Category: Technology

So with the new job, I work from home 3 days a week, and am in the office Thursday and Friday. This is the first job I’ve had that’s done work from home, but it’s a necessity for me because of how far away corporate HQ is for the company I work, and am part owner of. So how’s working from home working out? I’m a fan. Here are some impressions:

• I recover a lot of time not having to commute. With my old job it was an hour and twenty minutes a day lost to the commute, on a good day. I can wake up at 8:30 and be downstairs at my workstation sooner than I would normally be at work. It feels like a lot of recovered time.
• After a few days you realize there’s no reason to do your typical day 9-6 day of eight hours straight with an hour lunch break. I’m not much of a 9-5 person anyway, and I’m often most productive at night. When you work from home, you can run errands during the day that at night would take longer, and do the night owl thing with your work.
• I do get a little feeling of being cooped up in my office for as long as I’m down there. It’s different than being at work, because you don’t change venues for several days straight. I used to work evenings from home previously, but at least you changed offices in the evening.
• Fast, speedy internet is a must. For me, I don’t really notice much of a difference here or there, since FiOS is really nice.
• Forget about the stereotype of working in your underwear or pajamas. I’ve found it’s best psychologically to follow a normal morning routine, and head downstairs to the office. Otherwise it feels like the weekend, and it’s hard to get started with the day.

So what am I doing? Experimenting with high-availibility Linux. I’ve managed to convince myself I know what components I’m going to use, so now it’s on to automating the builds with kickstarts and scripts. All I will say about my mission is that we will be building a high-availibility, lights-out data center. I will follow the Google philosophy of “let the computers run everything” with humans only having to get involved with hardware failure, or failures the machines can’t figure out and deal with. Part of that is automated builds; leave no room for errors introduced by feeble humans. I’m also a big white box proponent. We will not be buying expensive SAN equipment from EMC, nor paying the big bucks for Cisco networking equipment, because quite honestly, it’s not necessary to accomplish our goals. My current company shares my philosophy of hiring fewer, skilled administrators, rather than an army of lesser skilled ones that have to stick to the few tools they know. Our philosophy is to figure out what you want the machines to do, and find the right tools to do it, not to work from the tools, and to let that limit your capability. When you adopt that philosophy, you’ll often find that you can save a lot of money using open source solutions that might be harder to setup, but do the same job as an expensive package or device. At my previous job, I had a 384-core HPC Linux cluster, about a dozen or so corporate systems, and a dozen or so workstations, a dozen or so lab instruments, and about 50 desktops. Our IT software licensing costs were, most years, zero, and with the exception of my aging Exchange server, highly available.  The cost in personnel to maintain all this was the cost of my salary, and a two-day a week part time help desk person to deal with end user non-scientific support (I did scientific support directly). High availability doesn’t have to cost a ton of money, in people or equipment.

As many of you may recall, I quit a job from hell approximately one month ago, after being there only a month. Best decision I ever made. I don’t have patience for companies that use and abuse their employees, and I certainly won’t tolerate employers doing that to me. I started working for a friend’s company on a contract basis while I awaited the results back from a dream job. After a successful on-site interview with the dream job people, I haven’t heard a peep from them since. In my experience, this always meant there are other candidates. I’m really enjoying the work I’m doing now, so I decided just to accept a full time role at my friend’s company, as Director of Infrastructure Services. The fun part about this is that there’s no business unit to direct yet; I am to be a key person in building this business unit, the genesis of which is currently humming upstairs in my loft (I work from home 3 days a week, and at his office two).

(I’ll hide the rest unless folks want to read it. It’s rather long, and I didn’t want it to crowd the main page.)

Continue reading “Recent Conversations with Tech Support”

If you were having trouble accessing the blog earlier this evening it’s because I was installing a new firewall. Previously I had the machine serving the blog connected directly to the outside, and used firewall rules on the server to filter out the undesirable traffic. I decided to buy a little Linux-based appliance with a MIPS CPU that can handle my WiFi, VPN, and firewalling all in one unit. Previously I was using the ActionTek box that came with the FiOS, but I was becoming displeased with its capabilities.

The only question now is whether this little box can stand up to the torrent of traffic you get from an Instalanche.

Roberta takes a look at the old tome that “NASA spent millions to develop a space pen; the Russians just use pencils.” It never seemed to me that, in the pure oxygen environment used in early spacecraft, or really even in spacecraft today, it was a good idea to have little bits of broken off conductive, flammable graphite floating around among a lot of electrical equipment. The Russians may have used pencils, but they also didn’t care as much for the lives of their astronauts. Failures could be swept under the rug.

A few weeks ago I shared with you the floppy drives that played the Emperor’s March from Star Wars. No I bring you old computers and an HP scanner covering “The House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals:

The singer’s pitch sounds off to me, but still pretty cool. Hooking up the scopes was a nice visual touch.

X-Plane 10 was released over the Thanksgiving weekend, so as a fan I immediately put in an order. I’ve been working on a project that revolves around X-Plane, a bit more slowly than I would like over the past month, but I’m still convinced I should do it, as it could possibly make me money. I’ve gotten as far as a skeleton prototype plugin written in Python. We’ll have to see how well it works in version 10.

I also have some first impressions after playing with the demo for a couple of weeks. I think the product has great potential. It’s certainly pushing the boundaries for what flight simulation can be. But I also think it was rushed out the door before it was really ready. Framerates are pretty terrible and not entirely predictable. I’m running on a 3.2GHz dual-core i5 with an ATI Radeon 5870 running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2. This machine is not top of the line, but no slouch either, and the frame rates can get quite disappointing.

Part of the problem, I think, is that X-Plane 10 looks fantastic with all the settings turned way up, but since few machines can really handle that, you have to make sacrifices, and those sacrifices are disappointing. But no doubt they wanted a good base to build on, and I think they have that. Take a look at some of these demos:

My system isn’t quite good enough to look that good. Here’s one from a helicopter:

You can see the jumpiness as it deals with ground detail, which is what I noticed. Hopefully much of this will be fixed in short order. With Microsoft getting started with betas of Flight, indicating they have not abandoned the flight sim market, Laminar is going to have to move quickly if they want to capture some of Microsoft’s dominant market share in this arena. They certainly have the potential to.

Long time podcaster Eric Shelton has started a blog, and in a technology related post, notes that Apple’s Mac OS Lion is their Windows Vista moment:

Vista was so awful users would “upgrade” back to XP, and it never gained more than 19% installation based. Apple jumped on this with blatantly mocking (and successful) ad-campaigns to woo users burned by Vista.

But now, Apple seems to have done a remarkable job of causing me to do a 180. OS X Lion (or 10.7 in more logical terms) seems like a massive step back in usability for something named after the king of the jungle.

Now that we’re on 10.7.2, it’s more stable, at least. I haven’t had to reboot it due to issues for a while. In my mind the biggest mess from the Lion release Apple has yet to fix is Safari. A lot of technology companies seem to be infected with fixing what ain’t broken syndrome. Apple now seems to be one of them. I just installed an update to Safari that I sincerely hope will address some of the stability problems.

I also agree with Eric on the reversed scrolling thing. I think it’s actually is more natural on a trackpad. On a mouse not so much, but I think Apple has determined the mouse to be passé.

Clayton is offering advice on telescopes for Christmas. This is kind of timely, because after our star tour to the top of Mauna Kea last year, I’ve been thinking I should get one. But it’s a daunting topic. Reflector or refractor? And which kind? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Do I want one that would be easy to schlep to Hawaii? I’d definitely need one that would be easy to transport, because there’s not a whole lot that be seen sandwiched here between Philadelphia and New York.

I’ve also thought that astrophotography would be pretty cool, but I’m guessing pretty expensive as well.

I’m subscribed to a number of aviation newsletters. One today pointed this bit of Crony Capitalism in my direction that’s certainly going to have an impact on the Flight Sim community in a big way. Basically, they are cutting off public access to aeronautical charts:

Industry officials told Aviation Consumer that the market will likely reject significant increases in cost for apps and online products. Smaller providers and free websites may simply go out of business. Larger companies may try to keep their subscribers but with higher subscription prices. The pervasive fear in the industry is that this could lead to only one or two entities controlling the market for the distribution of government-produced information that is essential for flight safety. Aeronav spokeswoman Abigail Smith told Aviation Consumer the agency is determined not to let that happen but the new fees, whatever they are, will have to be enough to cover costs.

I understand trying to cover costs, so less taxpayer money is required to fund this part of FAA, but why not just charge for individual access, rather than routing access through a handful of vendors with contracts? By making some buyers more equal than others, the large players are guaranteed to be the primary beneficiaries.

With the lot that’s running the country now, you have to wonder if someone is getting paid off. It’s the Chicago Way.