A year and then some

Okay, at least I do realize how many months it has been since I've last posted. Writing is harder to do when you don't have time to sit down. It's a good thing when I'm chasing Richard around. 

He's currently sleeping and I've just spent 23 hours going to and working at our data center. I remember that crazy week working for Borland without much rest when I was younger, MUCH younger. It took me the better part of a weekend to recuperate. Not fun at all. But glad to have done it as there were some crazy end of year tasks we had to do for our customers.

On the personal technology front, it has been a busy year. Wrote a media CMS using Grails, although thinking about rewriting it with node.js to learn more about node.js. That's one of the things I want to do next year. Maybe also switching databases to postgres. Have to update my Atlassian tools and renew the licenses.

Got a Chrome box for the TV downstairs, but it doesn't perform as well as expected. Will be returning that soon.

Upgraded phone to iPhone 6+. Initially thought that when the phone was introduced that it would be WAY too big, but after spending the last two days with it, I'm really liking the size. It doesn't look that big anymore especially when I use it primary like a tablet. I am getting older as the larger fonts do make it easier to read.

Upgraded our internal wifi to 802.11ac. Moved everything over to gigabit network, as our internet router was still 100 Mbps. Also upgraded our Internet speed plan to 300Mbps! Getting some amazing speeds upstairs where the traffic is cable modem -> router -> wifi router -> wifi bridge -> gigabit switch where the distance between wifi router and wifi bridge is probably 30 to 40 feet away from each other. 

 

 

 

Got two new computers (3 if you count Li's) since last post: 2 servers plus a workstation. The servers are i7-3770K 32GB ram and i7-4770K 32GB ram. The workstation is i7-4790 with 16GB ram. Had to replace the workstation as the motherboard was fried. Funny thing was that I brought the computer into a shop to get it replaced and they had burned through 4 versions of the motherboard before realizing that the case was short circuiting the board. Glad it came back in one piece and it has been running smoothly since. The servers have not had any hiccups and really putting them through the paces. 

VNC and Android

About 3 weeks ago, I got 48GB of ram for my i7, upgraded my VM infrastructure to most recent version. I've also moved some of the services around, mostly MySQL off the VM host which is Windows based and into a VM running Ubuntu. After doing this, I was able to use some off the shelf MySQL backup scripts. With the extra ram, I was able to give more resources to my VMs so that the services can run faster.

I'm really excited about having more VMs as well, so that I have an extra playground to play with these open source services, such as VNC. I have come to like Ubuntu Server edition a lot for its speed and ease of installing services. With the additional resources, I can boot Ubuntu server in about 10 seconds. It is ridiculous how fast it boots. For a development box I built, I installed Gnome and VNC. I can connect easily enough from my Mac, but it got me thinking if I can connect to the box using Android. Lo and behold, I can. But more than that, I can actually attach a keyboard and mouse to the Droid tablet! I really like my Nook, except for a couple of things: speed and speed. I had gotten used to the speed of iPad 3. In terms of screen quality, the Nook HD+ is really comparable to the iPad Retina. One thing that I tolerated was the speed. It was slow reading books and comic books. Page turning was slow. And the other thing that eventually drove me nuts was clicking and its response times to my actions.

Well, I finally found the droid I was looking for: Google Nexus 10. The screen is really incredible: 2560x1600 in a 10.1 inch form factor. Can't really see the individual pixels anymore. It has a lot of speed and then some. Everything I've done with it has been responsive. I have all the apps moved over from the Nook to the Nexus and everything is faster! There isn't any lag anymore. One thing that I've heard from others is that Android 4.3 prevents a lot of bluetooth keyboard from working. So I'm not updating until I hear that the problem has been fixed. I can't live without a keyboard on the tablet unless I'm just reading. The only other thing that irks me is that using both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse together with wifi causes the keyboard to repeat occassionalllllllllllllly. I'm looking for a workaround because with VNC, it is pretty important to use a mouse. From what I've read, it might be possible to use a USB mouse with the micro usb port. I'm waiting for my cable to arrive.

One aspect of the droid tablet that I really like are the widgets that I can install on the home screens. I miss that feature from my Windows phone days. When looking at the lock/home screen, I can see a bunch of notifications without me having to launch the app first. That's sort of making me mad now on the iOS devices. I have to click the mail app to see my emails, then switch to the facebook app, then check my IMs, etc. Why can't my home screen just show me all the alerts at once?

Of Droids and Pen

On Father's day 2013, I got a nice present: the Nook HD+ 9". Yes, I have an iPad 3 and it is quite useful. So useful in fact, that we all share it. Li uses it to surf and read magazines. Richard uses it for learning and reading. I use it for all sorts of stuff, but mainly for reading. So the iPad is one of the most used device in our home. And I get to use it when no one else is.

So when Barnes and Noble decided to have a big sale on the Nook, I thought I would give it a try and see how good it is. Much to my surprise and delight, it is working out very well for me. For the main purpose of reading, it is great because of the excellent cross platform tools I use: DropBox, Box, Evernote, and of course Google Drive. My digital library consists of PDFs and epubs. So they are supported very well on multiple platforms as well. I also have a bunch of digital comics and it is a matter of finding the right application.

Of course, the Nook doesn't compare to the iPad in terms of pure CPU speed. The Nook is a fraction of the price. I would say that I put up with more stuff because it is so cheap. I wouldn't and didn't try the Nook at the previous price. But at little more than $120, it was worth a try. One thing I noticed, but isn't cause for alarm is that the device gets pretty warm just playing graphical games.

Switching backups...

http://blogspot.thui.org/2011/05/400gbs-and-counting.html

About a year and a half ago, I was using LiveDrive. Since then, I've decided to switch to CrashPlan. Why? For one thing, LiveDrive was consistently uploading at a pace around 300KB/second. I appreciate the fact that they're in the UK and if anything ever happens to the US, I know that my data is safe in England :) However, uploading gigabytes at that speed takes forever. Another reason is that their Mac support totally sucks. Can't say how much it sucks.

I've been using Macs for about two and a half years now and really love how I can do just about everything with it. Most programming languages are available on Mac and if it isn't, I can easily create a VM. Right now, I have about 8 VMs in various OSes and environments. I can experiment with technologies so easily. I've basically decided that for my work and research, I wouldn't use anything else. I've made the switch and I'm not going back. I have some older laptops that are Windows based and when they die, I'm going to replace them with Macs.

My server is still Windows based and that's mostly for ease of management. Although I'm starting to rethink that decision as well. My main purpose for it is to serve files, so I may just get a dedicated NAS. Then the other purpose for the machine is to host VMs. I can do that just as easily with Virtual Box on a Linux machine. A reason to keep the machine around as Windows is gaming.

In any case, support for Mac backups has become very important to me. I have stuff on my machine that I want backed up. I have a time machine, but I want something offsite. And LiveDrive is NOT it. I do like their briefcase feature, but DropBox works more efficiently. So ultimately, LiveDrive is out and hello CrashPlan! And it is cheaper!

A year old!

Richard's a year old! Time certainly flies. It seems like only yesterday we were welcoming into our lives. And here he is, a year older. Happy Birthday!

His stats: 23.5lbs, 34 inches long, 18.5" head.