TechVirtuoso

Apache gears up for battle against Oracle

November 9th, 2010 at 8:22 PM No Comments Michael Stanclift

The Apache Software Foundation, masters of the code that is responsible for serving up more than half of the worlds web pages, including this one, has announced that it’s taking on software giant Oracle and it’s ever more restrictive Java licensing. Indicating that if Oracle doesn’t play nice, they’re going to leave the Java Community Process.

Apache is particularly upset because they feel Oracle doesn’t play by the same rules they’re expecting other companies to follow when using Java technology in their products. Their complaints about the license process date back to before Oracle purchased Java when they’re acquired Sun Microsystems at the start of the year. Arguably, it was THE reason Oracle bought Sun, as Oracle has been one of the biggest Java users in their products.

via ITWorld

When old media embraces new media, The Washington Post iPad app

November 9th, 2010 at 8:05 PM No Comments Michael Stanclift

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCUFxFoaloE

When one of the most respect names in journalism gets into the iPad game, it seems they go all in. Bringing out big guns like Bob Woodward to pimp their latest adventures in new media.

From the look of the previews and reviews thus far, the app seems to be top notch. It’ll be interesting to see how other papers embrace new media into the workflow as their traditional distribution methods begin to dry up.

Tech Field Day starts on Wednesday!

November 9th, 2010 at 12:32 AM 2 Comments Frank Owen

It is going to be a crazy couple of days as myself and 10 other bloggers converge on San Jose for the 4th Tech Field Day presented by Gestalt IT. Over the two days We will be hearing from 7 sponsors, from storage providers to chipset giants and enterprise monitoring leaders.

This will be the first event that will be streamed live from Gestalt IT, the events organizer. I am expecting two action packed days full of tweeting, blogging and good discussion. If you have any questions you want asked to the sponsors post your questions in the comments or message me on Twitter.

Disclaimer: Tech Field Day is organized by the great folks at Gestalt IT and paid for by the presenters of the event. Even though my travel, meals and hotel accommodations were paid for my opinions are my own and it will not affect my posts.

Cable Management and You

November 8th, 2010 at 10:48 PM No Comments Frank Owen

Picture this (since I didn’t think about takeing pictures three years ago)… walking into an amazing laid out Data center. Raised floors, redundant CRAC units (back then I had no idea what a CRAC was) and UPS’s that stood over 6 foot tall. I was in heaven until I arrived at our cage. Equipment scattered everywhere, servers on a fold up table that bowed in the middle…. it was like an alternate universe inside of a perfect one. The worst part of it all…. the data for the whole network (at the time 350 desks) ran through a single 2950 switch.

I dove in and found that the worst was hiding underneath the floor. The main rack, that housed the two redundant routers (plugged into that single 2950 switch) and the DS3’s had everything plugged into 3 daisy chained surge protectors. I tore apart the floor panels and took out miles of old left over cables. Over time I found items to use (even found a 4 post rack) and eventually got everything so it looked like it belonged in this monstrous data center. We made a lot of changes when the Avaya was implemented and with our customer wanting to audit our center, I was able to justify a few more purchases to get us to where we needed to be. With the help from Neatpatch and RackSolutions I think we did a pretty dang good job.

Before:

We chose the Neat Patch solution for our horizontal cable management solution it is different. Most cable management solutions just enable IT’ers to get lazy and hide their cable mess inside of them. The Neat Patch solution enables you to easily take a mess of cables and work them into something beautiful. With short Fluke tested Cat6 cables provided it is easy to setup and to trace back your cables. How many of you can say it takes less then 3 seconds to trace back any of the cables from a patch panel to a network switch? I now can. Customer service is just another thing that sets Neat patch apart from their competitors. I received 96 grey cables with my order. One call to NeatPatch and they sent me out exactly the color combination I needed, no questions asked, no extra charges.

As I said earlier in the post I stumbled across a Rack Solutions 4 post rack in our basement that allowed me to get the servers off that fold up table and over to a new home. Luckily for me Rack Solutions also provides some industry leading cable management ideas as well. I was able to order a huge vertical patch panel that could house up to 88 ports in a single rack. This will allow us to no longer need to string cables up (or if we wanted to make our lifes hell, under the floor) whenever we added a new server or piece of equipment. All we needed to do was cross connect a cable through our Neat Patch solution and cross connect another cable through the Rack Solutions product and BAM, we are ready to go.

Through this process I have learned a lot about cable management and server placement inside of a proper data center environment. Here are a couple of key points I will leave you with.

Run as few cables through your raised floor as possible. It becomes Tarzan’s favorite place in no time. Not to mention the difficulty it ads when trying to trace or run cables.
Unless you are running in a shop with no maintenance windows, cable managers on the back of servers are a waste. They block airflow and they make cable management harder.
Just because it looks good, doesn’t mean it is done right. Sure, you can hide tons of cables inside some of these cable management solutions but that doesn’t mean you should.
LABEL YOUR CABLES. I cannot stress this enough. Over label your cables including power cables. You will thank me later!

Fedora 14 released, brings polish and feature updates

November 6th, 2010 at 5:28 PM No Comments Michael Stanclift

Linux distribution Fedora released their latest version this week. Fedora 14 was released Tuesday and brings along with it some new interesting features.

Framework software for Spice, a rapidly advancing infrastructure for desktop virtualization
New debugging features for developers, such as support for dynamic/unplanned memory usage tracking and faster launch thanks to pre-generated indexes
Powerful remote and out-of-band management capabilities with Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) support
Updated tech preview of the GNOME shell environment, part of the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release
A subset of new and innovative software from the MeeGo™ community for an enhanced experience on netbooks and small devices
OpenSCAP, an open-source framework for the Security Content Automation Protocol, which provides a framework and approach to maintaining system security backed by NIST standards
Support for emergent programming languages like D, and refreshed versions of popular languages such as Python 2.7, Erlang R14, and the Rakudo Star implementation of Perl 6

While not as popular as Ubuntu, Fedora is still one of the more popular distributions, targeted more towards system administrators and developers than Ubuntu. RedHat says there are approximatively 25 million Fedora users.

Also updated was the fedoraproject.org website, which now is a little more user friendly and provides more information about the release. You can download the release at the project website.

Ballmer plans to cash out 75 million Microsoft shares by year end

November 6th, 2010 at 12:45 PM No Comments Michael Stanclift

While he will remain Microsoft’s second biggest shareholder, Steve Ballmer has begun selling off a good chunk of his shares and intends to do more before the end of the year. This week alone he’s shed over 49 million shares of common stock, netting him around $1.3 billion dollars. The remaining 26 million could go soon and net him just another half billion.

It’s the first time since 2003 Ballmer has cashed out his shares. That sell off brought Ballmer around $1.6 billion.

Bill Gates remains the biggest shareholder at Microsoft, owning around 7% of the company. Ballmer still owns around 4% of the giant. Gates himself cashed out around 3 million shares recently, probably to finance the purchase of more mosquitoes.

via CNET

RIM fires back at Dell’s decision to ditch the BlackBerry

November 6th, 2010 at 12:33 PM No Comments Michael Stanclift

It’s was probably a rough day in Waterloo, Canada yesterday when news hit that 25,000 Dell BlackBerry users would be making the switch to Windows Mobile 7.

Part of the reason cited for the switch is the 25% reduction in cost associated with the switch. In addition to the fact Dell would be migrating to their own Dell Venue Pro devices, they’d also be switching to Microsoft ActiveSync instead of routing all their messaging through RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise services.

RIM (undoubtedly) didn’t feel the same way, with RIM’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing Mark Guibert telling Dow Jones Newswires in an email:

“We find it highly unlikely that they will actually save any money with this move and far more likely they were looking for a little free publicity”

Are they? You betcha. Did it work? Yep. Will it be worth it? Time will tell.

via BGR

Companies react to offering up Security Essentials through Microsoft Update

November 6th, 2010 at 12:12 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

You know you’re probably doing something right when three of your biggest competitors start acting like the world has come to an end. In this case, it’s Microsoft versus the anti-virus world.

While we like to stress the importance of anti-virus products on all platforms, they’re sort of like insurance companies. Their products are usually expensive and bloated, and when you really need them most of the time they’re not that effective. Microsoft’s Security Essentials product is arguably one of the best anti-virus products on the market, and it’s free, and it’s got traditional vendors like Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro scared. Even more so now that Microsoft has begun distributing the software to users directly through it’s Microsoft Update service.

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First the death of Xserve and now the X server

November 5th, 2010 at 10:19 AM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

First Apple decides to discontinue their Xserve lineup and now Ubuntu is planning to ditch their X server too.

Confused?

X is the underlying display server in the Ubuntu Linux distro. In an announcement today by Mark Shuttleworth, in the future Ubuntu will be ditching X.org and moving to Wayland display server.

The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system. We’d like to embrace Wayland early, as much of the work we’re doing on uTouch and other input systems will be relevant for Wayland and it’s an area we can make a useful contribution to the project.

Ubuntu is setting out to change the look and feel (and performance) of Linux. The upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 will ditch the GNOME interface for their new Unity styling, but there is no specific timeline for the departure of X.org in Ubuntu. Due to the integration of X into nearly all of Linux it’s possible it could take years to rip it all out in favor of Wayland.

Also, Wayland is still an extremely immature codebase compared to X.org, which is used in nearly every Linux distribution and was first released in 2004 (and was forked from XFree86 which was released in 1991.) In contrast Wayland hasn’t been used in any major Linux distro yet.

via Digitzor

Dell to issue 25,000 employees Windows Phone 7 devices

November 5th, 2010 at 9:09 AM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

Dell plans to give each and every employee a Windows Phone 7 device, specifically their Dell Venue Pro, as early as next week. In exchange, each employee must give up their CrackBlackBerry.

“Clearly in this decision we are competing with RIM, because we’re kicking them out,” the computer maker’s chief financial officer, Brian Gladden, said in an interview.

The company says the switch will save them 25% in mobile communications costs. They also plan to develop and market a service to encourage other companies to do the same thing. Dell also said they plan to offer phones based on Google Android in the program, in the future.

The 25,000 free Windows Phone 7 devices for Dell employees is in addition to the 89,000 devices given to each Microsoft employee. It’s a big boost for the enterprise credentials of Windows Phone 7 that two major companies are putting their money where their mouth is on this platform.

via The Wall Street Journal

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