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Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, February 4, 2011

February 7, 2011 By Stephen 1 Comment

I spent last week tying up loose ends before Tech Field Day 5 in San Jose. It’s going to be a great event, with presentations by Symantec, Drobo, Xangati, NetEx, InfoBlox, HP, and a new company making their US launch! In the mean time, I am working hard to wrap up the Small Enterprise Storage Array Buyers’ Guide for DCIG and continuing my regular work – spreading the word about state of the art IT! I’ve been researching VMware extensively, and building a home lab server, in preparation for my Storage for Virtual Servers seminar, too.

How To: Use YouTube Without Flash In Desktop Browsers

April 12, 2010 By Stephen Leave a Comment

If you hate Flash-based video players, you’re in luck! YouTube and Vimeo can now be set to HTML5 mode on Chrome and Safari, no longer requiring Flash.

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

This is week “1111111111” in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week “0000000000”. How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we’ve seen so far!

Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro

I remain enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, despite getting a scratched screen and my concerns about durability. It’s a worthy successor to the original and offers enough improvements that I’d recommend the upgrade for just about anyone who uses their iPad for serious work. It’s still not yet a laptop replacement, but this is due more to a lack of desktop-class software for iOS than anything in Apple’s control.

SMB 3 is Going to be Huge, in both Scope and Impact

May 6, 2012

Microsoft is about to release the third major revision to their ubiquitous network storage protocol, SMB. Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3 will really highlight this technology, and I predict it will transform the way people think about networked storage for Windows systems. But SMB 3 is big in another way, too: there are tons of new features, and not all will be implemented by everyone.

A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols

September 23, 2014

It’s clear how this fairy tale ends. So many companies are using “S3 plus” as their standard interface, and even inside their solutions, that it’s safe to say it’s won the cloud storage API battle. But S3 isn’t a finalized spec – the industry will extend and improve it over the coming years. Soon we’ll have a cloud storage standard based on S3, just like we have a LAN file services standard based on CIFS.

Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?

January 16, 2012

Moving cold virtual machine images from system to system, or even across great distances, is one of the main selling points of server virtualization. But it becomes much more difficult to manage movement of virtual machines that are still running, especially outside cluster or across WAN links. When talking about virtual machine mobility, it is important to consider what is being moved, the state it is in, and where it is going.

How Smart Is the Mondaine Helvetica Smart Watch?

December 30, 2015

I love watches and technology, so I was thrilled to hear about the creation of a “horological smart watch” base by the Swiss watchmaking industry. One of the first examples of this new breed is the just-released Mondaine Helvetica Smart. I purchased one of these watches, the limited-edition “1 of 1957” variety, and have had a chance to evaluate it both as a watch and a gadget.

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

We live in a world of cattle, not pets, and Kubernetes rules the roost. I’ve been meaning to spend some time getting up to speed on the latest but didn’t have enough hardware to make that happen until now. I recently bought a whole pile of surplus hardware so I will be able to experiment with orchestration and container platforms in the office.

My Core i7 Macintosh SE

May 25, 2017

I recently built the biggest, clunkiest iPad mini case ever, transforming my old Macintosh SE case into an iPad stand. But what to do with that empty case? Why, it’s the perfect size for a custom Mini-ITX PC! Introducing my liquid-cooled Core i7 monster Mac SE!

The End of Unlimited Data – Part 1: The Buffet

June 2, 2010

The headlines are all over the blogs: AT&T announced today that they are doing away with “unlimited” data plans and replacing them with limited packages at lower prices. I’m not going to repeat the news – Boy Genius Report has the best overview I’ve seen. Instead, I’m going to explain why I think this is a positive move for everyone involved, including AT&T, the customer, and the US wireless phone industry as a whole. This first post talks about the buffet mentality that got us here.

What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

May 28, 2019

Social media ought to be social, not just a broadcast platform. That’s my feeling at least. It’s been a while since I’ve ranted about “write-only” social media accounts, so I thought I might as well do it again. And at the same time, I thought I would update you on my promise to the people who read, follow, and interact with me online.