quuxpad

June 24, 2009: Thanks, Jeff & Joel!

On the Stackoverflow podcast, which I actually do follow sporadically (because it’s awesome!), Joel Spolsky found one of my answers at the serverfault.com website (again, awesome site), and singled it out for praise.

Jeff Atwood and Joel then proceed to discuss. You can tune into StackOverflow Podcast #59 and hear my little moment of unpronounceable fame starting around 58:50 and proceeding for the next 5 minutes or so (the rest of the podcast is also fascinating). Jeff and Joel: it rhymes with “ducks”!

Because they also discussed this blog, I guess I’ll have to come out of hibernation and post more here.

October 11, 2008: New twist in rackmount networking

Here is a nifty thing I found at RackSolutions.com  - a vertical rackmount patch panel! Optionally you can put a vertical powerstrip right next to it.

The 44U, 88-port assembly, without the vertical powerstrip, goes for $199. And listen up: it is not prewired. In fact it does not even come with the keystone jacks pictured here. You buy those separately, patch and label them yourself (or have your cabling people do it).

I’d love to see this stuff up close. It looks to me like it can only mount on the outside of an open 4-post rack, but there may be a way to fit it inside enclosures (which have metal sides and doors front and back); it is hard to tell from the information and pictures shown.

Depending on your racks, need for KVM, and use of cable management arms, this would make for a sweet looking and easy-to-manage setup, I think.

Also: RackSolutions.com has a very nice writeup on various rackmount details - hole placement and shape, various cable arms and shelving options, open vs closed racks, portable and wallmount racks, and so on. If you’re new to racking, I heartily recommend at least skimming this document, which is no-nonsense and completely free of sales pressure. A very welcome presentation of the minutia of infrastructure racks.

October 10, 2008: My minor fame

Over on my anemic little Zoho wiki, I have this page of WMIC Snippets. In case you did not know, WMIC is a very handy commandline/scripting tool for querying all sorts of things about a Windows computer. But I will let that page tell its own story about WMIC.

Lately I have been getting a number of comments and email complimenting me on the page, and I found out why: someone linked it from this Wikipedia page about WMI. Neato. Now I am a teeny-tiny little footnote in the world’s encyclopedia!

Also, I have been enjoying answering the questions people send me. If you have a Windows scripting question, feel free to send it, via the ‘quux’ links at the bottom of the wiki pages.

October 2, 2008: Google's Chrome: observations

I have been using Google’s new Chrome web browser since its release, which was a month ago today. So it’s time to put together a few thoughts!

Let me start off by saying, I am not a Firefox person. I haven’t put much thought into the reasons for this; it’s just a personal preference of mine. So this article will compare Chrome to IE7, which I have been using since it came out, and more recently, IE8 beta 2, which I started using on the day it released.

Things I like about Chrome:

• Chrome does sometimes hang, but usually for less than a minute, and it always recovers. By comparison, IE7/8 hung on me about every other day, and quite often never did fully recover.
• Chrome usually closes nearly instantly. IE can sometimes take several minutes to close.
• Chrome new tabs open instantly. I have seen IE take 15 seconds or more to open a new tab.
• Pages seem to load faster in most cases. Not all cases though! I still find myself waiting on a page-load - usually because the banner advertisement has not yet loaded.
• I’ve really come to enjoy Chrome’s single address bar. I type searches into it directly, and it is very fast to suggest sites and autocomplete words I am typing - often successfully.

The speed and stability of Chrome have kept me using it as my main browser for the past 30 days. I do have some gripes, listed below, but I have found that speed and stability are more important (to me) than I previously thought they were! Even with the long list of gripes I am about to list, I still prefer Chrome, and use it as my primary browser. I only open IE for the occasional task (like writing this post) that Chrome doesn’t yet handle as well as I like.

Things I am unhappy about (in Chrome):

• Scrolling is sometimes broken. if I click in the whitespace of the scrollbar, intending to scroll down one screen, it often keeps scrolling down until I move the cursor out of that scrollbar. This can be really annoying!
• Video clips often do not work correctly. They often do not play at all, or play only a few seconds and then stop. I have seen this happen in several video applets - YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
• Chrome does not always create a new process for each tab. Sometimes two or more tabs share the same process, as shown here:
  
  Chrome’s task Manager, showing two tabs in one process.
• I really miss the ‘quick tabs’ view from IE7/8. Very often I have a lot of tabs open, and I loved using the thumbnail view in IE7/8 to see them all, and close the ones I no longer need. Chrome does have a list view of all open tabs (press Shift + Esc to open Chrome’s task manager, a small snippet of which is shown above), but it is not as handy as IE7/8’s quick tabs. It is clear that Chrome has the code to do this, because you get a similar thumbnail view when you open a new tab - but the thumbnails are of ‘most visited’ sites, not currently open sites.
  
    IE quicktabs                                            Chrome new tab
  
• Chrome doesn’t always render edit controls well. For instance, here on Tumblr, when I edit or create a post, I see the following:
  
  Chrome (above) gives only a few buttons
  
  
  IE (above) showing all of the edit control buttons on Tumblr 
   
  
• Chrome loses my cookies whenever I restart it. This can be very annoying on sites like Techmeme or PopUrls, where preferences are saved in cookies, and those preferences define the way the sites act for me. I have to reset my preferences to sites like this every time I restart Chrome!
• When you shutdown Chrome, it saves all open tabs, and brings them back next time Chrome is opened. So far so good, right? But what I want is the ability to save tab-sets as favorites; Chrome has no way to do this.
• Even after a month, I want the page reload icon at the right side of the address bar; not on the left where Chrome places it. I still find myself mousing to the upper right, then correcting for upper left.
• Chrome’s file download strategy is weird, counterintuitive,  and sometimes broken. Many downloads open a new, blank page, where the download will appear as an icon in a footer at the bottom of the page. I must then click on this download to open it (such downloads are often PDFs). I must also click a little ‘x’ at the right side of the footer to close that footer. If I close the the blank tab-with-footer before using that ‘x’ to remove the footer, this footer then remains in some or all of my other tabs, and cannot be removed. Some unspecified amount of time later, the footer disappears on its own.

There you have it: a short list of really important Chrome advantages, and a much longer list of Chrome drawbacks. Yet still I prefer Chrome for most of my daily web browsing. I hope the Google folks are aware of these drawbacks, and working on them!

October 1, 2008: RAM and Disk Costs of Vista

I hear a fair number of complaints about the ‘bloat’ in Vista, so I decided to do a little bit of pricing research. I conclude that in most cases, the extra RAM and disk needed to run Vista will be $50 or less. The assumptions I used were:

1. You are upgrading a system with at least a 2gHz processor, and therefore do not need to upgrade the CPU or motherboard. (Vista is actually running well on my 1.7gHz processor, but I rounded up to 2gHz just for the heck of it.)
2. You do not need Aero, and therefore do not need to upgrade your video card.
3. You will replace your existing RAM with 2GB of new RAM.
4. You will replace your hard drive, but only charge the first 40GB of the new drive to the Vista upgrade. This is a generous estimate: the C:\Windows directory my Vista Ultimate system, running for months now, is using a total of 15.1 GB (including all subdirectories).
5. You’re not buying so-called “high-end” parts, like RAM with chrome heat spreaders and so on; you shop on specifications and best-deal prices.

All prices from http://www.pricewatch.com and are current as of the minute I write this article.

Desktop memory (DDR2, all ‘2GB kit’ prices):
41.00 - ddr2-1066 pc2-8500 2gb kit
61.98 - ddr2-1000 pc2-8000 2gb kit
26.73 - ddr2-800 pc2-6400 2gb kit
25.92 - ddr2-667 pc2-5300 2gb kit
25.69 - ddr2-533 pc2-4200 2gb kit
36.99 - ddr2-400 pc2-3200 2gb kit

Notebook memory (DDR2, single 2GB stick):
32.99 - so-dimm ddr2 pc2-6400 2gb
29.45 - so-dimm ddr2 pc2-5300 2gb
29.48 - so-dimm ddr2 pc2-4200 2gb
69.00 - so-dimm ddr2 pc2-3200 2gb

Disk (500GB, 3 flavors, plus a 250GB ATA drive): 
53.99 - sata 500gb 3.5” ($0.11/gig)
65.95 - ultra ata 500gb 3.5” ($0.13/gig)
160.16 - notebook 500gb SATA 2.5” ($0.32/gig)
99.99 - notebook 250gb ATA 2.5” ($0.40/gig) (I was unable to find a 500GB ATA drive; had to go to Newegg to find this 250GB drive)

So, the worst case here is a notebook system using ATA hard drive and PC2/3200 RAM. You’d spend $99.99 for a 250GB hard drive and $69 for the RAM upgrade, for a total of $170. But if we assume you really only needed 40 GB for the Vista install, that’s $16 in disk costs ($0.40/gig * 40 gigs). So the upgrade cost required by Vista is $85. All the other RAM/disk costs, using this same method (full cost of RAM + cost of first 40 gigs of disk) are $48.99 or lower.

For a desktop system using 3.5” internal drives, the worst case would be a SATA 500gb drive ($160.16) and PC2/800 RAM ($61.98). That’s a total cost of $222.14, but the 40GB needed for Vista costs $12.80. So the upgrade cost required by Vista is $74.78. All the other desktop RAM/disk costs are $53.80 or lower (again via the ‘full cost of RAM + first 40 gigs of disk’ method).

Conclusion: in most cases, the costs of extra disk and RAM for Vista will be less than $50, if you are buying new parts and shopping smart.

September 19, 2008: Extreme Disk Failure!

I found this and many other pictures of the same failed hard drive in the Ars Technica forums, and I just had to share it with the 3 loyal readers of this blog.

Notice how the inner part of the platter (near the hub) has actually worn completely through - the platter is no longer attached to the hub! Wow. Go have a look at the rest of the pictures, which are horridly fascinating.

September 19, 2008: Short power cords for shipshape racks.

If you’ve racked any servers lately, you’re probably irked at the coils of power cord slack you ended up with. There’s no good place to put them! CablesToGo have an answer: short power cords. They have them in 1’, 2’, 3’ and, well, a bunch more sizes. They’ll cost $5 and up, but are worth it.

Go ahead, submit the purchase order. Worst thing that can happen is, boss says no!