January 2008 Posts

Recently, I’ve been expermenting with PHP’s PS functions - the PECL extension that allows you to directly output PostScript from your scripts. There are other projects that come to mind (html2ps is another one that will render to PostScript) but I wanted somsething more tightly intergrated into my script. Mysteriously, when I went to install my scripts on the new Poweredge I bought, I began to get there strange errrors: ps_findfont() [function.ps-findfont]: PSlib warning: Trying to insert the glyph '.notdef' which already exists. Please check your afm file for duplicate glyph names. I couldn’t understand what was going on - it was working fine on the previous server. After googling about the web and wracking my brains for about two hours, I checked the versions of PSlib  installed on the two servers. Both were masked by Gentoo’s Portage system, but the unmasked version on the previous server was 0.2.6, whereas the one on the new server was 0.4.1. After I masked out 0.4.1 (thanks to Gentoo’s awesome package.mask) and downgraded back to 0.2.6, everything began working again. So there you have it. Apparently the PECL PS extension is not completely compatible with the most recent version of PSlib, and downgrading back seems to work. Hope this helps somebody!

After my debacle with the 1U servers I bought (see my previous post), I went by a local technology recycling center and picked up a couple of off-lease Dell Poweredge 1750s. It’s what I should have done in the first place. Anyways, I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to mount these servers in a rack. I wanted it to be mobile and easy to move as moving is something I have been very familiar with over the last few years. After not finding what I wanted anywhere, I was able to find rack rail at  zZounds (a music store that I’ve ordered guitar stuff from before). So I decided to do it myself. The first step was to understand the measurements of a 19” rack. Originally designed to hold railroad signal switching relays, 19” rack measurements are specified by EIA-310-D. The strips from RaXXess are standard rack rail at 0.625” in with. They are mounted at 19” apart from the outside of the rails, giving a distance between the inside edges of the rails of 17.75”. The depth isn’t specified, so I decided to make mine 30” deep. After that, it’s just cutting! It took 4 2x4’s at 10ft and a sheet of plywood. The pictures below will explain better than I can in words the process of building this thing. The first step was measuring and cutting. This was actually the most tedious part of doing this whole thing was getting the measurements right - as Dad always said, measure twice, cut once! I cut four 24.5” pieces, four 22” pieces, and four 36” pieces. Here’s the completed frame 1, with a Dell Poweredge 1750 in to test and be sure that I had the measurements right. The rails had been mounted on the inside towards the back of the frame to give the server face some protection. Closeup of the server in the frame. Adding the top and bottom pieces now. Mostly complete. By now you can see what I’m aiming for. And here’s the finished product! I added plywood sides and casters to roll it around. The total cost was about $100. The most expensive items were the rails (which came in at about $50 shipped) and the casters (which were $20 for four locally from Harbor Freight). After that, it took me about four hours cut and put everything together. It’s not quite finished yet - I want to add doors to the front and back to ease transport a little bit as well as handles on the sides to make it easier to lift in and out of a truck. I haven’t put the servers in it yet - I’m waiting for rails to come in for the servers since they didn’t have any where I bought them from. I’m also thinking about slaping a coat of paint on it to make it look a bit better. Otherwise, it’s pretty sweet!

… or, beware of deals that look too good to be true. In my professional career, I have now found only two things that have a 100% failure rate. The first was a batch of Digium TDM-400P FXO/FXS card. Every single one we deployed from that batch at my previous employer failed. I hear they don’t have those problems anymore - using a different fab shop now, I guess. But I still don’t like that card for that specific reason. The second 100% failure rate came just this evening. The culprit is this little POS: Dual Xeon 2.4GHz 2GB ECC 120GB 1U Rack Mount Server being sold by Geeks.com. Look, it’s a 1U for $375. I’m not expecting the universe out of these things. With that in mind, let me document the last two days of my life. I ordered two of these little guys about a week ago, and they arrived on Tuesday. I intended to turn one into a general purpose test and development box, and one was going to go to Atlanta to replace the 1U Celeron in my friends’ data center. So I get the machines home, unpack them and try to boot. The first one won’t POST. No beep, no video, just a bright orange surrender HD light. Research tells me that the motherboard is fried. The other one booted up fine. I figured I was just unlucky, so I RMA’d the first one today and was going to put the OS on this one. Well, the OS install went fine but when it came time to reboot … presto. The exact same thing as the first. No video, no beep, orange HD light. Of two machines ordered, both of them failed within 48 hours and both in the exact same way. So now I’m out at least $60 in RMA shipping charges - and I have no servers - just because this company apparently has no Q.A. So take my experience as an example of what not to do when ordering a server. A good deal can turn into a major headache incredibly fast. Me? I’m ordering Dells from now on.

… or maybe the water. Unless you were living under an Internet rock, you likely know that today was Keynote Tuesday. That is, the day Apple CEO Steve Jobs tells us loyal apple fanbois what we will be spending our money on this year. The star of this year’s show was the Macbook Air, a thin, light laptop designed to fit somewhere inbetween the Macbook and the Macbook Pro. At first I was wow’d by the Air. Jobs, as always, is the consummate showman and I will admit that I bought into the reality distortion field for a little bit. Then the “air” cleared and I began to think about what the Macbook Air really is. So let’s take a look at the Macbook Air and where it fits. Maximum thickness of 0.76”. The Macbook is a quarter inch or so higher at 1.08”. Weight of 3 lbs. The Macbook, a slightly heavier 5 lbs. Battery life is slightly longer at 5 hours. The Macbooks average between 3-4 in my experience. However, the battery is not removable, whereas I could carry several Macbook batteries with me. For $1200 more, you can get a solid state drive. 2GB of memory, and only 2GB of memory. The Macbook comes in at 1GB standard, but can be upgraded to 4GB. In my opinion, these are the areas where the Air wins. Now, let’s look at where it loses. 1.6ghz / 1.8ghz Core 2 Duo. The Macbook slides in at betwen 2.0 and 2.2 ghz. Storage is an 80GB 4200rpm PATA drive, whereas the Macbook boasts an 80GB 5400rpm SATA drive. Granted you can get a 64gb SSD drive with the Air, but for $1200 I can’t believe that anyone other than the biggest fanboi will be buying those for that price. The Macbook can be upgraded to as much as 4GB of memory. The Air is stuck at 2GB, and since it’s sodered onto the board, it’s stuck there forever. 1 USB plug? No onboard Ethernet or FireWire? No mic plug? No optical drive. Granted, you can buy an external drive, and you can use that boot from another computer thing, but that doesn’t help you if you have no other computer. Now, Brian Moon often tells me that I don’t think from the point of view of an average user because I’m not an average user. While it’s true that I’m not your average user (as a computing professional, I have needs generally beyond most consumer computing gear), I like to think that I can look at all choices and choose the best one. In this case I just can’t understand where this product is being targeted. I just don’t understand how anyone could want to trade off all the features you get with the regular ol’ Macbook for what is essentially a small gain in dimensions and weight, and the “wow!” factor, especially when all those added features on the Macbook come in at $300 less for the top-end Macbook model. At that price, you could upgrade the memory and buy an extra battery and still come in less than the base price of the Macbook Air, with the only tradeoff being that it’s 0.32” thicker and 2lbs heavier. I can’t believe that any informed consumer is going to choose a feature poor Macbook Air when the standard Macbook, at between $300 and $750 less, is just so obviously a better deal. Brian Tiemann said it best: “a ridiculously overpriced, feature-poor, and generally useless pig of an idea.” Also, I wonder if Steve Jobs knew Randy Newman was going to go all Michael Moore on everyone. Someone please be sure he never sees a microphone again!

I know top X lists are almost passe at this point, but that’s not going to stop me from giving a shout-out to some of the applications that daily make my life easier: MarcoPolo MarcoPolo is a neat little application that is capable of executing actions based on a set of rules. That is, if something on the system changes (such as an IP address, power status, USB or even the light level), it can execute a series of commands (such as mounting network drives, setting the screensaver, changing the default printer, etc). It can even run arbitrary shell scripts! Why this is useful to me: At dealnews, we (the dev team) all use MacBook Pros for our development work and constantly alternate between home and office. Whenever I arrive at work in the morning, the minute I plug my MacBook into the network, MarcoPolo senses that the IP address has changed from my home and changes the default printer, mounts some network shares, adjusts the screensaver settings, and runs a few other custom shell scripts I have to set up my environment. All without having to do a single thing. When I get home, it executes still more commands to change to a remote development environment. Completely effortless. XMeeting XMeeting is a SIP softphone (and videoconferencing application, but I’ve never used the video features) that allows you to connect to a SIP server and place calls using your laptop. Why this is useful to me: At dealnews, we run Asterisk as our phone system (see my earlier posts on Asterisk). One of the many nice features of Asterisk is its standards compatibility - that is, you can use anything that can talk SIP with Asterisk. Since CounterPath has apparently decided that Leopard compatibility for their free softphone (X-Lite) is not a priority, XMeeting comes to the rescue. As a bonus, it actually acts like a Mac application and doesn’t do the stupid things that X-Lite did (like messing with the system volume). Quicksilver Quicksilver is the single application I cannot live without. On a Mac without it I am almost lost. More than just a launcher, it is a tool to help you work more efficiently. You can press Ctrl+Space and type what you want and Quicksilver will launch what you need. That’s a horrible description for how cool this app is. **Why this is useful to me: **Without Quicksilver, I am lost. It makes it literally so fast to move around your Mac without taking you hands off the keyboard. A quick hit of Ctrl+Space gives you the ability to launch programs, open files, navigate contacts and send emails, and make quick notes among many othe things that this program can do. It is essential to my everyday life as a Mac user. DejaMenu DejaMenu is a neat little program that will display the current application’s main menu as a popup menu where the mouse is whenever a key combination is pressed. **Why this is useful to me: **I use my MacBook Pro with a second monitor when I’m at the office. One of the things that has infuriated me for awhile as a Mac user with multiple monitors is the inability to have the top menu bar either on each monitor respresenting the application on that monitor, or the ability to have it move with whatever monitor the mouse is on. It’s irritating to have to go back to the main monitor when the application is running on a different one. DejaMenu allows you to pop the application menu wherever your mouse is, which makes things a little easier. Additionally, I mapped the key combination to a button on my Logitech MX-1000 to make things even easier.

While in general I only use this blog for discussing programming, computers and my life as an engineer in dot-com, it’s only natural that, every now and then, a personal post will slip in. And this is as good a reason as any. On December 26th, I asked my girlfriend of almost three years to marry me. She said yes!