Use the XenSource, Luke...

We are preparing to partner up with XenSource so here I am sitting at the product launch. Room is full, and a lot of different countries are represented. Met people from Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. We are the only partner from Canada.

Their VP of World Wide Sales and Channels, John Glendenning is about to give us a presentation on the merits of Xen as a product and XenSource as a company. So will the CEO, Peter Levine.

As today is a Non-Disclosure event, I will have to keep this post short...

... This paragraph would be huge if I wasn't under NDA ...

The big announcements will be December --th.

Now I get to fill in an evaluation sheet and get a free polo shirt. That makes the trip worthwhile :-)

Worse.... Update... Ever...

Well, I am usually keen on Apple's security updates. I have never been burned by them. Except for this latest one. To be fair, I think my laptop's hard disk started failing *immediately* after... SMART reports that I should move all my important data off the drive *right now*. That's lovely, as I am on a trip to California right now. So, it's 3am in a hotel room, and I'm copying what I can to my spare USB drive.

The security update prevents me from running Mail.app and Colloquy, so I have to revert to irssi and squirrelmail. It's the first time that a security upgrade reduces my efficiency. Thanks Apple. (Well, OK, the Mail.app crash *might* be due to GPG Mail and not Mail.app per-se...)

The thing that really aggravates me about the HD failing is that Disk Utility will not permit you to fix permissions if your SMART status is "failing". And no real flags to force the checking either.

So, here's what you have to do:

- Reboot and press Command-S to get into darwin's single-user mode.

- Run the following:

/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /
/sbin/autodiskmount -va 
/usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions /

- And then reboot

Laptop hand-me-down

Being a CEO has its perks, but getting the latest toys should not be one of them.

It strikes me as ridiculous to see the CEO of the company with gadgets that they own just for the "oneupmanship" of it. Of course, the same can be said about the sports cars, the huge mansion, the trophy wife...

I do most of my roadwarrior work using an old and battered Titanium G4. It was the ex-CEOs laptop, and has obviously seen one too many airport check-ins. The casing was damaged from being dropped on the ground, the CDROM was broken, and the battery was dead. I had a choice to make: purchase a new laptop, or fix this one. I didn't need a CDROM drive right away, and a battery cost $120CDN. If I can't show restraint at purchasing for myself, how can I show proper spending diligence to my investors ? I purchased the battery, fixed the casing with some vise-grips, and bought a CDROM drive when my travels brought me near the We Love Macs store.

That was last year. A month ago, I found myself being quite annoyed at the sound level of the 4800rpm drive in the Titanium. Also, the memory was getting a bit tight as I am now using a few more apps in the background than before. I priced and ordered a new 7200rpm drive (yes, I picked one that had less heat-load and used the same amount of battery life as my old one) and another stick of RAM. So, $300CDN later, I am once again happy. I had to use Carbon Copy Cloner to move the data to the other drive, but it was quite painless.

This laptop is over 4 years old, and I've had it for about 1.5 years now. I figure it should last me another 2 years, if the LCD holds on.

How I get this blog together

I might as well describe the steps I went through to get this blog into existence:

Choosing a blog host

I had the choice between hosting the blog itself or using a blog hosting service. If I hosted my own blog, then I could control the information that would be published. In other words, I would be able to censor this that I had already published. Well, the information I want to blog will be technical recipes, and won't be Xelerance intellectual property. Since I am making this information public anyways, there is no specific requirements for me to host my own blog. I settled on Blogger because I just wanted to get up and running fast.

Choosing a blog software

Bart proposed vimblog; that one is very tech-oriented, and the fun thing about it is that all blog entries are stored in "email format" on the server. Well, I decided on Blogger as a host, so since vimblog is mostly a server-side software, I decided to pass. I had to chose between software that would be able to speak MoveableType API to Blogger. I settled settled on Ecto because I have a Mac and Ecto offers a queuing system. With Ecto, I can create drafts of future blog entries I want to create for the future. Quite neat.

Publishing

Ecto sends automatically to Blogger when I connect to the Internet. I can also synch published stories between my workstation and my laptop. I cannot synch draft stories between my workstation and my laptop, but I will try to find or code a way. This might be hard, since Ecto seems to store drafts in a .plist file. Perhaps if I can find a way to synch parts of an XML tree, this might work.

Here we go

It's been 3 years since my last confession ....

Well, what are blogs supposed to be but a public confession of our actions ? Hopefully this won't be that kind of blog. I decided to get a blogger account and start typing for the general public because I've found myself asking Bart to blog a technical item or technique that I had created that day.

You see, that's where I think that blogging is becoming the norm. We are moving our great Internet archive method from Usenet to web logs. So, searching for techniques and information used to give us a link to a newsgroup, and now chances are you will be linked to an individual's blog instead. By creating this blog, I hope to archive some of the technical recipes that I've had to create as part of my job.

Of course, I might ramble somewhat about the "Chief Executive" part of the job as well.

As most bloggers seem to write to an audience, my blog may very well be lines of code and a few notes. If I bring in an audience, I will be the first surprised.