It’s been almost two weeks since we picked up the new iPhones at the Mall of America, so I thought I’d write up a short review. AT&T also sent me a survey last week, so it got me thinking about what I like and don’t like about the 3GS (after switching from a first generation model).

As I wrote when I got the original phone, I’m not a big fan of the touch screen keyboard. After several years, I’m still not sure I like it all that much. I’ve gotten better at typing on it, but it still seems awkward to me. Even with the auto-correction, I still find myself correcting errors way, way more than I do on my laptop keyboard. The new cut-and-paste tools don’t work very well for me, either. It nice to have the option, though.

The 3G service from AT&T has been OK in my area – faster than Edge with decent coverage. I still experience the same dead zones as before and have had a few dropped calls. I don’t care about the MMS issue (don’t use it), but the tethering thing bugs the hell out of me. I’d use that if I could (and it should be included at no extra cost).

As for the phone experience, it feels better in my hand (lighter and sleeker), apps run much faster and the new camera options work great. It’s amazing to me that I can shoot video, edit it on the phone and upload it directly to Facebook from just about anywhere. I had some issues moving my settings and files over from the old phone, but nothing major. Having the extra storage space is wonderful – I now need to figure out what songs and movies I want with me all the time. I still have 15GB open on the device, after loading 1799 songs, 11 videos, 591 photos and 20 applications.

Here are my most used third-party apps:

• Tweetie
• Facebook
• Weighbot
• NetNewsWire
• iStat
• Now Playing
• Urbanspoon
• HoldEm
• Canabalt
• Wurdle

I’ve also been looking for a good TV listings app (currently using i.TV, but I’m not sold on it). I love that you when you buy an app, you can put it on all your devices without having to pay again.

Colleen bought a case for her new iPhone, but I’ve left mine plain so far. I’m really partial to Skinizi products (especially this one), but they are expensive. I also picked up a pair of the Apple in-ear headphones, which are awesome (and well worth the price).

So overall, I’m very happy with our purchase. It’s not perfect, but it does just about everything I want.

Just in time for the first (and second!) Minnesota snow storms in October, I purchased new tires for the MINI. The car now has almost 75,000 miles on it and the tires on the front were actually still the originals. I bought two new ones a few years ago and rotated the old rear tires to the front. This time, I picked four new Bridgestone Potenza G019 Grids (size 195/55R-16). Discount Tire in Apple Valley installed them for me quickly and smoothly for around $500.

Saturday also turned out to be new phone day. Colleen decided she was done paying T-mobile $50 a month for her pink Razr and wanted to upgrade. We went to the Mall of America and visited both the Apple Store and the AT&T corporate store, the latter of which was able to convert my account to a family plan. Colleen switched to a white 16GB iPhone 3GS, while I upgraded from a first generation iPhone to a black 32GB iPhone 3GS.

So now kid one has an iPod Touch, kid two gets my old iPhone (sans phone service) and we both have current iPhones. Everybody’s happy!

Yesterday I was invited by my long-time friend and Apple employee Paul “Pash” Pashibin to a meeting of the Apple Consultants Network that was hosted by Apple retail. Pash used to support the national sales channel and now is a business manager for the four Minnesota Apple Stores (Mall of America, Rosedale, Ridgedale and Southdale). Managers from all of the stores were on hand to introduce themselves and hear ten-minute presentations from local ACN members.

I went with the intent of doing a “test-drive” of ACN to see if 7 Minute Miles, LLC should apply for membership. In order to become a member, I need to pass at least one Apple certification test, obtain business insurance and pay the membership fee ($60 application fee and $395 annually).

Apple currently offers three primary levels of OS X certification:

• Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) 10.6
• Apple Certified Technical Coordinator (ACTC) 10.6
• Apple Certified System Administrator (ACSA) 10.6

There are all new classes, training materials and exams for Snow Leopard and currently only the first test is available (the others should be available next month). I think I can pass the first two tests without taking any classes, but I do need to study before plunking down $150 per exam.

I met a number of talented consultants at the meeting, but I was especially pleased to finally meet Charles Edge in person. Charles is the Director of Technology for 318, Inc., author of multiple books, prolific technology blogger at krypted.com and a prominent speaker. Charles had asked to be my friend on Facebook a while back, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t met him before (although we share a number of friends). He recently moved from Los Angeles to Minnesota and we had a very nice conversation after the meeting.

Here are some of the other ACN members who attended:

• Rashan Moore of Digital Coordination
• Clinton Little of Clintron X
• Brian Reichow of Escape Systems Corporation
• Bruce Greenberg of Northbrain
• Jason Hawke of Core Computer Consulting
• Kevin Kourajian from TechCheck LLC in Sartell
• Joe Skelley of Joe’s Tech Support
• Patrick Rhone of Machine Methods Consulting
• Chris Raymond of MacWorks
• Steve and Terri Zeh Jacobson of TechSource IT (and RSB)
• Tim Nyberg of The Mac Guys +
• Chuck Hauge of CPH Solutions

I was impressed by the Apple Store staff who spoke, as well as the ACN members. If I apply for the program, the local Apple Stores would stock my business cards and sell sheets, which I think would be very beneficial for future growth. I could also use the stores for client demos and other presentations. All of this means more business for Apple, so it seems like a win-win to me…

As some of you may have noticed, there have been a few changes here at 7minutemiles.com:

• All of my former .mn sports sites now re-direct to this site. New sections have been created for golf, hockey, running and skiing. Archived posts from each site have been consolidated on 7MM and separate RSS feeds are available for each category.
• Photo gallery images from the old sites have also been consolidated in the main 7MM gallery.
• Links to other sites we like have been consolidated in the 7MM blogroll area in the sidebar.
• I added page anchors to the fetishes page, along with a drop-down selector so you can jump down to the exact section you’d like to read.
• A new 7 Minute Miles, LLC services randomizer box replaces my personal “to-do” bucket list section, which has moved to the footer.
• Information on the contact page has been updated to add the new 7MM PO box mailing address and the return of my iChat/AOL account name.
• Minor updates to the about page and the biography sections.
• A new company page has been created to describe services the new 7 Minute Miles, LLC, organization is now offering.

Speaking of the LLC, I decided at the end of the summer it was time to start a new company. With the help of Doug Podolak and attorney Kevin Johnson, I founded 7 Minute Miles, LLC, on August 28, 2009.

The legal framework is now in place and I opened new business checking and savings accounts with U.S. Bank earlier this week. A former co-worker from Northwest Airlines, Mumtaz Walli-Ware, will be providing small business accounting and tax services and I will be purchasing business insurance from Tapemark Charity Pro-Am presenting sponsor, Anderson Agency.

The new company is a technology consultancy that specializes in WordPress web publishing and Apple system administration and management. Our first two new clients are the Tapemark Charity Pro-Am and the Macalester College Relations department. With are in negotiations with several other organizations and hope to have more news to announce soon.

Please take a look at the services we offer and contact us for a free initial consultation today!

About a month ago, I ordered a netbook from Dell for work. I have two admin needs for a Windows machine – to manage our new Watchguard firewall and to make changes to our voicemail system. I’ve run Windows XP on my Mac Book Pro using VMware, but the Watchguard in particular didn’t seem to like the network sharing that occurs between the Mac and XP sides. I figured that for a grand total of $388 (including tax and shipping), the Mini 9 was worth a try.

My initial impressions were mostly positive. It took me the better part of a day to install all of the usual anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-spyware tools that Windows requires, along with the multiple security updates from Microsoft. After a quick download and install of Firefox, Flash and iTunes, the machine was pretty much ready to go. Wireless worked fine right away and all of the sites I use on a regular basis performed and displayed just as I expected.

Here are the specs:

• Intel Atom Processor N270 (1.6GHz/533Mhz FSB/512K cache)
• 1GB DDR2 at 533MHz
• Glossy 8.9 inch LED display (1024X600)
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950
• 16GB Solid State Drive
• Genuine Windows XP Home Edition
• Wireless 802.11g Mini Card
• Integrated 0.3M Pixel Webcam
• 32WHr Battery (4 cell)
• 1Yr Ltd Warranty and Mail-In Service

I also decided to order a 16GB SDHC memory card for $34 from Amazon to double the storage space.

So it is what it is – not a powerhouse by any means, but good enough for simple browsing and email. It’s got a dirt cheap price and is very portable, although a little thicker and heavier than I expected – nothing like the Sony netbook (that costs three times as much). The battery capacity isn’t great and will drain completely if you don’t use it for a few days.

I probably would have recommended it after a week for people looking for cheap and small, but after using it regularly for a few weeks, I find that I really don’t want to use it unless I absolutely have to. After carrying it in my backpack with the 17-inch Mac Book Pro, it now sits in the server room next to the Watchguard.

Typing on the keyboard is just painful – almost as bad for me as my iPhone. Start-up speed from sleep is glacial and I forgot just how bad it is having to constantly update and monitor all of the Windows anti-everything utilities. After not using it for a week, it took almost an hour to download and install security and anti-virus updates alone. The quality of the screen is fine, but the whole unit just feels small, cramped and not terribly well built.

All in all, I’ll stick with my big laptop for “real” work and plan on my next iPhone to get more power and speed for those small and cheap needs.

It’s still too early to say the battle is over, but so far the new bad-ass switches from HP have not gone down once since they arrived. The web-based management features are great for monitoring what’s going on and I was able to turn on two new (for us) features:

• “This switch features automatic fault detection capability which can protect your network from being brought down by problems such as network loops, defective cables, transceivers and faulty network interface cards.”
• “Multicast Filtering (IGMP) – Direct multicast packets to only those portions of the network where they are needed. This improves network performance in networks using the IGMP protocol with high levels of multicast traffic.”

As I wrote in February, the network at HSRA has been a frustrating troubleshooting nightmare. With the help of many others (friends, colleagues, outside consultants), I now basically have a new network. Here are the key pieces:

• HP ProCurve 2848 – 48 port gigabit Ethernet switches (5)
• Watchguard Firebox X1250e firewall

Combined with all the gear I just brought back from Seattle, the server room is getting pretty crowded. Still lots to monitor, clean and organize, but I may finally get to move on to other projects soon. I’m still worried there is bad cable out on the floor, but the new switches seem to deal with that much better than the el cheapo stuff from Best Buy.

This week was sort of bittersweet for me – after more than four years of service, I was tasked with decommissioning my work servers from the data center in Seattle where we have been leasing a half rack. digital.forest has offered us great service over the years and I’ve been a friend and colleague of their tech VP, Chuck Goolsbee, who I first met many, many years ago in his role as list-mom of the very useful Mac Managers mailing list.

Over the years, we placed many different pieces of equipment in our half-rack. The service and pricing structure of digital.forest were miles above what was offered in the Minnesota market and more than offset the physical distance issue. Their tech support staff handled most issues on-site for me and they patiently dealt with my literally hundreds of DNS support tickets over the years. I really only needed to travel to Seattle to install new gear or perform major upgrades.

The trip this week involved taking five servers, one switch and one tape backup unit off-line, removing all of those items from the rack, packing them up and getting them back to Minnesota. I planned to do this over the HSRA spring break so I could minimize downtime. Originally I thought about driving out, but ended up flying out on Tuesday afternoon and returning on the early Wednesday morning red-eye flight.

Since Sun Country isn’t flying to Seattle right now, I flew the “new Delta” and took one of our studio Anvil cases along. The flight out was full and I waited until the end to board. That was a mistake, as my reserved exit row aisle seat had already be giving to someone else because they booked a child into an exit row and had to move people around. The flight attendant wanted me to sit in a middle seat in the row in front of the exit row – you know, the one that doesn’t recline. Since they make you pay extra for exit rows, I was a little pissed off. They offered to move me to a middle seat in an exit row, but a Delta pilot came down the aisle and said that was “his” seat. Jerk. At least the lead flight attendant came by later and offered to make him move.

When I got to Seattle, I decided to go to my favorite fast food place at SEA-TAC, Ivar’s Seafood, and get some late lunch. The fish and chips were great and I meandered down to baggage claim to get the Anvil (which they only charged me $15 for, despite being oversized). Everyone from my flight was still standing around – I think it took about an hour for the baggage to arrive.

After that, things went pretty smoothly. I rented a Mazda mini-van from National and packed two servers in the Anvil case. I removed the hard drives and put those in a small box along with a Mac mini server and a small ProCurve switch. The three other devices got packed in some extra Dell boxes that digital.forest had laying around and were sent home via FedEx (those items didn’t need to be put back online right away).

After a nice dinner with Chuck, I went back to the airport, returned the car and hauled the heavy Anvil to the check-in area. After some confusion about what they would or would not accept, they decided to charge me $190 and let me check it. Their scale said it weighed 81 pounds, but it had to be much, much more than that, so I was happy. Got through security and hung out in the WorldClub lounge for two hours until the plane left.

This time I claimed my exit row seat early and ended up having no one in the middle seat, which was nice. It was still hard to sleep, though, and I ended up driving straight to the school to get the three servers unpacked and back online ASAP. Fun airline fact – the baggage handlers at MSP will put anything down the regular carousel, including extremely heavy Anvil cases. That thing could have destroyed smaller, inferior luggage if the timing had been better.

I spent most of Wednesday working to get everything back online. Two of the three were online by Wednesday night and the last one came online this morning. Overall downtime was minimized, but it took much more work than I planned, especially on the DNS side of things. Everything seems to be up and running fine today, but the real test will come on Monday when staff and students return in force. I decided to put all of the HSRA workstations back on the wired network too, but I’ll write more about that next week.

Special thanks to Chuck and his staff at digital.forest – if you need a co-location facility, they’re awesome.

7 Minute Miles Seattle Photo Gallery

During my oh so fun network adventures the past few weeks, I did run across one wonderful new tool. iStat is a $1.99 iPhone application (normally $2.99) by a company called Bjango that can be used to remotely monitor Mac servers (and regular computers).

Very easy to set up, iStat actually has two parts: the iPhone program and a Mac program called iStat Server that runs on the machines you want to monitor. It transmits data on port 5109, so you may need to make adjustments to your firewall in order to get the two programs to talk to each other. I set this up on several Xserves running Mac OS X Server 10.4.11 and 10.5.6, as well as two Mac minis that I use as servers running regular 10.5.6 (see screen shot on the left).

Once your firewall rules are correct, configuration on the phone side was easy – enter an IP address and enter the 5-digit passcode that the iStat Server displays. As you can see in the sample screen shot on the right (provided by Bjango), iStat gives you a nicely designed layout for each device that provides live updates for CPU usage, RAM allocation, open hard drive space on each volume, network traffic (in both directions) and, depending on the machine, internal temperatures. Device uptime and system load are also displayed.

The program also allows you to see information about your iPhone: memory usage (with an option to free memory), open storage space, IP addresses in use, uptime, load, your phone’s unique identifier and the wi-fi MAC address. The last two items also have buttons to email those bits of data to whatever address you want.

There are also options for ping and traceroute, but I haven’t had as much luck using those as the normal monitoring features. That is probably more of an AT&T issue than the program, though. When connected to a wi-fi network, it seems to work better. Bonjour is also supported, so it can see devices that are running the server software.

Since my network has been wonky, iStat was a nice discovery to allow me a chance to get out of the building, but still watch what was going on in the server room. The look and feel are perfect and it works as advertised (aside from the ping issues). A steal at $2 – this is an application I would have paid much more for – especially when you look at the price of tools like Intermapper.

Now if Apple would come out with iPhone editions of Server Admin and Workgroup Manager, I’d be all set…

It took me another two weeks, but I think the HSRA network is finally stable. As I mentioned in the previous post, this was perhaps the most frustrating and hardest-to-troubleshoot technology issue I’ve dealt with in all my years of doing this type of work.

Lots of red herrings and false starts during this nightmare – old switches in the server room, stray switches everywhere, loop-backs, cabling, copier network card, server network card, firewall, power surges, mice, squirrels, strange liquids dripping from the ceiling, people bringing in foreign network devices. I tried isolation techniques to pinpoint the problem, but it always seemed to come back after a few hours. It also didn’t help that everything would work at night, only to fail once students and staff came in during the day.

After one all-nighter and four days in a row of late-night re-wiring sessions, I finally decided last week to switch over as much gear to the wireless network as I could. It seemed to be more stable through all of this and I was getting desperate. I just added four new Airport Extreme base stations this year, so I knew it should be able to handle the load from 50 new iMacs. I removed all of the older eMacs from the floor, as they do not have wireless cards. Amazingly, the network stayed up all day.

I added an isolated switch to the firewall and started connecting essential wired devices: printers, network security cameras and a few primary workstations (that lacked wireless cards). The key measure to see if the network would stay up was the system log on the server – link errors would appear there when the network was about to lose it’s mind:

Didn’t realize we still had AppleTalk turned on – it was apparently being used for printer setup. Turned it off on the server (which made the server log errors go away) and started reconfiguring all of the clients as well. Bonjour-only printer setup from now on…

With a functioning wireless network (and limited wired components), we decided that the issue had to lie with the physical wiring on the main student floor. This area had been re-constructed over the summer, with walls being torn down and wires pulled out of the old connector boxes. I already had pulled all of the stray Linksys switches off the floor, so we spent one morning last week with a Fluke wire tester and checked all 35 active ports – all checked out fine. I also checked all of the patch panel cables in the server room – also fine.

With the cables cleared of guilt, we started adding back student iMacs one advisory at a time using the wired Ethernet ports. Links errors reappeared within two minutes. At first we though it was one computer out of the first five, but after further testing, they all would give a link error.

I remembered reading a forum post that talked about manual Ethernet settings and IPv6. I couldn’t find the exact post again, so I just started experimenting with the settings. Out of the box, a new iMac is set to have IPv6 turned on and Ethernet set to automatic. After turning off IPv6 and setting Ethernet to manually, 100baseTX, full-duplex, flow-control and 1500 MTU, we experienced no more link errors.

Eureka!

I tend to think that the IPv6 change wasn’t necessary, but I’m keeping it off at this point. I added two more new 24-port Linksys switches to the server room and converted all of the machines back to the wired network successfully. We will hopefully be moving to HP ProCurve gig switches soon, but at least we are solid now.

Students were also experiencing two other issues that I considered unrelated: network login rejection when the server was at high CPU-utilization and kernel panic crashes on logout. These were both known issues that I found mentioned on the Apple discussion forums. The former was a server bug that has since been addressed in this weekend’s security update and the latter is caused by duplicate fonts in a student’s network directory. I deleted all fonts from the student home directories on Friday, so we’ll see if that helps this week.

Today I finally got to install the new iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 updates school-wide using the awesome K-12 site license we purchased ($250 for each suite). Bravo to Apple for the great recession-friendly school pricing.

We’ll see how this week goes, but it seems good so far…

The past few weeks at work have been the most stressful I’ve had in several years. The network gremlins have been out in full force: students can’t login to the server, printers drop off the network for no reason, users can’t access the internet, etc., etc.

Normal troubleshooting hasn’t unearthed any regular pattern or source of the trouble. I’ve slowly been replacing and/or eliminating individual items – firewall, switches, cabling, server settings. Lots of little things have turned up, but nothing that has completely eliminated the troubles. At this point, almost everything has been touched at one point or another and it seems like I’ve rebuilt the network from scratch.

While I was on vacation, I had a consultant come in and do some troubleshooting and benchmarking. It was a bit expensive, but I needed the backup and I thought another set of eyes may see something I didn’t.

One of the outside recommendations was to increase server capacity. We’ve added a lot of computers this year, but I had more computers in LA last year with the same basic setup. Still, we had a great stroke of luck in that a company in St. Cloud wanted to donate some older servers to a school. The picture shown here is our old rack enclosure with all of the donated gear added. The new machines aren’t online yet (needed to order software, a new power supply and an extra RAID card), but we’ll soon find out if that helps with our peak login issues.

Once the HSRA network and server infrastructure is stable again, I have about 10 web projects to work on, including several non-profit side projects. Speaking of side projects, I’m also trying to learn iPhone programming. More on that in a future post…

UPDATE: Just after I posted this story, I checked the main HSRA server from home and couldn’t see it. I drove in to troubleshoot, and five hours later, I think I found the source of all our trouble. I’ll post a full report tonight.

UPDATE 2: All was well until about 1PM yesterday, when all hell broke lose again. Back to the drawing board…

I swore I wouldn’t join Facebook – I already spend way too much time online between my job and my hobbies, I told myself. My wife became a member after she went back to grad school. Then a race I ran this fall posted pictures only viewable by Facebook members. On November 10th, I broke down and signed up.

As a web developer, Facebook seems really well done to me. I’m still not that familiar with all aspects of it (or some of the history), but it’s been a blast getting back in touch with a bunch of people I would have never connected with using just Twitter, LinkedIn and my blogs. Seems miles ahead of MySpace, too.

What amazes me the most about Facebook, though, is how much complexity there is beneath the surface. I can’t imagine how much time and thought went into programming this thing. I don’t know what it used to be like, but I find the performance and implementation of features to be very strong. Uploading and sharing photos, in particular, is stellar.

If you’ve been dragging your feet about joining Facebook, all I can say is jump in, the water’s fine…

Tonight I stopped by the Apple Store at the Mall of America to pick up a new MacBook for a colleague at work. After 30 minutes of unpacking and configuration, I have to say, it’s a pretty nice machine.

The previous edition of the Mac Book has served many people I know very well – my wife has one and I purchased quite a few for the school here and in LA. Aside from a few notable melt-downs, they have worked great for the price.

My biggest issue with the new edition was the lack of a FireWire port. This has been talked about all over the web and I understand the reasons Apple dropped it, but I will still miss the convenience of FireWire target mode and the ability to use the huge pile of FireWire hard drives I have laying around.

The build quality of the new machines is top notch – the block of aluminum process creates one solid-feeling laptop. It’s a lot lighter than I expected and the glossy LED-backlit screen is bright and vivid without too much glare. The entry-level configuration is somewhat pricey, but has specs that are usable right out of the box without needing any extra upgrades. No video cable in the box sucks, though.

This is not the laptop for me (I’m a 17-inch matte screen guy), but it’s very nice and would likely serve the needs of 80% of the laptop market quite well.

The first part of our new equipment lease at HSRA Minnesota arrived yesterday on three large pallets. It’s always fun to un-box new computers, but the novelty wears off by about the fifth one and the rest just become a chore.

Should keep me out of trouble all week, though…

A few years back, we bought up a bunch of “.mn” domain names at work. That extension is the country code for Mongolia, but it also works well for Minnesota-based sites.

I have several domains in production now (golfing.mn, hockey.mn, run.mn, proam.mn), but we have a bunch that we don’t plan to use:

• bride.mn
• cabins.mn
• concerts.mn
• deals.mn
• homefinder.mn
• seats.mn
• sexy.mn
• theater.mn
• zoo.mn

If you would like to take ownership of any of these domains, drop me a line at dk@studio-4.com and we can chat. I hate domain squatters, so all we are looking for is to recoup some of our costs (.mn domains are more expensive–starting at $49.95USD per year).

August means the end of summer, the Minnesota State Fair and the beginning of the school year. It’s that last one that means my workdays will be getting longer soon. Here’s a short list of things going on:

• Rebuild and upgrade the networking infrastructure in the server room and big advisory space at HSRA Minnesota (pictured above)
• Execute a new Apple lease for Minnesota and take delivery of a boatload of new equipment that needs to be configured and deployed (50+ workstations and 25+ laptops)
• Install upgraded studio and pre-production equipment in Minnesota
• Reposition security cameras and upgrade and enhance digital recording systems
• Upgrade Minnesota server operating system and re-configure
• Re-image older workstations in Minnesota
• Deploy site licenses for Final Cut Pro, Logic Studio and Aperture
• Upgrade and deploy enhanced graphics lab in Minnesota
• Plan for tech contingencies at HSRA Los Angeles and a possible late August visit

On top of all that, I’m still dealing with DNS and firewall issues in Seattle, an overall cleanup of the four Seattle servers, test installs of Elgg, Moodle, Buddypress and Drupal and a re-design of the HSRA New York website. Oh, and I’m trying to learn Ruby on Rails and subversion on the side. Fun, fun.

I just realized this year’s WWDC was my tenth. I started going in 1998 when it was still held in San Jose and only missed one year (2002 – dark days in my airline career). The company names on my badges have changed quite a bit, even though I’ve really only worked two places my entire life.

I thought of asking “When was my first WWDC, where was it held and what company did I represent?” at Stump the Experts this year, but I wasn’t sure of the company until I dug through my junk drawer today. My how time flies…

Another WWDC is history. This is always a highlight of the year for me: a great city and loads of professional development. My head is full of new ideas and things I want to work on this summer:

• Ruby on Rails
• Leopard Server upgrades in MN and LA
• Remote system administration, imaging and automation ideas
• Javascript and Ajax
• iPhone web development
• Cocoa and Xcode
• Graphic design and Illustrator

Yesterday was the beer bash in Yerba Buena Gardens and the surprise musical guest was Barenaked Ladies. I’m not a big fan of them, but they were funny, clued in to the audience and entertaining to watch. Plus they’re Canadian, which is always good in my book.

I’ve never seen so many nerds packed into one place. They did the same regional food stations as last year and the caterer was mostly able to keep pace with the hungry crowd. I had some Italian, Chinese and “All-American” finger foods, all of which were pretty good.

For lunch yesterday, I went to Lark Creek Steak in the Westfield Centre. This is one of the restaurants associated with Bradley Ogden, whose namesake restaurant in Las Vegas is one of my favorites in the whole world. I had the steakburger with sharp cheddar, fries and a shake. It was one of the best burgers I’ve ever had–so good.

Hanging around downtown until my Sun Country red eye later tonight. There are lots of people still at the convention center, even though the sessions are over (labs go until 6:30). I’m currently using the high-speed wireless to watch the live Tiger/Phil stream from the U.S. Open. Kung-Fu Panda is showing across the street, so I might go and catch me some animated JB too…

This conference always seems to go by so quickly. Check out my Twitter feed for all the sessions I’ve been attending. Very interesting stuff here this year. I wish I had more time to learn iPhone programming–there is a lot of money to made there. The shirts this year at the fake Company Store were awesome, so I picked up a couple.

In the food arena, I had lunch yesterday at an Irish pub called The Chieftain located right around the corner from Moscone. Had fish and chips that had a strong ale flavor – yum. Dinner was at Lori’s Diner, where I had a real cherry Coke with an open faced hot turkey sandwich. Food is definitely part of the reason I love San Francisco.

I ran five miles this morning before the sessions started, running from the hotel to Fisherman’s Wharf and back. They now have an In-N-Out Burger at the Wharf, along with all the other wonderful places. I really need to bring the kids here soon.

More good sessions today, with Dr. Paranoid from Pixar presenting again at lunch. I finished several lingering work projects yesterday during breaks and after dinner, so I might be able to go to the Design Awards and Stump the Experts tonight. Nerd fun.

What a week. After the Tapemark, I headed home, mowed the front lawn, grabbed a quick dinner, then drove to the airport to catch a flight to San Francisco for WWDC week.

The flight on Sun Country had some nice surprises. The flight was pretty crowded (130 people), but my row had about four inches of additional leg room–just as good as sitting in an exit row. Arrived right on time and the notoriously slow SFO luggage system had my bag out on the carousel right away.

A quick ride in a Toyota hybrid cab brought me to a new hotel–the Orchard Gardens Hotel on Bush Street. It’s a green hotel and the room is really nice: flat-screen HD TV, in-room wireless, Thymes toiletries and a really comfortable bed.

Today’s keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference was OK, but a little thin on substance. The new price point is nice, and I like the 3G and the GPS, but none of it is available yet and I was hoping for “one more thing.” There was some new stuff in the later sessions, but that is under NDA.

Walked down to Belden Place to have dinner tonight at Sam’s Grill and Seafood Restaurant. I ordered Alaskan Halibut and was a little disappointed. The cheese cake I had for desert was a little better, but I really hate places that charge $3 for a 10-ounce mini bottle of Coke with no refills. Always fun to sit outside in San Francisco, though.

Thanks to the kind people at LubeTech and this grant, I was able to load up the MINI with five brand new twenty-inch iMacs today, purchased from Mike Meirovitz at the Mall of America Apple Store.

I went directly to the store so I could get them prepped for online science testing tomorrow (before they get loaded up for the Sweat Equity Enterprises program).

Always fun to have new toys…

After a very crowded flight on Sun Country, I rented a car and drove to Digital Forest in Seattle to pay a visit to my co-located servers. There were several tasks I’ve been waiting a while to complete:

• Install and configure a new HP ProCurve switch within our half rack to better manage bandwidth between servers.
• Re-configure a hardware RAID and upgrade to Leopard Server on Xserve 3.
• Configure the firewall, mail server and iCal server on Xserve 3.
• Clean the tape backup device and re-configure to auto-clean in the future.
• Install a demo version of BRU backup software on all four servers.

I’ve finished most of the on-site stuff and plan to work on the configuration tweaking while watching the Wild game on Versus tonight. If it weren’t for the cold I think I’m catching, this would have been a near perfect trip.

Oh yeah, also had lunch with Digital Forest geek wrangler Chuck Goolsbee at a place called New Teriyaki & Wok. We both had the chicken and beef combo, which I thought was very good. Always nice to visit with Chuck, keeper of the Mac Managers mailing list.

One night in the Seattle rain, then back to spring in Minnesota.

Never seen a laptop screen get messed up quite like this one. Not sure what she did with it, but this HSRA laptop needs some serious screen replacement…

It’s not every day that I read about something in the paper and find something mentioned that can have a major positive impact on my job. That happened yesterday, though, when I read a story in the Wall Street Journal about companies trying to manage online video use by employees and the effect it has on network performance. A service called OpenDNS was mentioned and I went to check it out.

Schools that receive federal funding for Internet access must comply with CIPA regulations (Children’s Internet Protection Act), which include measures to block or filter Internet access to sites that are considered obscene or harmful to minors.

This has always meant purchasing firewall equipment with expensive annual content filtering contracts from companies like Sonicwall or Astaro. There are a few free options available for schools, but I hadn’t found any that really met all of my requirements.

OpenDNS addresses content filtering in a different way, one that doesn’t require any dedicated hardware or specific software on each client. This made it easy to set up and configure using a simple web-based administration page and a few changes on the local school server.

Today was the first day of use at HSRA Los Angeles and after a few follow-up tweaks, it seems to be working great. Best of all, the service is free–OpenDNS makes it money from advertising that appears on the page that is displayed when a site is blocked or can’t be found.

I’m anxious to see how it holds up the rest of the week, but so far I’m very, very happy.

Bravo David Ulevitch!

Returned Thursday afternoon from another week in not-so-sunny SoCal. At HSRA Los Angeles, I found the new Cisco VoIP equipment in the server rack (above), along with their new phone headsets (which turned out to be way different from the ones on 24). Sun Country helped me transport a new video editing workstation with two 23-inch Cinema Display flat panel monitors 1,528 miles without damaging or losing anything. Hurray!

This trip also included:

• binding six new graphics and video machines to the network
• running a new network cable to the video production room
• installing system and Office security updates on 150 machines
• fixing the camera on their ID card system
• installing additional RAM in two video machines
• rebuilding one advisory Mac mini from scratch
• managing issues surrounding full hard drives on managed student accounts

Still need to troubleshoot some issues with ARD clients dropping from the admin computer lists and some other miscellaneous issues, but overall, it was a productive trip.

The studio director and I didn’t get out to the beach all week, as it was too cloudy, cold and rainy every morning. We did walk to the top of the hill on the last night, as I wanted to see how big the waves get when the wind blows off the ocean (not very).

As for food, this trip was all about saving money. Aside from the trip to Canter’s Deli I wrote about earlier, I ate lunch at In-N-Out and El Pollo Loco (and skipped lunch the other day). The other two dinners were both in Redondo Beach: Hennessey’s one night and Gina Lee’s Bistro the other. Everything during the week was decent–not bad, but not spectacular either.

Next work trip will probably be an overnight to Seattle to visit my servers at Digital Forest.

When I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was stupid. But here I am today testing out how we might use it at HSRA for online collaboration (staff and students).

Via Alex King’s Twitter Tools WordPress plug-in, my three latest tweets appear in the sidebar, and every post on 7 Minute Miles should be added to Twitter.

Not sure how this will fit in with my email-chat-blog work flow, but it’s fun so far…

Time for another brief Macworld commentary (for the three people who come here each year for that):

• Not a huge deal, but the iPhone update was instant gratification and has some useful features (with innovative interfaces too).
• Time Capsule seems nice (and priced competitively), but I’m still waiting for the original wireless backup feature shown at WWDC 07.
• Happy to get a free Apple TV update, but the movie rental terms, selection and pricing aren’t going to get me to cancel Netflix anytime soon.
• Mac Book Air: style and elegance that everyone will drool over, despite the trade-offs (more below).
• Randy Newman?!?

I really love the look of the new MBA. Sony has owned the ultra-small laptop market for years, providing strong designs and charging a premium. The Mac Book Air has style in spades and I was actually surprised at the relatively low price (the base model is capable out of the box without any extra upgrades). Sony gets burned by Apple again.

There are some obvious trade-offs that Apple had to make with the Mac Book Air, but overall I think they chose well. Personally I’d miss the Firewire port the most, as I seem to be using Firewire hard drives all the time for backup. The Remote Disc feature has been available before, but it appears this has been implemented in typical Apple fashion and will help get around the loss of the optical drive.

No security cable lock? Methinks these will disappear into thin air (couldn’t resist).

The solid state drive at a cool grand is actually market competitive for this technology, and I’d love to see some performance numbers that compare the two options. Slightly disappointing to see the processor speed drop so much compared to the other laptop lines, but the chip did have to shrink in size substantially. I also hate integrated graphics, but hey, it’s three freakin’ pounds.

I’m somewhat surprised to see the screen stay at 13.3 inches, with the width and depth remaining roughly the same as the Mac Book. Can’t wait to handle one in person…

My parents have the Grand Marais newspaper sent to their home in St. Paul every week and pass it along to me after they read it. The Cook County News-Herald is a great small town paper and often has stories that make me smile. This week, though, they had a story that truly made me laugh out loud.

The November 30th issue had a story about the county website being upgraded to list property tax records online. There was some opposition to this, as the original proposal including the ability to search by property owner name. This was removed after reviewing other county policies in the state, but the final vote included two no votes:

“Commissioners Johnson and Fritz Sobanja voted against the proposal. Johnson said he couldn’t back the plan because of significant opposition he’s heard; Sobanja said he voted no as part of his ‘war against computers.’”

Where do I enlist?

Since I was already getting Leopard questions from people, I decided today was the day.

There are tons of great stories online about this, so I’ll just hit the main points of my experience.

First off, I always do a complete backup of my drive before proceeding with a major upgrade like this. I used to use Carbon Copy Cloner, but now mainly use Super Duper! by Shirt Pocket. Mr. Bombich has a new version of CCC out, though, that also looks very nice.

Based on the preceding paragraph, you can probably tell that I’m not that excited by Time Machine. Since they dropped the ability to back up to an Airport-attached drive for now, I haven’t even turned on that feature yet. Should be good for the general Mac population, though. Definitely a good time to be a drive manufacturer.

Once properly backed up, the upgrade procedure went smoothly for me and took about an hour. I installed the one software update, restarted again, then started testing all of my primary applications by going down the dock and launching stuff.

Not sure what all the fuss is about the fake 3D look of the dock when placed on the bottom. The first thing I do on a machine is turn on hiding, so I never see the damn thing anyway. I don’t earn my living using the dock–I need my real apps to work and I need to be able to manage my work flow (switching between apps, moving files, etc.).

Two things in Leopard will be very useful for this: Spaces and Quick Look. Both are much better than I was expecting and I will use them daily.

The transparent menu bar must die.

The majority of things just worked after the upgrade, but here is my list of things I need to fix myself (or wait for a vendor):

• Localhost settings for my off-line web testing environment always get hosed (Apache, PHP, MySQL)
• Last.fm sort of works, but needs to be updated (this is the app that updates my last song played at the bottom of this site)
• Shared volumes and networking are broken in both Windows XP and Vista running under Parallels
• Growl notifications work for some events, but not all (Mail)
• VPN Tracker 4 is broken and causes a kernel panic when connecting

That last one is the biggest one for me, as I use that to connect to Los Angeles. VPN to the St. Paul site using the built-in L2TP connection works fine.

Other things that just worked or are improved in Leopard: printing, wireless access, all of my primary Adobe apps, BBedit, Transmit, NetNewsWire, Word and Excel, Pages, Remote Desktop, Mail, iChat and iCal. Those last three are especially nice compared to the Tiger versions.

Dashboard is a mixed bag–the fonts in some widgets are way off now, while the new movie widget is very fast and I love the new ARD widget (this may have been available before Leopard, but it’s very nice). I’m anxious to get my servers upgraded to Leopard to check out the Server Status widget.

That’s about it for now. I’ll post updates here as things get patched or other issues pop up.

UPDATE: Decided to dump Parallels for now and install XP under Boot Camp. Took a long time to set up, but it’s very fast. Also set up Time Machine with a new external hard drive. That took several hours to do the initial backup (around 160GB) and now I just need to wait to see how it works in practice. Found out my issues with web development testing using localhost were caused by Apple switching to Apache 2 as the default instead of 1.3. Still tweaking that, but it’s mostly working now.

Made it to Los Angeles today from Seattle, courtesy of Alaska Airlines. They had the lowest price and for the most part, it was an OK experience. I was ticked off, though, that I had to waste time in a line called “bag check” that wouldn’t let me check my bags until I stood in a different line to get a printed boarding pass. Oh well, at least they got the bags off the plane and into the baggage claim quickly.

I’m here to help set up the technology infrastructure at the new High School for Recording Arts Los Angeles. I stopped there on the way to the hotel and was amazed at the progress in the big space.

Tomorrow will mostly be a planning day–creating network maps, gathering ISP info, taking inventory, deciding on security camera placement and updating the work plan.

This time I’m staying at the Hotel Hermosa in Hermosa Beach. My first impression was not great, but I think it’s growing on me. It does have a Fatburger across the street, so it can’t be all bad.

The internet connection didn’t work when I got here (and it costs extra), but it seems to be good now…

Part of the reason I haven’t been posting much lately is the project I completed today. In anticipation of the new Los Angeles school, I decided some of our server equipment at work needed to be repositioned and reconfigured. It sounded like a good idea at the time (and I think will be long-term), but it took a lot of planning to pull off.

In a nutshell, I moved two servers from St. Paul to Seattle, pulled a large network storage device out of Seattle to be sent back to Minnesota, reconfigured the remaining St. Paul server to match what I need to do for the new Los Angeles server and upgraded memory across the board.

Kudos to my favorite Minnesota airline, who not only were on time with great in-flight service, but also managed to get all my gear to Seattle in one piece. I panicked on Sunday night when the Anvil case I planned to use fit the two servers fine, but weighed more than 100 pounds (Sun Country’s stated limit).

My anxiety over getting the stuff to Seattle caused me to get very little sleep Saturday night and I woke up before my 5am alarm. I removed one server from the case and took it to the airport counter and asked if I could carry it on. The helpful agent didn’t think it would fit in the overhead, but she said to just put it back in the case and check it as oversized (for a $40 charge). I told her it had to be over 100 pounds and she said, “we don’t have scales here.”

Poor, poor ground workers…

Also have to give props to National Car Rental and their agent in Seattle who found the car with the biggest trunk and helped load that big, honkin’ case in there. I just love the National Emerald Aisle service–one less stressful thing in the travel world is something worth celebrating.

I wanted to wait until iPhone 2.0, but I had one budgeted for work and I just couldn’t resist after reading the initial waves of positive reviews.

There has been more than enough written about the iPhone, so I’ll keep it brief:

• Bigger than my old RAZR, but still comfortable in a pocket.
• Activation and transfer of old T-mobile number smooth and completed within 30 minutes.
• Screen is gorgeous, even in direct sunlight.
• Data sync with laptop easy and reliable–even picked up my photos in Aperture instead of iPhoto.
• Storage space is limiting with large music, photo and video libraries–need to prioritize what goes on it.
• Connected to my home wi-fi network easily–browsing is very fast.
• Used EDGE access once yesterday in the middle of nowhere–slow, but usable and worked fine.

Overall, I found myself with a huge smile and laughing like a little kid as I explored the interface and all of the included apps. Still need to figure out which songs I want on it and how to manage email efficiently between it and my laptop, but overall, this is a spectacular 1.0 product.

I can’t wait to see what happens next (both with software upgrades and new models down the road)…

This afternoon we took the girls to tour the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in northern Minnesota. We took both tours offered: the historic tour and the physics tour.

Both involve taking a cage tram down a half-mile shaft (2341 feet down, 689 feet below sea level) at a top speed of 10mph (that felt much faster). You could fit about ten people in each cage and I was a bit claustrophobic during all four rides.

The mine was in operation from the late 1800s until 1962, when it was donated to the State of Minnesota. The historical tour was fun–it reminded me of all those childhood trips to Knott’s Berry Farm and the Mine Train Ride. The reality of working in a mine during this period must have truly been awful. Makes my work issues seem easy by comparison.

The physics tour had my head spinning. The University of Minnesota has a $150 million laboratory on that same level of the mine as the historical tour–one of several labs that have been used over the years.

The large one we got to see (pictured above) houses an experiment called Minos (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search). This thing is basically a gigantic magnet that tries to capture neutrinos sent from Fermilab outside of Chicago (450 miles away). You can watch the live data capture here (screen explanation here). They only get one or two successful captures a day.

They also have another lab with an experiment called CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) that maintains an environment near absolute zero, but we did not get to see that area. It amazes me that everything in those labs had to be brought down the same narrow mine shafts that we took to get down there.

Very, very cool nerd toys set among old steel history…

Here are the items I submitted to Apple this year as feedback on the conference:

Good Stuff

• Access to Apple engineers
• Some strong speakers
• Meeting other attendees
• Being in SFO
• Beer bash here worked well
• Wireless access and power were much better this year
• Happy to see more web development focus

Suggestions

• Don’t sell so many tickets when there isn’t capacity (or pre-poll attendees on what sessions they want to attend and plan accordingly).
• Better train the center staff on crowd management–lines and arbitrary rules suck.
• Create in and out doors for each room to better move people around.
• Bring more Apple Company Store stuff here (where were those developer people? O’Reilly?).
• More drink options at lunch time (Brisk and Lemonade only are really lame).
• Food in general at lunch is poor–give us an option to pay less and just eat out every day (which is what we do anyway).
• Get session information online faster.
• Overflow rooms without video of the speaker are not the same as being there.
• Free iPhones! Seriously, though, it would be nice to offer us the chance to at least order one earlier than the general population (same goes for new hardware that may coincide with WWDC).
• Need more conference hotel space.
• Get more tech “superstars” here to speak and promote the hell out of it beforehand.
• Expand on the session descriptions so I can better plan my time.
• Would like to see more sessions on things like optimizing PHP, Apache, MySQL on OS X Server–preferably by the people who wrote them.
• Bring back the piles of junk food and Mt. Dew/Jolt from the San Jose days.
• Ozomatli was fun, but I’d never heard of them before. With the power Apple has in the music world, it would nice to be “wowed” next year–bring us Bono or Peter Gabriel or any of the other big names that like Apple.
• In a similar vein–why didn’t we get to see the new Pixar movie early? Get some more of the big entertainment houses using Apple gear to speak.

Overall, I was happy by the end of the week (after a not-so-great start). The keynote may have been a candidate for “Worst-Keynote-Ever,” but mostly it just lacked the wow factor so common in Steve’s best. Leopard will be great, but the timing of the new release for education is just plain awful. And I tend to agree with those who are still looking for a real iPhone SDK (although we should be able to do some cool things until iPhone 2).

Nice last day in San Francisco today. Most of my sessions today were focused on the issues I have with the new school in Los Angeles. The quality of sessions today restored my confidence in WWDC–up until today, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to come back next year. Now, I’ll have to re-think that decision.

We walked over to a new restaurant I’ve wanted to eat at for two years, Zuni Cafe at 1658 Market Street. They were crowded, but we lucked out yet again and got a nice table near the bar and right next to the window.

Zuni reminded me of both Barbette and Vincent in Minneapolis, with a little bit of St. Paul’s Heartland thrown in. They locally source most of their ingredients and the quality was really high. I ordered a fancy hamburger with gruyre cheese and super skinny fries, while Jake had a huge pork chop. Luckily, our orders came just before smoke started billowing out of the manhole cover down the street and they lost power and hot water to the kitchen. Pricey, but very, very good.

My last session is just finishing up and WWDC07 will be done. Our red-eye flight on Sun Country doesn’t leave until 12:40am Pacific time, so we are planning to eat dinner near Moscone, catch 28 Weeks Later at Metreon, then head out to the airport. Arrive home at 6am, drive to Somerby to cover the Nationwide event, then up to Grand Marais Saturday night. Must. Sleep. Soon.

Tonight was the “Campus” Beer Bash at WWDC–now moved from the Apple Campus to Yerba Buena Gardens atop Moscone Center. I wasn’t sure I’d like not being in Cupertino, but I sure didn’t miss the bus ride down and back. Overall, I think it was a good move.

We snuck in the back way and didn’t have to wait in line for food. They had tables set up by regions of the world, including Japan, China, Italy and Mexico. Lots of drink servers, a few ice cream carts and several desert tables equaled (or maybe exceeded) the catering options of beer bashes of old.

The musical entertainment turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The past few years have been major let-downs, especially considering the clout Apple now has in the music business. This year’s act, Ozomatli, was featured in one of the iPod ads. I’m glad we stayed for their set, as they were energetic, talented and fun. As they apparently do at many shows, they ended their set by parading through the audience playing, singing and interacting with the crowd.

Earlier in the day, we had lunch at House of Nanking in Chinatown. We ate there last year and it was well worth the mile walk up Kearney Street to this award-winning restaurant. We lucked out yet again–no wait and we got a great table by the window. Jake and I both had sesame chicken and enjoyed seeing the owner being his usual crabby self.

WWDC 2007 (also know as SausageFest) wraps up tomorrow.

Today was the first day of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in downtown San Francisco. After three days of non-stop Tapemark Charity Pro-Am action, my co-worker Jake and I jumped on a plane at 9:30pm yesterday night and arrived here at 3am Minnesota time.

We are staying at a new hotel this year–the Orchard on Bush Street (about two blocks north of Union Square). The San Francisco Marriott was full, so we found this option on tripadvisor.com. The price was decent and so far I’ve been impressed with the room. Bit of a walk, but it’s not bad.

I woke up this morning at 7:30am and got in the keynote line. We were able to get in the big room and sat towards the back. Overall impressions? Not much new and no free iPhones. The “top secret” features of Leopard don’t seem that great, but maybe they will grow on me. I desperately wanted a new Finder and so far, I think it still falls short of the preciseness and time-savings features of the old OS 9 Finder. Absolutely hate the transparent top menu bar…

The rest of the conference is confidential, so I can’t speak to specifics of what I’m hearing. That’s usually when all the good stuff happens, though.

Tonight we have tickets to see the Giants play Toronto at the wonder stadium by the bay.

Our TV for the past 12 years, a 42-inch Sony rear-projection CRT model, finally gave up the ghost. Best Buy had some good deals over the President’s Day weekend, so it was time for me to finish researching HD and decide. It also helped that we received a nice tax refund and a 24 month interest-free financing offer.

After many hours of reading pages at the AVS Forum site, I decided on a 50-inch Sony Grand Wega SXRD rear-projection 1080p unit (KDS-50A2000). The owner’s thread for this model at that site is more than 300 pages! That is a great reference site, but it can be a little overwhelming.

My goals were to find something that had the following traits:

• future-proof (1080p, HDMI)
• reasonable price
• work well with my existing equipment
• allow me to upgrade components later

This model wasn’t the $6,000 unit I’ve been lusting after, but I think it’s a nice compromise. Due to the snowstorm last weekend, Best Buy had to delay the delivery by a few days. It came on Tuesday this week and I’ve spent the past few days tweaking, moving components around, buying new cables at Target (twice) and visiting the Comcast store to pick up an HD cable box.

I now have a progressive scan DVD player connected via component cables (that claims to output a “545p” signal), the Comcast HD box via component and our old EyeHome unit connected via composite cables. Standard-definition DVDs look pretty good (they aren’t being upscaled), standard-def channels are OK and HD channels look spectacular.

I wish there was more HD programming, but I guess that’s coming. This site provides a nice guide to local sports programming in HD, which is what I’m most interested in. There are also a number of HD On Demand options from Comcast, including Versus hockey highlights and a limited selection of free HD movies.

Now all I need is to have Playstation 3 prices come down and I’ll be all set…

The photo section of 7 Minute Miles embeds an open source photo management application called Gallery 2. It’s worked well for me, but it’s pretty complex and somewhat hard to customize. There are a lot of hidden features and some that don’t work so well. It also supports custom themes, which I’ve done on this site.

This weekend, my sister and my wife both asked if there is a way to view a slideshow. I had experimented with that in the past and didn’t really like it. I just turned the latest slideshow version on and it’s not bad. The full-screen option is clunky, but the regular option is OK. Here are the steps to use it:

• Go to the album you want to view
• Use the album actions drop-down box to select “View Slideshow”
• Change the max size to 640×640
• Change the delay seconds (if desired)
• Click the [-] box to hide options
• Enjoy the show!

I also enabled simple RSS feeds for albums, so if you use a newsreader, you can subscribe to an album to find out when new photos are added. My favorite reader for Mac OS X is still NetNewsWire Lite, now offered by NewsGator.

Two final photo tips: when navigating single photos, you can click on the right side of the photo to go to the next one and the left side for the previous one. Lastly, if you are on page 2 of a multi-page album, you can change the page number in the URL and hit return to jump right to that new page.

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally found the time to research my validation errors and have resolved them all. So now I’m proud to add the W3C logo to the sidebar:

It’s a nerd thing, but web standards are a good thing. Happy to finally join the club…

Now that the freshness of the iPhone announcement has settled down, I’ve decided that it’s not really what I want. The more that comes out about it, the less I like it. No third party apps because they don’t want a rogue app to take down Cingular’s west coast network? Are you kidding? And the more I read about the differences between the various wireless data networks, the less comfortable I am with the choice of EDGE. But perhaps the thing that makes me dread it most is the total cost of ownership–a high upfront cost and what appears will be an expensive voice/data package that will last 24 months. It still looks beautiful and fun to use, but I’m not sure the value is there.

What would I pay $500 for? A wide-screen video “iPod Pro” with all of the features of the iPhone, minus the networking. Give it a 120GB hard drive and I’m all over it. Music, movies, TV shows, iCal, Address Book, iPhoto all synced via a dock and iTunes is exactly what I’ve wanted for two years now. At first I thought I’d also want the wi-fi, but everywhere I’d use that, I’d rather have my PowerBook. I barely want to carry a cell phone, let alone something like a Treo or Blackberry for email and web browsing. I may be old fashioned, but nothing holds a stick to a real keyboard and a 17-inch screen for those types of apps for me. Maybe the iPhone changes this, maybe not.

Since he returned to Apple, Steve Jobs has been a hard person to bet against. I still remember all of the naysayers when the original iPod was announced and a lot of those criticisms either didn’t hold or Apple changed up the product in future revisions. I’m sure the same will happen with the iPhone and I have to believe that most of the features mentioned above will also find their way to the iPod sooner or later.

Another MacWorld in San Francisco that I didn’t attend, but until WWDC moves somewhere else, I’m OK with that. After watching the rumor sites post the play-by-play today and reading some of the media feedback, my initial thought was that this must be one boring MacWorld show floor. With only two iPhone prototypes on display in the Apple booth (under glass no less) and only two other hardware announcements from Apple (the Apple TV and a new Airport Express base station), there really wouldn’t be much new to see. Microsoft pre-announced Office 2008 for the second half of the year, but I’m not sure if they are showing anything at the show. Still, there are lots of things to talk about.

The iPhone is just about everything I was hoping Apple would do with a phone. The size looks good, the screen is a little bigger than the PSP (which I loved when I owned one), battery life seems OK and the feature set is spectacular. It really doesn’t seem right to call it the iPhone–it’s really an iPod Pro with phone functions added. My only real disappointment was the relatively small storage sizes. 4GB and 8GB are OK (and much larger than what the PSP offers with it’s memory card storage), but it’s still ten times smaller than the current largest iPod. I wouldn’t be able to transfer my full libraries (music, video and photos), but I can’t really do that with my current iPods either.

The pricing seems OK to me–the original Treos were in this range. I’m not excited about it being locked in to one carrier and requiring a 2 year contract. It would have been nicer to have an unlocked device sold at Apple Stores that could be used with any carrier, but from what I’ve read, some of the features required changes to the network infrastructure. Too bad Apple couldn’t create or purchase their own network somehow (what is the current market value of the weaker carriers?). Then again, I always hoped Apple would use some of that extra cash to buy Adobe.

My biggest question is how open the device will be to third party developers. They say it’s OS X, but will all of the same development tools work? How is the file system structured? Will there be new APIs to access the new phone-only interfaces? Time will tell. I’d also like to have iPhone versions of Terminal and ARD, a sports score widget and a mobile version of the “real” iChat. I’m assuming there will also be some sort of news feed reader, a calculator and some unique games available by the time it actually launches this summer.

A few other unanswered questions:

• Is there the equivalent of RAM versus hard drive storage?
• What sort of processor does it use?
• How well will the screen last under constant finger contact?
• How will email and calendar synching work in the Windows world?
• What’s up with using Yahoo! mail? Isn’t the .Mac framework up to the task?

Even with all of the uncertainty, you could probably put me down today for at least a couple units for work and family (if they were allowed by the FCC to accept orders).

My review of Apple TV is short and sweet: what’s the point? When we bought an HD projector for the office, we bought a Mac mini that does all of this and much, much more. When combined with Elgato’s EyeTV, I have everything I need (albeit at a higher price). If I was able to buy a new HD TV right now for my living room, I’d be buying another Mac mini, not an Apple TV. Maybe I just don’t get it, but it seems that this is a solution in search of a problem.

Lost in the hype was the introduction of a new Airport Express base station. The specs and pricing of this unit are still higher than the commodity wireless gear you find at any CompUSA, but I’ve always liked the easy setup and nice Mac-based admin utility that comes with the Airport line. Three Ethernet ports is a nice improvement, as is the ability to share a USB hard drive. The speed and range improvements are as yet unproven, but I’ll take their word for it. My only disappointment here is having only one USB port–having to add a USB hub just to share both a hard drive and a printer is lame.

Not a bad keynote by any stretch, but it does make you wonder when the rest of the 2007 news will arrive. There are lots of things that need to be done (the “secrets” of Leopard, Mac Pro upgrades, etc.), so it should be a fun year to watch Apple Inc. execute their plans.

UPDATE: From the pictures at apple.com, it already has a calculator widget. Also, some interesting commentary from Chuq Von Rospach, a former Apple employee (and hockey fan).

UPDATE 2: Henry Norr writes at Macintouch that the system is basically closed to Mac developers. In the Macintouch keynote summary, however, there is the quote: “developers who want to do applications [for the iPhone] are welcome to contact Apple developer relations.”

We’ve been using a SonicWall SOHO3 hardware firewall at HSRA for several years to filter Internet content and comply with federal law regarding student access. A few weeks ago, it started to go bad and needed to be replaced. I didn’t like some of the support policies of SonicWall, so I asked around and was referred to company called Astaro and their ASG120 product.

The process started off on the wrong foot. There were no brick-and-mortar or online vendors, but I found a local company that was listed as a reseller: CPS Tech Solutions in Brooklyn Park. I spoke with Ben Mallonee at CPS and decided to order the 120 model with one year of content filtering and one year of gold support. They don’t carry stock on hand, so the unit would be shipped from the vendor directly to me. This was on Friday and the unit was to arrive on Monday via FedEx. It didn’t, and the shipping saga lasted well into the next week with CPS, Astaro and FedEx reps all calling to apologize for the delay.

When I did finally receive the unit, there were no activation codes. Ben emailed a code, but that only unlocked some of the features I ordered. After much searching, the sales person at Astaro was able to email me the other two codes and I was in business–sort of. The Astaro has more features than the SonicWall, but is also more difficult to configure. My first attempt (while school was in session) didn’t go well, so I decided to switch back to my temporary NAT interface until I could try it after hours. It wasn’t until the following weekend that I had it running well enough to put it in production.

The Astaro allows me to access the web admin interface from either inside the school or via the external public interface. I decided to run some updaters from home and the first one went fine. It restarted OK, so I ran the next one. This one didn’t restart OK and the unit was frozen. This happened on Sunday night and I really didn’t feel like driving in again for a third time that weekend, so I waited until Monday morning to power cycle the unit. That fixed it and I ran the rest of the updates while standing next to the unit in the server room.

There were still a few remaining issues:

• VPN from the native Mac OS X client is broken (known issue)
• VPN using third-party VPN Tracker application sort of works, but not all the services I need
• Port forwarding acted really strangely, so I turned it off. This is probably just a configuration issue on my part. I’ve since decided port forwarding is probably a bad idea anyway.
• Content filtering based on time period would not work unless all times were covered by a rule.

So it appears to be a great upgrade, now that most of the kinks have been ironed out. It is much more powerful than the SonicWall and gives me a lot of new information I can use to manage the connection. It sends me informative emails as events happen and a daily executive report as well. The students aren’t very happy about the improved control, but that’s why we have it…DK

Our new Mac Pro arrived this week. It’s part of our office video editing workstation (pictured above):

• Dual 23-inch Cinema HD Displays
• Sony HDV-FX1 High-Definition Camcorder
• Final Cut Studio
• Harman/Kardon Soundsticks

The specs on the machine are incredible:

• Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5100 Series Processors
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 ECC Fully-Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) Memory
• Four 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200-rpm, 8MB Cache Hard Drives (2TB Total Storage)
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM
• Dual 16x SuperDrive with Double-Layer Support (DVD+R DL/DVD-RW/CD-RW)

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a new machine that seemed significantly faster than what I was using, but this box truly screams…DK

This week I had a troubling issue at work I’ve never seen in all my years of working with technology. Making matters even more frustrating, it just cleared up by itself today with no action on my part.

HSRA has a number of security cameras set up to record digitally to two servers. Those servers record motion-sensitive movies and take a still shot of each camera every 30 seconds. The application uses a standard ftp file transfer to move those still images to a web server. On Tuesday night, I noticed that the cameras showed students in the building, but upon closer inspection, saw that the time stamp on the photos was from earlier that morning.

I fired up VPN Tracker to connect to the school’s network. Both security camera servers were up and running, so I used Apple Remote Desktop to take over the screen of each one. I noticed that all the cameras were recording video, but the ftp file transfers were stuck on “logging in.” I checked the web server and ftp appeared to be running fine with nothing unusual in the logs. Thinking it was maybe a password issue, I changed the password and tried the ftp transfer again. Nothing.

Next, I tried to connect to the web server using AFP. The login window appeared right away and the file window popped up with no delay at all. For kicks, I decided to restart all three servers. Still no change, so I decided I would wait until the morning to power cycle the Sonicwall device we use for firewall/NAT/filtering, which has cleared up wonky network issues in the past (even though it really shouldn’t be a cause for internal LAN service items).

When I arrived at school, I went to the server room and immediately restarted the Sonicwall. I then restarted the security servers and looked at the ftp status window. Still stuck at login. I opened a terminal window and tried to do a manual ftp connection to the web server. After about 30 seconds, the attempt timed out and failed. I tried Transmit (a GUI-based ftp client) on my laptop to attempt an ftp connection to the web server and it also failed, but got a little bit further in the login process. I tried it several times and was able to make a successful connection about once out of every five tries.

Some additional experiments yielded interesting results:

• SSH also seemed to be affected and would always time out
• FTP and SSH to servers outside the LAN would connect right away
• Firewall settings on all boxes were either permissive for ftp or off entirely
• Other active protocols (AFP, ARD, web, mail) did not seem affected
• FTP and SSH between any other internal clients I tried all timed out

This really had me stumped. After power cycling the Sonicwall and the servers again, I remembered that our gigabit switches had caused weird things before and decided to power cycle them too. All that caused was a few additional problems with printers, file server logins and internet access that were easily fixed by client restarts.

I decided to really study the Sonicwall via the admin interface and the log settings. Everything seemed to be functioning normally. I cruised through their support forums and ended up writing my own post there. I received a reply from the moderator that said local services on the subnet should not be impacted by the Sonicwall, just as I had earlier suspected.

Final step that day was to ping my network guru friend Chuck Goolsbee of Digital Forest. He said the same thing as the Sonicwall moderator and that I should try to isolate the issue before replacing network components (I have a spare Cisco 1712 router and considered swapping that with the Sonicwall). Dejected and tired, I left for the day.

When I arrived the next morning, things were still the same. I started reading about paid support options with Sonicwall, the feature-set of the Cisco unit, alternate filtering and firewall options like Dan’s Guardian and IPcop and anything else I could do to either fix this or get a working replacement. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the ftp status windows on the security servers started flashing activity! Without me touching anything, ftp just started working (and has continued to do so since then).

The network gnomes have left the building, at least for now…DK

Today Apple announced revisions to the iMac line of consumer desktop computers. Processor upgrades are always nice, but the big news was the new top model, the 24-inch iMac. To me, this seems to be a great value at $1999 ($1899 education pricing). That was the price of a 23-inch flat panel monitor by itself not that long ago.

While the standard config is great out of the box for almost any user (2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 1GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive, 8X SuperDrive, 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 7300 graphics card and Firewire 800), the options to max out the machine only add another $1200 or so (education pricing). That would upgrade the processor to a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, increase RAM to 3GB, up the hard drive to 500GB and switch to a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT graphics card. Not sure why they list 3GB instead of 4GB as the max RAM–there are two slots and the 3GB is listed as 1x2GB, 1x1GB.

We have several of the pre-Intel iMacs at the school and have been very happy with this form factor. My wife purchased a 17-inch 1.8GHz iMac G5 last year that we are getting ready to sell (she ordered a black MacBook portable for her return to grad school this fall). It’s been a great unit: 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive, combo drive and Airport/Bluetooth wireless. Looks like eBay says it should sell for $650 or so. Anyone interested before I list it? Drop me a line if you’d like to know more…DK

• Record attendance created crowding and bad lines with rude handlers–need to manage this better
• Minimize session conflicts within the same track
• Add a web development track (RoR, PHP, MySQL, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• Add a design and pro apps track (Photoshop, Final Cut, Logic, etc.)
• More sessions in IT track (advanced email services, database optimization, network monitoring, etc.)
• Liked the marketing session–more options on PR, co-marketing, developer profiles, etc.
• Better discounts at company store–same as employee offers?
• Offers on new hardware annoucements–give attendees the chance to buy one new machine at cost
• Announce campus bash entertainment ahead of time and have buses run later
• Better snacks during the day (like we used to have in San Jose)
• Food continues to be bad, but this year we just experienced some of the great places in town–either get some of those places to cater or just drop food altogether (keep snacks and beverages though)
• Bring back O’Reilly and Movie Night
• Heard rumors of venue change–not sure where would be better
• Don’t print and distribute schedule insert cards until sessions are announced
• Make the name appear on BOTH sides of badges to make security happy
• Bring back door prizes (like the 50 free PowerBooks)
• Since my flights always leave late, would like to see Friday afternoon sessions return
• Let all attendees have access to the ADC seed (so Leopard preview can be updated for non-Selects)
• Add all presenter and Apple contact information to the WWDC site; create opt-in attendee directory

WWDC keeps attracting more people, but the trend has been to offer less each year. I hope it doesn’t slide too much–it’s still my favorite tech event of the year…DK

Today was the last day of WWDC 2006 and I’m currently at SFO waiting for my flight home. Security was no problem and we have another two hours to wait before our flight leaves. I bought the $10 day pass for internet access to pass the time and just filled out the online feedback survey for the conference (lots of feedback for them this year–more on that later).

We attended all three morning sessions, then walked over to Town Hall for lunch. I had Faith’s warm Smithfield ham and cheese toast with poached egg sandwich, which was really tasty, but small. After lunch, we walked over to the Embarcadero and re-traced my running route up to Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghirardelli Square. I took a ton of pictures and will upload them to the photo section when I get home.

After a chocolate ice cream cone at Ghirardelli’s, we waited about an hour to take a cable car back to the other side of town. We stopped at Macy’s Marketplace to pick up some Boudin sourdough bread loaves, then walked down to Mel’s Drive-In for dinner. Picked up the bags at the Marriott, then hit the road in a crazy cab ride to the airport (why is it that cab drivers get to drive as fast and reckless as they want and never seem to get pulled over?). We had a pretty great week: perfect weather, wonderful food and lots of learning opportunities. It’s going to be a busy few weeks at work with all of these new ideas…DK

The week is flying by quickly. Yesterday’s schedule was jam-packed with things to do. Dinner at Roy’s was great and we went to see Clerks II afterwards at the Metreon. Today, we had breakfast at the Marriott, attended the morning sessions, then walked over to Tommy’s Joynt for lunch. I had pastrami on sourdough and soaked in the unique atmosphere of the place. Now I’m finishing up the afternoon sessions before boarding the bus to the campus bash in Cupertino…DK

Didn’t know much about this until today: iTunes U

It’s only open to U.S. and Canadian non-profit universities right now, but I can see all sorts of ways this could be used at the high school level by an organization like HSRA. I’m going to hound the product manager again to see if we could be a test site for the K-12 segment. Here are examples from UC Berkeley, Duke and Stanford…DK

We arrived at about 7:15am to get our credentials and get in line for the keynote, which was much better organized this year. Everyone was seated early and the Steve Show started right on time. After reading today’s story in the Wall Street Journal about the timing of Steve’s options, I was curious if he would spend as much time on the financial performance of the company as he usually does at WWDC. Nope–only a quick mention of retail store numbers and overall Mac unit and market share growth. Come to think of it, no mention of iPods at all today, either.

There are lots of places to read the blow-by-blow of the keynote (here and here, for example), so I’ll just note my observations. People will think the new Mac Pro is another expensive Mac, but when you do side-by-side comparisons with PC makers (which is easier now, thanks to Intel), these machines are great values. The top of the line machine at education prices: just under $15K. But check out what that buys you: 16GB of high-speed ECC RAM, two dual core Xeon 5100 processors running at 3GHz, 2TB of internal storage, a state of the art graphics card and dual 30-inch flat panel displays. More mundane entry level models start at $2299–really decent for the type of workstation we are dealing with here.

The new Xserves are really nice: on-board graphics (finally!), more internal storage, huge increase in speed over current model, redundant power supplies and lights off management (the ability to start up a machine remotely that is powered down). Agressive pricing and more than a million configuration options make me re-think my server upgrade plans for the next 12 months. When these ship in October, the Intel transition will be complete.

I was initially a little disappointed with the Leopard stuff that was shown. Things like Time Machine are very useful ideas, but I thought the look and presentation are a little hokey and unprofessional. The Mail demos were a mixed bag–I hate the idea of notes and to-do lists in the application (this is confusing, as iCal currently handles this) and I really hated the idea of HTML formatted templates. I changed my mind on the latter, though, after I realized that 1) they do look nice, 2) lots of people want to do this and 3) there aren’t a lot of good tools available to create email like that.

The previews of Spaces, Core Animation and Dashboard Web Clip were good demos, but don’t seem to be worth a likely $129 upgrade. The good news is that Steve said a number of Leopard features are still Top Secret, and we were introduced to a number of new things during the afternoon sessions that are really, really exciting. Unfortunately, all of those sessions are under non-disclosure, so you’ll just have to wait until next Spring.

The weather here has been the typically great San Francisco summer weather: high around 65, fog in the morning and sun in the afternoon. The breeze at night through the hotel window is refreshing. The food so far has been mixed–the lunch at the conference was awful, but they made up for it with good snacks at the afternoon break. We ate dinner at Lefty O���Doul���s, which had a great atmosphere and good, cheap food. Tomorrow we plan to hit Chinatown and later, Lori’s Diner. I ran five miles in the hotel workout room tonight, so I can splurge a little on the eating…DK