It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, the real life has been keeping me busy but I try to get to the forums every day or two.
My new career has kept me hopping. The college is busy and turn over has lead to an open position that I’m going to try to fill. Unfortunately it was the position that performed similar duties, so the team’s current work load has increased.
I have a few large projects under my wing. I’m working hard to meet our budget restraints but keep service levels high.
We’re looking at new UPS installations in two campus buildings, one a small 6-10KVA and the other is for our core server room weighing in at 60-80KVA. We lack a generator and no budget to buy one so we’ll need to run on battery long enough to shutdown gracefully in the even of a power outage.
Ramp up our ESX cluster and virtualize as much as possible. Many of our HP servers are out of warranty and still run critical apps. I’ll be starting with some of the easier redundant servers and working toward more critical servers as we balance the load and ensure our core switch fabric can handle the increased iSCSI load the ESX and SAN environments will be placing on them.
In my spare time, I’m troubleshooting our TrendMicro AV solution along with Exchange email issues that creep up. Personally, I think Trend is bucket of chum with a pretty bow on it - but now isn’t the time to forklift in a new solution, it’s time to wring as much support out of them as our contact gives us… so far I’m less that impressed at their customer service. It’s frustrating when you want to give your clients the best service possible, but a vendor prevents you from meeting those goals.
On the home front, life has been equally busy. Sam crawled for the first time. He’s getting more mobile every day. Anna scored three ribbons in her last swim competition… I could see her smile from a block away when she brought them home.
Nap time is over for Sam… time to save and log off. Peace!
Are you ready to make history? Are you ready to set a World Record? Today is Download Day. To become part of the official Guinness World Record you must download Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, or roughly 24 hours from now.
Seriously… why are you still here reading this? Go Download Firefox now!
Tags: firefox, open source
A few hardcore geeks have solved the latest problem holding back their community - how to beat some of these insane Guitar Hero songs on expert or Dragon Force’s Through the Fire and Flames on any difficulty.
Well a few ideas are looking promising.
Kevin Herron developed Tom Hannu, a Guitar Hero bot and a YouTube user he uses to post videos of the bot slaying songs on expert with 100% accuracy. The songs are preprogrammed into three applications which then spews out the strums and notes out to a breadboard wired into a dissected Guitar Hero controller. Very cool and very accurate.
Demo Video:
Second bot:
Jeremy Blum, went with more of a hardware attack on this problem.
This slick bot that actually watches the live video using optical sensors to pickup incoming notes and then relaying the strums and notes to a dissected Guitar Hero controller. It’s not infallible, but pretty darn good for not knowing what the next note is going to be until it shows up on screen. Some of the effects in the game mess with the optical sensors - but a few tweaks and I think this will be almost perfect.
Here’s a sample:
Tags: guitar hero
A fantastic quiz I found on metalfloss.com. Are these ten items names of a canceled Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream or a music band that is probably only known on MySpace?
No cheating…
My Result: 3 out of 10… 