Hello world!

Staking my claim, gonna see about perhaps migrating the blogger blog over here. WP is much nicer.

 

Ubuntu HH usability testing

The Content Consumer has a great post about testing Ubuntu‘s latest release. He Installed a standard desktop system and stuck his girlfriend in front of it. The results were interesting, and a testament to why programmers and engineers shouldn’t try to design UIs.

 

Macs – Just Say Yes?

Chris Green has a great post titled “Saying “No Macs” is no longer an option for *Church* IT“. Some definite food for thought that’s got me thinking about ProPresenter on iMacs vs. MediaShout on Dell 745s for our worship spaces.

 

It’s all about the pixels!

Yesterday I went down and picked up some some servers and workstations that were donated to us. This company runs a trading floor, and I started salivating when I walked in to the place. This is what a typical desk looks like:

Yep, that’s *sixteen* monitors per machine. A typical desk has just shy of 21 million pixels covering nearly 20 square feet to play in. There are no cube walls, because they’re all made of monitors.

The upside to this was that the workstations we were donated ran these pixel rigs in their former lives. And they all were stuffed full of PCI video cards (GeForce FX5500 for the curious). Naturally, I snagged a couple out of one of the stations to put in my WhatsUp monitoring station. I was disappointed to find that it only has 2 PCI slots.

I expanded on my own pixel rig, which I had recently reconfigured by mounting the 24″ screens to the top of my cube walls in order to reclaim some much-needed desk space. Here is the result:

Left to right, top to bottom:

• Acer X241W, 24″ 1920×1200, running WhatsUp Gold and keeping an eye on the facility map and my rack
• Acer X241W, 24″ 1920×1200, running WhatsUp Gold with 2 IE panes. The one on the left is monitoring network traffic and response, the one on the right is monitoring disk usage,.
• Dell E153FP, 15″ 1024×768, running Google Earth with Area 51 radar overlays from WeatherTap (probably gonna replace this with a 17″)
• Dell E177FPb, 17″ 1280×1024, running VirtualCenter console
• Dell E207WFPc, 20″ 1680×1050, running WhatsUp Gold, with the wireless bridge workspace. This is a dual-input monitor that is also hooked to my laptop
• Dell D820, 15.4″, 1920×1200, main workstation laptop

The brains of the monitoring station run on a Dell Optiplex GX620 with 3.2GHz P4, 3GB RAM, Radeon X600 primary (AGP) and two GeForce FX5500 secondaries (PCI). The WhatsUp backend runs on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 with 4GB RAM and dual 2GHz Xeon processors.

Total pixels: 10,773,152

I still have one additional monitor output I can use. If I put a 17″ on that one and replace the 15″, I’ll be cruising at 13,918,880 pixels.

I love my job

 

Starbucks goes retro (and a little naughty) !

Over here, on $* changing the logo on their cup to the pre-1987 logo as part of a promotion of their new house brew:

Here’s my question, Starbucks fans: Does the logo, be it be green, white and conservative, or brown, white and slightly pornographic, have anything to do with why you line up around the block for the Seattle company’s coffee — new blend or old?

Reminds me of the joke about the origins of the Canadian flag… They wanted to create a flag that represented both male and female Canadians… But that would be pornographic, so they covered it up with a maple leaf

 

CITRT now on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has just approved the l group. Here’s the invite. Or, just ping me with your e-mail address.

 

Thin Clients, revisited

Well, it seems the t5720 we’ve been buying from CDW has been discontinued as of April 1st, replaced with the t5730. Here’s the skinny on the suggested replacement SKU from CDW:

AMD Sempron 2100+ (1GHz)
1GB RAM
1GB Flash
Radeon X1250/dual-head support
Thinner (by about 3/4″)
Gigabit Ethernet.

Oh, and it’s almost 10% cheaper.

Hope to get my hands on one of these at some point and see how well it handles video.

 

Doh!

So, the rolling hotspot went dead just north of Wichita. All due to a dead battery.

It seems the Mogul, when running WiFi and EVDO, draws more power than my 12V charger can provide. I shoulda brought the 110V charger that came with the unit and plugged it into the power strip in the car. Once we got to the hotel, I borrowed one from Jason Lee, and battery levels increased when running WMWifiRouter on the AC adapter. I think the culprit is the cheap 12V adapter I got at Wal-Mart… it was $7, instead of the $40 that Sprint wanted. It was labeled as a BlackBerry charger, so my guess is there’s a current limiting circuit in there designed to keep the BB from incinerating itself, but is insufficient to power a Mogul running at full bore. I checked on JLee’s charger, and it sources 5V/1A, which is a pretty serious amount of juice.

 

Liveblogging from the road!

As promised, I’m rolling down I-35, chatting on IRC, and having a webcam chat over MSN with my dad (who uses a Linksys EVDO router for his access at home). Matt is hacking code from his laptop. Clif is paying attention to the road. Since we’re gonna be on interstate highway the whole way, we can pretty much count on a solid EVDO connection the whole way.

I’ve got a running ping going to 4.2.2.2 (a public DNS server). It’s interesting to watch the ping times start to get a little long, then we lose a packet, and then the ping times drop back down to the low 100s. I’m guessing those are tower handoffs. The fact that it works at all is nothing short of miraculous.

 

Recipe For a Road Trip

Half the Resurrection IT crew is getting into the LovingWaiterMobile and hitting the road tomorrow for MinistryTECH/Spring RoundTable. Being geeks, we need net on the go. Here’s how:

Take one Sprint Mogul (or equivalent):

Add the following:

Version 3.0 Rev.A/GPS/WiMo 6.1 firmware update
WMWiFiRouter software
Google Maps for Windows Mobile
An external power source (not strictly necessary, but highly recommended if you’re going to do this for more than about 20 minutes)

Stir carefully and set up the ad-hoc connection on your client devices, and connect.

The result:

Beats the pants off this for sheer elegance, while providing the same functionality:

So where does Google Maps come in? Simple – for GPS Navigation. Which it can do while dishing up wi-fi to our laptops. Now we just need something that will upload our position to a live map