Things to come, maybe…

Haven’t forgotten this exists I just haven’t had the opportunity or motivation to write anything. So here is some of the things I’m playing with that might make it into a post. Or if you prefer “things that I am doing that might be interesting”.

The “cloud”. Holy shit clouds! From being told by a boss that he wants to build a better dropbox, to just using dropbox. Amazon Cloud Drive and S3 (yep I actually pay money for cloud storage now). Public, private, hybrid, oh my!

Macs, virtulization and you. How VMware would be my best friend if they would just make workstation for OS X. And well virtuilization is just awesome anyway. Macs are shiny! Have a couple virtual environments to build at work in the next few months. Every time I get to consolidate servers into a cluster made of a handful of servers I am a happy camper.

Games. Holy shit Steam likes my money. Bioshock is better the 2nd time I try to play it, so far at least. Buying games that I know I’ll never actually play (it is a sickness). On hiatus with WoW, I have more play time I just haven’t activated it yet. Don’t know if want to go at it again yet. PSN is back, I have probably already forgotten my password for it (probably the same with my battle.net one (stop making me change it every 3rd time I log in Blizzard)) downloaded the free games, and then got distracted by Saints Row 2 (play it!)

Google+ I have an account but haven’t gotten to mess with it too much yet. It doesn’t look like there is a Farmville or Angry Birds for it yet.

WoW 4.0

Recently I was given Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm.  And, well, shit.  I may break this up into other smaller posts or I will forget about it completely.

The new:
I started with a Worgen so I could see one of the new classes and new old world.  The starting area for them is heavily scripted and phased from the rest of the world.  I kind of spaced out on the fiction time line presented during all the events, but it was pretty good.  The changes in the world itself are interesting I actually stopped questing in the 20′s so I am sure I’ve missed something but no one reads quest logs anyway.  I have been looking around the zones when I go to farm professions and, yeah, shit has gone wrong.

Some of the changes I’ve been noticing may have come in WotLK but they are still new to me.  The easier leveling I feel is because of lowered XP requirements.  It is not taking me nearly as long as I feel it took me the first few times.  But I have been doing random dungeons almost exclusively.  Which is also new and different.  In BC there was the LFG tool, but it never really worked well.  They added battle group wide dungeon queuing and it works pretty well.  I am playing a tank so it is even better, near instant queues.  From what I gather DPS classes have longer waits so your mileage may vary.

The talent changes are one of the bigger game play changes I’ve noticed.  The trees have been paired down a lot and you are specialized in one tree until 31 points are in it.  You only get 41 points total now.  It seems like you are getting the skills at different times and at a slower pace.  I know they made it so you only have to buy 1 rank of the skill and it will just improve as you level so that could be a factor in it.  I just remember buying all the skills when you level and it is every other level or so now.  Talents are also not every level now.

In closing. 41 in a little over a week.  Goddammit!

10.7 Lion!

So I had ignored the last Apple press event hype on pretty much every press site that day.  I just now read the features of 10.7 Lion.  Oh man. Let’s have a quick run down of the “new, innovative features”.

App Store: Holy shit you can buy applications online?!  Ok this sounds so awful but I guess I can see the point.  Buy once install many times on different macs using your iTunes account.  Yay simplicity!  Neat, but shit how on earth did we get applications before this?  Too bad they can’t make the iDevices start syncing to your iTunes account when you turn it on, have to plug the fuckers in!

Launchpad: Yay lets look at all of the pretty icons at once!  To be fair on this one applications are kinda weird on the Mac anyway.  Blah blah like the iDevices, more like start menu type deal.  So instead of rooting around in the applications folder, or making 10000 dock shortcuts you can bring this up and have at it.

Full-screen apps: Holy shit again! I can run applications in full screen mode!?  Why has no one thought of this before?  Oh… wait.  Based on the Apple press images it looks like it gets rid of the “Apple unified menu bar” or whatever and lets the app have full-screen awesomeness.  But…  Is this really groundbreaking and revolutionary?

Mission Control:  Crazy expose.  I don’t know, this one I am not grasping as well. I only use the dashboard to look at the calendar for when I forget what day/day of the week it is. Never really use expose either.  So maybe this is the best feature so far?

Some of these seem like they are trying to fix problems that don’t exist (yet). Maybe not multitasking will be sweet on the woefully underpowered Air?  Maybe the Air needs to drop the keyboard, add a multi-touchscreen and make it into a tablet!

today equals awesome

Maybe if I start posting about more mundane things I will at least have a detailed record of the events leading up to my eventual psychotic break.  Also for potential lawls?

Annoyances: whooo today was awesome!

Air Conditioning being off at work because “the building is closed and no one should be there”.  Great thanks for not remembering that some people work on the weekends even when the building is “closed”.  And not being able to track down the guy that can turn the AC back on.  Seriously it was to hot to spend anytime in the office.

Having the closest elevator to my office, and where I needed to going being shut down.  Thus making me have to push carts loaded with equipment even further to get to the next elevator.  Also see first annoyance about AC.

Having to push carts loaded with equipment from outside across the giant building to the elevator closest to where I needed to go.  See also previous 2.  Yep building being closed means I can’t park near a close door.

Having to drive across Boston with a car loaded with equipment because the same guy that controls the AC also deals with the keys for the company trucks.  Not that driving an SUV would have made it better, it just wouldn’t have been in my car.

Swearing a lot due to having to make extra trips across the building to pick up items that were forgot.  Seriously who packs up equipment and leaves the surge protectors?  Whoops left the key in the lock box!

Not getting anything overly productive done because setting up 2 training rooms took far longer then it really should have.  Oh and the office I should have been able to get things done in was 90 degrees.

On the plus side sitting in the server room for an hour or so after all of that was great.  Yay for the one room that will always be climate controlled.

So in summary, hot office equals me unhappy.

Yeah it’s kind of like that

So I’ve neglected this blog again for awhile.

I’ve also realized that I am either not interesting and or crazy enough to do frequent posts.   However have been reading some much better bloggers, obsessively mostly due to boredom.

In other news, work work work work work work porn work work work work work.

Anyway, watching some arrested development and trying to think of more words for this.

Okay so new idea, I should come up with blog ideas BEFORE I start writing them.  So here you go, under 100 words because I am lazy.

Wii would like to play

We recently came to own a Wii.  Which lead me to check out the library of Wii games.  And by check out I mean hit up my GameFly account to see if I needed to queue anything.  How many would you guess?  Zero?  Yep!

I just did another glance at the “popular” Wii games listed and it is mostly Nintendo games, and a couple movie tie ins.  One third of them had Mario in them.  Anyway back to the point.  What are the good Wii games?  Obviously the answer is the Nintendo franchise first party games.   Woo Zelda and Mario.

Why buy or rent a Wii game if you own any other modern console as well?  It is not like the Wii version is going to be better.  I don’t see how adding controller waggling is going to improve something.   I know the Wii has sold like crack-laced pancakes but every time the game play reports come out the most played games are always Wii Sports.  The game that came with the system.  I know we have played more Wii Sports Resort then the 2 Mario games we have so far.  Why?  Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a pretty good game and all, and I will probably be playing more of it but Sports Resort keeps going back in.  And we don’t even play many of the games!  Table tennis and the three point challenge, maybe bowling when those get old.

Now that I’ve said that I do like first party Nintendo games, it just doesn’t have much else going for it.  especially if I can get a better version of a game on another console.  Heck I have the GameCube version of Twilight Princess because it was graphically better then the Wii (also we didn’t have a Wii at the time) still haven’t beat it (I should get to that someday).

I will probably buy the new Zelda when it comes out, and I will probably get sick of the Wiimote gesturing for it.  And I will probably not finish it.  But that is 1 game purchase.  My GameCube had a similar fate.  I can count the games I bought for it with 1 hand.  Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Super SmashBros Melee , Ikaruga and Twilight Princess.  I have the Zelda collection for it as well but that doesn’t count.  Compare that to the shelf full of PS2 games I own, or the CD book full of PS1 games.  Same story with all other Nintendo products after the SNES.  A few DS games, a few GBA games, Hell I have more Sega Saturn games then DS games.

The PS3 is where this trend breaks though.  I think this is mainly due to the cost of the games, and the amount of time i can play a game, oh and GameFly.

Also Netflix on the Wii is pretty awesome.  Now I can stream bad TV shows to my TV! Having to use the disk is kind of annoying but it gets the job done.  I have the PS3 disk but it also is needed every time, and I could just use my PC at that point.

This turned into a little more anti-Wii then I intended but decided to let it post anyway.

Back on the Android

As the title states I’ve gone back to the Android OS for a phone.  I still have the iPhone but I am using it just for work for now.  The transfer of everything went pretty smoothly.  The phone is the HTC Evo 4g.  Sadly no 4g up here that I’ve found.  Guess I don’t live in a major enough city.

Firstly I didn’t have to hack it to get some basic features that I need.  Multiple GMail accounts.  Woohoo.  Not sure when they added that but I’m fairly sure that the 1.5 on my Hero couldn’t do it.

The screen is very nice, and it is very responsive.  Not sure if that is all because of the better hardware or if the new OS has something to do with it as well.   Even the marketplace seems better then it was last time I really messed with an Android phone.  There is a free version of a 40 dollar iPhone app even.  Very nice.

The main problems I am having with it are probably Sprint issues. I think something may not be provisioned correctly.  My data kept turning off today, and I am unable to turn the hot spot on.  Tuesday I’ll try to get these things sorted out at work.

More to follow as I get back into the swing of things with it.

And lets see if twitterfeed will work, my guess is not.

Converting Manga to EBook

There are a few (many) guides out there like this, but this one will be special.  This is going to be a brain-dump of my current, honed over the course of a day, pieced from other guides work-flow to turn manga form the web into ebook format (BBeB).

Why would you want to do this?  I wanted to be able to cram manga onto my EReader.  Pretty simple reason.  I choose the Sony with this in mind, because it can handle the most file formats.  If you don’t have a Sony you can probably skip the Rasterfarian step and just crunch it with Adobe Acrobat Professional.  I believe you can crop the pages to reduce blank space and then run the reduce file-size command it has to drop it down to something reasonable.

The Sony format, which they don’t even use in their store anymore, with the optimization brings the file size down from 200 some MB to 40MB.

I also am not condoning stealing of books.  I did this with a series that I already own in paper form, it just happens to be 12 hours away in a storage unit.  Everything in here could be found with a couple Google searches anyway, that is how I got it.

I think I saw a program that can do all of the conversion steps at once, but for some reason I don’t have a saved firefox tab with it so I forgot the name, I think it started with an “O”

We’ll start off with what I am using to get this done.

MacBook Pro, with VMware Fusion for a Windows VM. (Fusion because I don’t have XP on a physical computer, and the VM on my desktop needs to be rebuilt before it’ll be useful to me again.  I’m pretty sure a real computer could speed this up)

Sony Reader PRS600

MangaDownloader (Downloads off of OneManga, PC and Mac Versions)

Manga2EBook (Converts zip files to pdf. May work on vista/7, there is a newer version on the site am not using it at this time)

Rasterfarian (works some magic to optimize for Sony Readers. I think this is the part that needs xp/2003 and .net 2.0)

Automator (Apple Scripting tool. Because I am picky about file names)

I’m sure anyone could probably figure it out from just that!

Step One:

Get Manga.  You can get it however you want.  I choose to download it from OneManga with MangaDownloader.  The end goal here is a folder with zip files.  MangaDownloader will create zip files per chapter for you.

Step Two:

Make sure all zip files are named and numbered correctly.  You don’t want to end with a pdf that has its chapters numbered wrong.  I used Automator to rename all files in a folder sequentially with how ever many digits I want.  3 works in most cases I’d assume.  X 001, X 002, X 003 and so on.

I also Break it down into smaller divisions before converting to pdf. Folders containing smaller chunks of the total series.  So my 136 chapter manga is 5 separate pdf files.

Step Three:

Run it through Manga2EBook.  You can set up all your jobs at once and just let it crunch on it for awhile.  This step eats a bunch of disk space.  I think one of the guides mentions it uses 2x the space of all the files alone.  This program extracts the zips and re-sizes them, then it creates a pdf with chapters based on the zip files.  If they aren’t named cleanly you’ll get chapter 1 followed by chapter 10.

You could be done at this point.  for ~30 chapters that is about 900 pages I was getting pdfss around 220MB.

Step Four:

Rasterfarian!  This step also takes some time.  Not going to give you a step by step on how to run the program.  What it does (to my understanding) is pulls all the images out of the pdf, crops the white space off (if you use the option) and rasters the images up to make them easier to read on an e-Ink display.  This step gets my 220MB pdf down to about 40MB.  In a VM with 1 CPU it was taking a long time, couple hours for 900ish pages.

All that said and done, if you have some device that has WiFi or 3G you could just go to the onemanga site and read them online and save a bunch of effort.

Phones!

blog post about phones!

So now I have used almost every flavor of smart phone on the market currently.

Windows Mobile: I’ve had a Windows Mobile phone for the longest.  It was the first smart phone I bought, and well it was terrible at first.  Sprint HTC Touch.   Slow, buggy and kind of a pain to use.  Then I started loading custom ROMs on it.  I think right around when Sprint released the update that enabled the GPS to work.  Since the custom ROMs it has been better to use.  But not great.  If the hardware is good and some custom ROMs are available I’d consider getting a new one.

Blackberry: I’ve had these for awhile too in a work situation.  They are great little devices.  The UI is kind of lacking, but for messaging they work like a charm.   I never used it for anything personal though, all work related.  The Blackberry data plan would keep me from getting one for myself.

Android: I had wanted a HTC Hero for awhile, but I can’t upgrade the phone on my plan without upgrading the plan.  Eventually I got one from work, because they wanted to test out how Android works and all that fun stuff.  I am waiting for the 2.1 update to happen before I make up my mind on it.  It isn’t slow and it works with just about everything.  It does excellent email, exchange and gmail contacts.   The exchange support isn’t that great, it can’t do look ups so all the contacts have to be in your personal contacts.  Annoying.  I’m hopping that gets fixed.

iPhone: This is the most recent work phone.  I’ve had it for a week now.  I’m torn on how I feel about the thing.  It does somethings really well and others I wish it could do better.  It is a great toy.  I have mine jailbroken so I can squeeze a little more functionality out of it.  I don’t like how it doesn’t have good gmail capabilities if you have it connected to exchange.   If i want my Gmail contacts I have to buy an app for it.  It does do exchange look ups over active sync which is great.   No Google Voice app, just a webapp which works well enough.  That is my main issue.  Also the email system on it feels clunky and terrible.  I think windows mobile handles multiple accounts better.   But the device itself is nice, everything usually feels responsive.

I think I had more of a reason for writing this before I started, but I can’t remember now.

Why NFS + ESXi?

So I’m thinking that breaking this up into smaller posts will increase the likelihood of them actually getting written.  And as a bonus, should help me remember what the hell I was thinking.  So these will probably be computer heavy posts.

Tonights episode is on NFS and why NFS.

NFS is used a lot more in the Linux/UNIX side of things.  So why am I mucking about with a Windows server box for it?  Active Directory.   Not that I will really be using it for this BUT it can!  You can setup user mappings for Linux accounts to Windows accounts.   Or you can just copy over a users/groups file from the Linux box and map local accounts to it.

I will probably be doing the later.   For simplicity sake.   The complete end result here would be NFS hosted on a server, shared over Gig Ethernet.  Attached to my VMware hosts.  And maybe mapped to PC’s or anything I want to have network storage.

Why would you want to do that instead of direct storage?  For those without enterprise VMware experience it sounds silly.  The way it works is the same storage is available to all of the hosts.  So the VM’s can be powered up on any of the hosts.  This allows for the load to be spread or for high availability.   This probably isn’t hugely needed for my small home/lab setup.  But, here is the real kicker, SATA/IDE drivers stuffed into the server are much much much cheaper then 15k SCSI disks.  Any other servers I get are going to have SCSI drives that have already have 2+ years of 24/7 wear and tear on them.  So I am not expecting a ton of reliability out of them.   So I am thinking 2 in a mirror setup and any extras as spares for the system drives on the host servers.

Why bother with ESXi?  Beacuse VM’s are awesome!  Also, how else am I going to get a dozen or so servers without blowing something up.   While I might be able to fake my way through all the AD MCSE tests I probably need to mess with ISA and shit for the rest.  Yay learning!  Also, VM’s are awesome.

So the short and dirty version.

Cheap and dirty network storage + free VMware enterprise grade hypervisor = good times.