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!

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.

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.

Lofty goals, in summary.

Whipping up a quick post here to do 2 things.

One.  Remind myself to do things.  And two test twitterfeed.

So the plan I’ve come up with is to build an NFS based storage box and connect it to ESXi server(s).  I would like to give it Gig Ethernet if possible so that the network can be faster then the drives.

Probably going to accomplish this goal with windows server with UNIX extensions.

Anyway so there will probably be a more lengthy post about that when I start getting frustrated with servers.

VMware and Pizza

I think for this entry I’ll start with the pizza and move on to the VMware, and anything else I come up with on the way.

So today (12/11) was the first time I’ve had Domino’s pizza since I moved up here.  I was not disappointed.   I have no become some sort of pizza-snob, at least not yet.   I had the Cali Chicken Bacon Ranch.  I would recommend it if you like those things and pizza.   I used to eat Domino’s on a semi-regular basis when I was in college.  It was close to my apartment and on the way from campus to home.  I could place an order from a parking lot and it would be done by the time I got there.  I believe I ate the Hawaiian and deep dish bacon cheeseburger pizzas the most and the buffalo kickers.   Now that I live up here i eat Bertucci’s and CPK more, and they are both really good.  But neither will deliver.

Also I feel it is worth mentioning that the Domino’s online ordering site is fairly great.  It gives that lovely progress bar of what your pizza is up to, and most importantly when it leaves the store for your house.   Handy.

This weekend at work I am going to configure and hopefully test the first server I’ve built that is publicly reachable.  Specifically it is a View Security Server for the VMware View environment I rebuilt about a month ago.  In short this will allow the desktops to be reachable without having to use a VPN connection.  It can be secured by RSA, but on its own it is a fairly awesome concept.  especially when someone points out there is an iPhone app for the connection.  Yes yes it isn’t anything that can’t be done with a VPN and RDP (at least until I upgrade it again and it uses PCoIP)

whiteboards and vm’s

For starters whiteboards are awesome.  Seriously.  Do I need to say anything else?

Companies that make then abandon video codecs are a pain.  not much to go on with this one.  Guess I’ll get to play with virtualdub in a VM at some point.

See first line, designing networks and systems is fun.  On the plus side of this I keep getting reassured that I should be the one getting promoted out of my current position first. I will refrain from being excited about this until it is a fact and not speculation.

I have figured out how I can get my home lab setup without having to have a physical firewall/router box.  it looked much less impressive in Visio then it did on my note pad.   The idea came to me after a network guy and I re-tooled the network for a test environment we have at work.  Short version, we are adding a separate firewall and adding a DMZ network to the existing setup.  Then removing its ties to the current firewall.

2003 MCSE material is boring.  I mean really who actually uses windows software RAID?  This and a million times this.  There is at least a whole chapter devoted to windows RAID.  And really, it makes me ill to think about people actually using it.  I mean dynamic disks are cool and all.  But who isn’t running their servers in a corporate environment without hardware RAID?

I think where I stopped for the day was when it was showing me how to use the defrag utility.  I would skip these chapters but the tests like to pull little obscure things from random places.

Windows 7, day 4

Title is almost a total lie except for the fact that it has only been on my home pc for 4 days.  been using it since the 7000 build on my work laptop.  so far so good, activated it tonight.  Slowly moving data over to the new drive.  Need to get back into vista to export my bookmarks and probably Thunderbird settings.  But laziness prevails and sometimes I just want to shoot things in Borderlands for awhile when I get home from work.

Trying to make a conscious effort to actually use capitalization on this blog, harder then it sounds.

Back to Borderlands.  Recently finished the first play through.  Story is mostly meh, but really that is not the point.  The point is killing shit and getting loots.  Lots and lots of loots.  I like how much the game ramps up on the 2nd time though.  Takes away that badass feeling you had towards the end of the 1st but it isn’t brutal.  It was probably a little worse due to it being multiplayer but still, good times all around.  I am still playing the game and I have PS3 games I would also like to play.  It is keeping me from finishing up fallout3 and from working on Demon’s souls.  Both also good games but addiction is a fickle beast.

 

Recently updated my phone to Windows Mobile 6.5 with a lovely custom ROM off of XDA.  It is faster then the last 6.5 ROM I tried.  So I am actually liking it a bit more and it may be able to hold me till a nicer Android phone comes out that I can actually use on my current plan.

Windows 7, Zero Hour.

Today marks the end of 2 weeks straight of working.  It is also Windows 7 install night.  I was going to put this off till after I slept but I couldn’t resist anymore.

Armed with a new drive and a Windows 7 Ultimate DVD the adventure begins.

Cleaned out the case with canned air and some paper towels to get the years worth of dust out of it and finally got the fan filters off to wash them.  Removed all of the hardware that will be added later, extra video card and harddrives.  I bought a new WD Black 1TB drive for the new system / data partitions.  Going to reuse the Seagate 500GB for storage and hopefully get my old WD PATA 250GB out of there.

Install went smoothly, doing a driver less system index just to see where it stands, mostly for giggles.  Giggles and beating mike.  5.9 on the initial test.  Harddrive is bringing it down, which i feel is unexpected.  The google says that without RAID or SSD getting over a 5.9 on the drive is pretty much not going to happen.

Time to start the downloading of a few programs and some updates and then maybe some gaming.   Got to kick the tires and see how it handles before i start cramming all my hardware back in it.

well time to play a few rounds of borderlands and then finish this up tomorrow.