What did you get for Christmas?

I'm assuming by now that the food comas have all worn off, and people are getting back to normal life after Christmas...?

I didn't get much this year, it being somewhat slim, financially.  I picked up a Seagate 1TB SATA drive and a SATA docking station for the major items, and a few odds and ends. 

You might think that's virtually nothing, and from a certain perspective, it is.  But I'll be leveraging that 1TB drive.  My current system has an OS drive of 160GB (I built this box about 3.5 years ago!) and a 500GB RAID5 (3 x 250GB SATA) data drive.  I'm running short on space on both of those drives as you can imagine.  Not only do I need more space on my system, I need space for backups, preferably on a separate system!

Here's the plan, subject to modification as I get going:

• Install the 1TB drive to main system
• Clone the RAID5 data to the 1TB drive
• Break up the RAID5, removing one 250GB drive and reusing the others as a mirrored 250GB drive for redundant storage of important data
• Put the remaining 250GB drive into another box and load a server OS on it
• Use the server to backup some of the main PC's data, plus some from other PC's in the house

Currently, I've done this much.  I decided to play with Windows Home Server to see how it compares to more corporate versions of Windows server OS.  Surprisingly, it was simple in the extreme to install the OS, attach workstations and implement the backup scheme.  The hardest part was finding where to control what I wanted backed up, which resulted in a full server storage problem the first time it tried to do the backups.  Obviously I need more than a 250GB drive to handle all of my backups, but then some of that stuff really doesn't need a backup.

I 'm using the 30-day trial of Windows Home Server, so obviously I won't be leaving the setup this way.  There are major limitations to WHS that require me to choose something more robust.  No domain service, etc.  WHS is good for basic home service, like it says on the tin.  Backups are trivial to implement, and document and media sharing is also a snap.  The WHS console GUI is well laid out and easy to learn.  So if your parents need that kind of 'server', then WHS would be easy for you to install and support.  (You do IT support for your parents, don't you?)  However, I want to improve my Active Directory skills, so I'll need to choose a corporate Windows, most likely Windows 2008R2.  More on that when I get around to it!

So... What did you get for Christmas?  Leave a note in the Comments below!

Cameras

Photographers say the best camera is the one you have with you - and they're right!  Some people will try to tell you that you have to have the best camera and the most expensive lenses if you want to take good pictures.  Hogwash!  While those things will offer you more flexibility under which conditions you can capture good quality images, they are hardly required, and utterly useless if they get left at home.  Fancy DSLR?  Nice, but bulky, you're not likely to take it with you unless you plan on shooting.  Point & Shoot?  Less flexible, but convenient to slip into  pocket or purse, more likely to be with you when that special moment happens.  Camera phone?  Likely to be with you virtually all of the time.

The image above was shot on my Sony DSC-W1, a 5.1 megapixel point & shoot from circa 2003.  It was a higher-end camera at the time I bought it, and I researched for a few weeks before making my purchase.  I liked the large (at the time) 2.5" LCD viewscreen and the quality Carl Zeiss lens.  I also liked that it used AA-size batteries - important in a pinch when your batteries are dead and you want to shoot something.  This image has been tweaked for color and lighting, and has been resized, so it's hard to tell just how decent an image it really was.  It's sharp, relatively well-exposed and even. 

There have been times when I didn't have a camera with me.  What to do?  I did what many people now do - I took out my cell phone and used the built-in camera, a 1.3 megapixel job.  It's notably inferior to my old Sony, but it has the benefit of virtually always being where I am.  I may later regret not having a better camera with me, but at the time I just do the best I can to get a decent exposure, good framing, etc.  With fixed focus and no flash, it's rather limited.  But it can capture an image when nothing else is available.

So you can see that having the biggest and best isn't a necessity, but having something with you is.  And learn how to get the most out of any equipment you have, it will help you catch that moment of inspiration which would otherwise have been just a memory.

Social Media

I've recently become more involved with "social media".  And I don't mean just starting this blog.  I've also been working my Twitter skills, working my job search skills on LinkedIn, keeping up with the Joneses and everyone else on Facebook, and also alpha testing the new open source Diaspora.  Diaspora is currently invite-only, by the way.  I have a MySpace account, but it's been so long since I've been in there, I don't remember my login.

Pretty much half a billion people are on Facebook, so most likely you know what it is, how it works, and why you do or do not want to use it.  I happen to use it to keep in touch with family, friends and former classmates.  I have less than 200 "friends", all of whom I have met personally or known online for a very long time.  I don't take just every friend request that comes along.  I also don't play the endless, mindless games that seem to be all the rage now.  I've used Facebook for several years, since before it really got mainstream popular.

LinkedIn is newer, and more serious and professional in tone and nature.  No random chatty posts, there, it's all about careers - finding them, keeping them and documenting them.  I've been on LinkedIn for almost two years, most of which I've also been unemployed.  I'm pretty sure that central Minnesota hiring folks are not as tech savvy as their metro Twin Cities counterparts.

I've been on Twitter about two years as well, but not seriously until the last 5 or 6 months.  I first signed up while at my last job, to learn it for support purposes.  Someone was requesting help in using it for Community Ed networking and advertisement.  As tech support for the Community Ed building, I was the guy to try it out and teach someone how to use it.  Twitter is an odd duck.  It wants to be fun and friendly quick sound bite microblogging, like texting for the web, but a lot of what comes across is marketing of various products and services, including people who want to help you learn to use Twitter for marketing.  Another big Twitter thing is celebrities flogging their current projects.  It's a good place to keep track of your favorites, if you're into that.  Some celebrities are truly engaged with their fans, which is pleasant!  As with Facebook, I have a relatively limited following on Twitter.  I'm not one of those who follows anyone and everyone just to increase my follower count.  I prefer quality over quantity, and I have been known to unfollow those who prove to be low quality.  While other social networks are fine in the browser, I find that Twitter works better in a dedicated application.  I happen to use TweetDeck, but there are many out there.

Diaspora - what can I say about Diaspora?  It came about after a few too many of the Facebook privacy fiascoes of the past couple of years.  Diaspora aims to be a social network with sane privacy and user policies.  Users get much more direct and thorough control over what they share, and with whom.  Diaspora is in early alpha testing, so is by invitation only, and I can attest there are still a lot of bugs to work out and features to add.  Diapsora runs on a pod system, where you have an account on a pod which then connects with other pods to share data.  Anyone can set up their own pod if they wish, and join in the fun.  Right now, it feels like a cross between a stripped down Facebook, Google Wave and I don't know what else.  Keep an eye on this one if you're into social networking.  The open source nature means that Diaspora will be extensible and modifiable!

As for MySpace - does anyone still use that?

What other social networks are you using, and why would you recommend them?  Leave a message in the comments!

Holiday Gifts, Part Deux

A popular gift for techie folks is a new cell phone.  But which one?  As always, a lot of new models are released in time for holiday shopping...  So many choices!

Windows 7 phones are the new kid on the block, having just come out this fall.  Microsoft has been hyping these for a while as a competitor to the iPhone.  Having owned a Windows 5/6 Palm Treo (came with WM5, I hacked it to 6.1) I just can't see any Windows phone seriously competing with an iPhone.  Soon after I got the Treo (almost 3 years ago), I wished I had gotten the PalmOS version instead, even though PalmOS is also irrelevant in the current market.  The UI may be updated and somewhat similar, but the whole MS philosophy just doesn't work for mobiles, if anywhere.  Sales figures seem to indicate the whole mobile market feels the same way.

Okay, so, iPhone?  Hm.  Stylish, popular, very functional, perceived as fun.  And a retina display!  (That means the display is supposed to be so good, your retina wouldn't be able to notice if they made it any better.)  But still, an Apple product, and subject to the Whims of Steve.  A walled garden of available applications.  If you're adventurous, you can jailbreak, but why support a company and product that even makes that necessary?  Somewhat spendy, and oh, be sure to buy a case for it as you can't hold the 4G in your hand without killing cell signal?  Hmph.

Well, what about Droids?  Yeah.  Which one?  That's the question.  There are literally dozens of Android-based phones on the market with varying features and capabilities.  Not to mention, each carrier has their own version of Android.  Can we say 'Market fragmentation'?  Bigger screen?  Better screen?  Samsung's Galaxy seems to be well regarded for the big, high def screen.  And an app store!  But still somewhat of a walled garden... But Android is open source!  Sure, and it's nice if you like to support open source, but again, each vendor has their own, modified version.  We've seen the problems that can lead to in the varieties of Linux OS out there, and supporting apps for that.  And some of these are pretty spendy, too.  With  1GHz+ CPU and plenty of RAM, that's not surprising.

Aha!  Blackberry!  Can't go wrong...  Except now governments have been pressuring RIM to give them backdoors into the Blackberry ecosystem for surveillance purposes.  And RIM has been complying.  Does Blackberry have an app store?  And aren't they just for corporations?  I want a fun phone!

What's left?  Symbian-based phones seem to be a dying breed, though Nokia still sells shiploads of them.  What's that new thing, Meego?  Is anything available with that? 

Well, I could get a pre-paid simple cell phone, like Tracfone.  I don't need no stinkin' apps!  Or fun.  Or any amount of cool at all.  I just want to make a call now and then!

Maybe I'm going to settle for two cans and a string.  You all can decide for yourselves what you want!

Holiday Gifts?

If I had to recommend one thing to gift this holiday season, I would probably have to go with rechargeable batteries and a charger. 

Why?  Keeping all of those dead batteries out of the landfill!  I look around at all of the battery powered gadgets and toys in my house, and it's staggering how many AA and AAA batteries we go through.  Simply switching to Lithium Ion rechargeables will keep many dozens of batteries out of landfills each year from my house alone.  And the trend is to MORE batteries, not less. 

Another benefit is that new rechargeables frequently have a higher energy density than standard alkalines, letting you go longer between battery swaps.  For example, my old Sony P&S camera does much better on even NiCad rechargeables than on alkalines. 

Rechargeable batteries also save money.  A single set of rechargeable batteries will replace many sets of alkalines.  Rechargebles have a little higher initial outlay, but over their life will more than pay for themselves.

A source of  energy that is greener and more economical?  What's not to like?

Photo Break!

Steve Howe, guitarist of the band Yes.  I shot this using my Canon EOS 450D (Rebel XSi) on kit glass, the 75-300mm @300mm, f5.6, ISO 1600.  Steve was on tour in 2009 with Yes and Asia in a double billing, and I saw the show at Moondance Jam in Walker, MN.

All Work And No Play...

In memorial to all those who lost their lives on Dec. 7th, 1941 at Pearl Harbor... 

While I intend this blog to be mainly technical and professional in nature, you know the old saying...  So, from time to time I may discuss technologies I use in my leisure activities.  One of these leisure activities is Photography.

I mentioned my stint as a Navy Photographer back in the late 80's and early 90's.  But that isn't where I started with photography!  I have always been interested in cameras and pictures.  I used to ask my parents if I could shoot some pictures with their old Kodak Instamatic using 126 cartridge film back in the 70's and onward.  I took summer school classes (voluntarily!) in TV and Film Making.  I took photography classes in high school.  After high school, I attended college and took more photography classes.  But like many students, I ran out of money for school.  Military recruiters were calling, but I never paid any attention.  One evening that changed; I stopped by the Navy recruiter, and as part of the discussion I mentioned I was very interested in photography.  Well, they just happened to have this specialty...  I learned more photographic technique and skill while in the Navy.  It was all 35mm and some medium format, all film, both color and black & white.  Until 1992, that is.  Shortly before I got out, the lab I worked in got a prototype digital image system that digitized film or prints and stored the images.  It was a Unix-based rackmount system running a X11 GUI.  The contractors who installed it told me it cost about $250 thousand.  I got to play with it for a few months before I got out, my introduction to digital imaging.

The end of my enlistment was nearly the end of my photography career and hobby.  I had burned out on it, mostly because the Navy has very prescribed things it wants images of, and very prescribed ways of shooting.  Dull, boring!  It was several years before I wanted to pick up a camera again.  And by that time, digital cameras were beginning to make a go of it.  I waited a bit and eventually settled on a Sony DSC-W1 5 megapixel point & shoot model which had all of the features I felt like using and was simple enough the rest of my family could also use it.  Well, over a few years of using that, I found I was enjoying photography again, and kept running into the limitations of the Sony camera.  Being a P&S, it had limited zoom, fairly poor low-light performance, and it was slow.  I knew from experience I could handle a SLR camera, so I started looking at those, and eventually settled on a Canon 450D (known popularly in the US as the Rebel XSi) with a couple of kit lenses to get started.  NOW I had the tools I needed to really get back into photography...

You can see some of my photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgdillman/

Make it so...

Okay, so now you know a little about me, and where I come from.  One of the purposes of a blog, we're told, is to foster conversation and commentary.  What do you think I should do with this blog?  I could try to answer your tech questions, but Google might be quicker.  I can advise, based on my experience.  I've done that for numerous friends and family, as well as professionally.  If you have a purchase you're pondering, let me know what it is and as much detail as you can, and I'll give my recommendations and reasoning.  If you're pondering solutions to a particular problem, same goes.  I'll do my best to recommend the technology I would use to solve the problem.

Who's first?

History of Me, Part II

Last time I talked about early pre-history (okay, so I'm not quite that old...)  Photography wasn't going to lead me to riches, and all of the people supposedly in the know said computers were where it's at!  So...


While I was in the Navy, I bought my first computer, an Intel 80286-based clone with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive.  That computer quickly became my major hobby and time waster.  I upgraded a couple of times, ending up with an 80486 DX-33MHz EISA based system that was actually pretty cutting edge for a while.  (You'll note from this and later bits that I have a tendency to research and adopt certain technologies which I feel to be superior for various reasons, some of which don't prove to be the technologies that win out in the long term...)  I used it to run a Bulletin Board Service (BBS) where other computers could connect to mine via dial-up modem and chat, message or share files.  In a DOS-based system, this pretty much took over the whole computer, so I looked at alternatives for multitasking.  I tried DesqView, which was nice, but what really blew me away was IBM's OS/2 2.0 (and later 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0). 

I hear some groaning!  One of those Team OS/2 zealots!  Guilty as charged, but I still maintain that OS/2 was far and away the better system over Windows 3.1 and even as late as early Windows XP.  The object oriented interface was a thing of beauty!  OS/2 allowed me to run my BBS, and still use the computer for my personal needs at the same time.  Windows at the time was incapable of more than rudimentary task rotating.  The classic test was to be able to do something, *anything*, while at the same time formatting a floppy disk.  OS/2 did it easily.  Nothing else at the time would.  But I digress...  While doing all of that, I read a number of computing periodicals on a regular basis.  I got good at tweaking and upgrading my own computer, and helping other people with theirs. I moonlighted with a local computer shop for a while, building PC's and such.  I found that I enjoyed getting my hands on, and in, the hardware, much more than I ever enjoyed programming.  And I also enjoyed connecting computers to make them talk to each other.

When I got out of the Navy, photography jobs were leading me nowhere, so I ended up using my GI Bill and going back to school.  I attended St. Cloud Technical College working toward an A.A.S. degree in Microcomputer Support & Network Administration, which I was awarded in May of 1996.  While still a student, I interned with the MIS Department at the college.  I was involved in many of the  low-end support activities, such as virus cleanup (a quarterly major undertaking!) and classroom lab configuration.  One of the things I did to improve that was to use my knowledge of DOS batch files to automate the setup of PC's in the labs.  Things like that got the attention of the MIS Director, who offered me a job even before I had graduated.

That position would last 8 years and expand to cover most Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, all network printing, administration of the college e-mail servers, the college's first Linux-based server, and a whole bunch of infrastructure installation.  That was back before the low-voltage licensing requirements got put in place.  Eventually, I ended up leaving the College, but that's another story for another time.

History of Me, Part I

Okay, so I'm a professional IT guy, but obviously, I wasn't born that way.  For one, IT was a vastly different animal when I was born.  Computers filled rooms (each).  There was nothing Personal about them.  So how did I get involved with computers?


When computers first shrank to a size where they could be come personal, the mid-70's, I was still young, but they quickly caught my eye and my interest.  Some of them didn't even have monitors, just lights or printed output.  In 1978, my Jr. High got the first Apple II computers in the district.  They had all of 32K of RAM and a single 13-sector floppy drive.  I signed up for the first group to get to work with them, and we were one step behind the faculty all the way.  At times, I know we pushed them.  I also formed relationships with electronics stores that started to carry these new, more personal, computers, doing odd jobs like vacuuming the store in exchange for being allowed to use the floor model.  I learned some BASIC programming and read every computer magazine I could find.  Creative Computing was the king back then!

In high school, I continued to take classes dealing with computers.  More BASIC programming, some mark-sense card input, etc.  And in the counselors' office, there was a fancy typewriter with an acoustic modem next to it.  This was for timesharing on the MECC system, and I got hooked!  It was supposed to be educational, but I quickly found multi-user games and chat rooms and dived right in.  We're talking the early 80's, well before any public Internet.  That early foundation lead to later use of IRC chat and many multi-player games once the Internet became available, and eventually to my use of current social media outlets like Twitter and LinkedIn.

All of that early experience was primarily on Apple II-based systems.  I tried a number of alternatives like the TRS-80 system from Tandy and the Commodore Pet and C-64 systems, and in the mid-80's the Apple Macintosh.  I never cared for the Mac; I didn't see the usefulness of the GUI at the time.  After I graduated, I drifted out of computers for a while, not being able to afford one of my own at the time.  I did a stint in the Navy as a Photographer's Mate, but that's a story for another time.