Darkavich's Daily Ramblings Ramblings of a Mad Sys-Admin

OK, so some of you may have seen I started using twitter tools. The sidebar feature works really well, but the nightly blog postings don’t seem to capture all the data from teh previous day. I decided to disable this feature and just use the side bar.

I grabbed a few new apps today. The one that stands out and is going to be a huge success.

The app is called Shazam. The application works this way. You hear a song, you say, “hey… I know that song, but can’t remember the name.” So what is one to do… Whip out the iPhone with Shazam, push the tag button and hold the phone up to the music and wait. A few seconds later it will identify the song. But WAIT that’s not all. It gives you links to take you to the iTunes music store so you can buy it and download it.

Now this is really going to sell some phones!

I installed the following apps this week.

• Yelp (business locator)
• Remote (control itunes on a remote computer)
• French, German, Spanish dictionaries with speech
• Jott (check out jott.com, killer voice to text note taker)
• Baseball (stats for all the baseball teams sorted by year)
• EasyTask (a task manager I am trying out)
• AIM (AOL Instant messenger chat client)
• 105 Classics (Internet radio station streaming client)
• ShoppingList (create shopping lists, for fee app)
• LiveSportz (still have not been able to get it working)
• People (white pages search client)
• Light (Turn your iPhone into a flashlight)
• Facebook (simple Facebook client)
• Whrrl (find friends in your area)
• Twitteriffic (Twitter client)
• Save Benjis (Internet search tool for products by name or bar codes)

I think I have exhausted all the free apps 😉

Ok, so I resisted for a while….. I am now on twitter. Why am I on it? Well, I upgraded the new iPhone software to 2.0 and noticed a twitter application, so I figure if people really care about what I am doing on a semi-real time basis, who am I to disappoint them 😉
You can find me under my standard username Darkavich.

So I experienced a number of items this week that I found interesting.

1) While sitting at Soup Plantation I flipped on my iPhone and a list of WiFii networks appeared. The following SSID was found: NCC-1701D. Unfortunately it was protected, but I would have liked to see what was on the network.

2) The new cell phone law in California is a joke. $20 fine? Most people are just ignoring it. Over the last week I have seen at least 3 dozen cars still talking on the handsets while driving as they drift all over the road. So basically, the law is not a deterrent. I say fine them $250 for the 1st offense and take away their license for the 2nd. And who the heck thinks SMS texting is safer than holding a phone to your ear?

3) I purchased a new Cavalry raid array. This is a dual 500gb raid 1 or 0 array with eSata. I lost the single external drive on my Tivo last month. Fortunately I didn’t loose a lot of shows, but I wanted my disk space back so I could get my 95 hours of HD recording back. The drive array arrived in the mail yesterday and I attached it to my tivo. It told me I now had 165 hours of HD. That can’t be right!!!!

So I realized even though the sticker on the side said mirroring, it was set up in striping mode. It has a little dial that is supposed to change the raid level but the numbers are out of alignment. Fortunately I was able to plug it into my mac running VMware and install the management software. I had to dial through and check the management software to see what position it was in. Once I found the Raid 1 position, I had it re-sync the volume. This took about 5 hours. Once the sync finished, I re-attached it to the Tivo and now I have my protected volume. Now I need to figure out how to protect the internal drive from failure.

4) I also bought a USB raid 1 chassis. This I plugged into the apple Airport. Now I can backup my mac using Time Machine.

5) I tried to upgrade my mac to leopard. what a disaster. The DVD I was using had a corrupt file, so it left my mac in a very unusable state. Fortunately I had a backup and could do a fresh install from a new DVD and then migrate my data. What should have been a 2 hour install took a day and a half. Lesson learned, do NOT skip the verification of the dvd when installing the OS.

6) The new iPhone software was released today at 4pm. (8 hours late). I upgrade my phone and am loving the application feature. There are some really good third party apps. I also am SOOOOOOO happy the calendar now supports groups. I can now identify which calendar the appointment is associated with.

7) I have a new up-converting DVD player. It will do 1080p, but for some reason it will not sync at 1080p though my receiver. I have to keep it at 1080i. I will have to call Pioneer at some point. I wonder if my extended warranty is still valid.

Anyway, it’s been a very busy tech week at Pond Haven.