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

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.