Month: July 2010

Out of Shape

Since I’ve gotten married my weight has risen to a plateau of 275 pounds.  It’s amazing how you don’t notice these things until they creep up on you.
Lately my back has been hurting when I do anything but sit.  I’m also sure one of the reasons why I’m tired all the time is primarily due to the extra weight I’m carrying around.  I know I don’t have anyone to blame but myself, but the last several months have been exhausting due to our ever growing child.

I believe my “six pack protector” is mainly to blame for my back problems.  This time I’m not going to complain, I’m going to do something about it!  Last winter we bought a Nintendo Wii and Wii Active, a workout program.  While it’s not as effective as a real workout at a gym, I believe it will get me on the right track.

I started working out last night, and from that I can tell you for sure that I’m out of shape.  I tried the “easy 30 minute” routine, and my body gave out after half of the workout.  I’m still sore this morning.

I plan on giving my body a day of rest between workouts to help facilitate getting back to a healthy weight.  I hope this can be an inspiration to my wife as well.

For the last year or so, my oldest daughter has become somewhat of a couch potato (much like her father).  I want her and Amelia to know that when you do that there are consequences.  Had I kept a normal workout routine, or a more physical lifestyle I wouldn’t be in so much pain.

I hope this shows them that it pays to be active now instead of later.

Without Context

Over the weekend, I tested the capabilities of my newly operating LAN.  I read an article on lifehacker about a program designed to test the speed of your home network.  This article basically shouted “try me.”  And so I did.

While my LAN should theoretically be gigabit in speed, it has been almost impossible for me to find what exactly gigabit is.  The only absolute I can find is that the term gigabit means 1 billion bits.  The problem is finding the context of that.  What is truly considered a gigabit network?

This program creates a file on another computer on your network and calculates the data for you.  I sent 1 gigabyte files to my server and HTPC.  By sending this large of a file, it tests more than speed, but throughput of the network.  Every computer on my network has a gigabit network card except for my server, which has a 10/100 network card.  This is where I’m somewhat confused, as the results were somewhat similar for both machines.

Results:

Server

—Writing— —Reading—
Packet length : 1,048,576,000 1,048,576,000
Time to complete: 98.0580000 148.7040000
Bytes per second: 10,693,426 7,051,431
Bits per second : 85,547,408 56,411,448
————- ————-
Mbps: 81.5843658 53.7981491

HTPC

—Writing— —Reading—
Packet length : 1,048,576,000 1,048,576,000
Time to complete: 92.2800000 92.9600000
Bytes per second: 11,362,982 11,279,862
Bits per second : 90,903,856 90,238,896
————- ————-
Mbps: 86.6926727 86.0585175

What I’d really like to find out is if these numbers are “in line” with what a cat5e LAN with a gigabit router and gigabit switch should be.

While I’ve done a fair amount of “googling” this, I haven’t found any information that hits a home run.  Most of what I’ve found is out of date, or goes off on a tangent in a completely different direction.

If you happen upon this blog and are a network engineer, or knowledgeable on this subject, please let me know!

Broken Links and Duplicate Files

I recently noticed that I had somehow uploaded almost 900 duplicate photos on flickr somehow.  So I have been going through all of my pictures and deleting the duplicates.  In some cases, taking all of the metadata and information I have probably forgotten with them.

Because of this deletion, some of the links to pictures on this site have become broken.  It’s an unfortunate side effect.

While to some this may be a major disturbance, I use my pictures to illustrate things that may be hard to describe, or to emphasize certain aspects of my posts.

This reorganization will take some time, but the OCD is coming out of me with this one.  I just can’t help it.

Goodbye Yahoo!, Hello Google

I’ve been subscribing to Yahoo! Mail Plus since 2006, and while I enjoy it, I don’t enjoy the fact that I have to pay $19.95 a year to POP my mail to my various e-mail clients.  I knew I needed to make a switch somewhere, but didn’t know where to go.  I know there are many e-mail services out there such as hotmail, juno and gmail.

I’m kinda finicky about my e-mail provider, as I’m not a fan of web mail (I only use it when I have to).  That’s why I’ve been paying for Yahoo’s Plus service.  I used to be a big proponent of Juno.  If you don’t know the history of it, it’s quite fascinating.  It started as a e-mail only program.  You could write emails and send them, that’s it.  It would connect when you wanted to send or receive and then disconnect.  In the age of dial-up access, this was an efficient use of the phone line.  I used Juno from 1996 until about 2004, that’s when my inbox began to be clogged with so much spam that I spent more time cleaning the spam out than simply reading the e-mail that was intended for me.  That’s when I gave up my original internet handle, Cowboyman.
Starting August 1st, I will no longer be with yahoo.  I’ve had a gmail account for quite some time, I just haven’t used it much.  I will be full-on switching over to google for my email needs.  To keep the spam bots away, I won’t be divulging my entire email address for the world.  But for those of you that know my email address, it will be changing ever so slightly.

Instead of firstname_lastname@yahoo.com it will be firstname.lastname@gmail.com

If you’re my friend on facebook, you can see all of my info on my profile page as well.

Hacking Apple’s Time Machine

On my quest to learn everything I can about the “locked down” world I like to call OSX, I tried to setup Time Machine.  For those of you that don’t know, that’s Apple’s built-in backup utility.

My situation is somewhat unique, but I found many others on the interwebs trying to solve the same issue.  How to backup over wireless, and how to backup to a NTFS formatted drive or a network drive.  So I scoured the web and found many potential solutions, most of them contained incomplete information however.

The guide that finally pointed me in the right direction is located here.  It’s a surprisingly easy process and should be supported by Apple.  Why should you have to physically connect a drive to a laptop to back it up?  That just seems counterproductive to me.  Isn’t the whole point of having a laptop for mobility?

I’ll outline the steps below for those of you who are weary of clicking on links.

Step 1:

  • Open up Terminal (Applications, Utilities)
  • Enable unsupported volumes by entering the following code:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences
TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Step 2:

  • Mount your network drive (Finder, Go, Connect to Server)
  • On your Mac, open Disk Utility. Click “New Image.” Use the following settings:
  • Save As ComputerName_MACAddress (Must be Ethernet MAC Address and not Airport MAC Address)
  • Volume name can be whatever you want.  I named mine “Time Machine Backups”.
  • Change partition to “No Partition Map”
  • Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
  • Custom Volume size. Set the maximum you want to use on your remote location.  Don’t worry if you don’t have the room on your Mac.  I set mine to 200gb, the size of the hard drive on my Mac.  The empty file was a little over 300mb.
  • Save and then move this file to your network drive.

Open time machine and select the network drive you moved the sparsebundle file to.  Time Machine should now backup without any issues.

When you perform the first backup, have a wired connection and turn off your wireless.  My first backup was 50 gigs and took over 3 hours with a gigabit LAN.  I can only imagine how much longer it would take over a wireless connection.

This has been the first of what I’m sure will be many achievements in my learning and (in some cases) working around Apple’s master plan.

First Impressions

I finally stepped into the world of Apple.  While I thought it would be a new and exciting experience, I must say I’m somewhat disappointed.

I purchased a Black MacBook off eBay that came with many accessories.  The auction included a laptop bag, 500gb Lacie external hard drive, the original box and restore discs and an Apple keyboard and mouse.

It’s specs aren’t the best, but I don’t need them.  It has a 2.16 ghz Core 2 Duo Intel processor, 2gb of ram and a 200gb hard drive.  I plan on upgrading the ram to 4gb once I learn all I can on OSX and need to start working with VM Ware.

I must say that the design of and abilities of my MacBook amaze me, while some aspects of it downright disappoint me.

The first issue I had was with it’s “slot loading” disc drive.  This computer came with Tiger (10.4) so I purchased Snow Leopard (10.6.3), and my first task was upgrading to this OS.  While I’m still not sure if something is wrong with mine, or if this is a design flaw; my particular machine doesn’t particularly like to load or unload discs.  The only way I can get them to load is by pushing the disc in all the way using a foreign object.  Ejection is similar, as it only ejects about 1/16″ out of the machine.  I asked some of my co-workers about this and they confirmed that these drives are finicky at best.

My second issue is with the seemingly “closed” nature of the Mac OS.  While I’m basically a newbie, it doesn’t seem as friendly to someone who likes to customize everything like myself.  While there are options, they are limited.  Luckily I have vast experience with Linux, the second cousin twice removed to OSX; this makes my learning curve much more shallow than if I had no experience at all.

Let me restate for all the fan boys out there, these are just first impressions.  I haven’t had a chance to dig deep into this machine yet.  I’m diving head first into the mac world and only using a PC when required or when I can’t use it; such as at work or when I’m doing some work for my business.

I transferred my entire music library last night and eagerly anticipate setting up iTunes and seeing how similar the Mac version is compared to the Windows version.  I’m also going to start transferring all of my personal home videos using iMovie and iDVD.  Two programs I actually need to learn for my job at IU.

Since I have went on a technology “spending spree” of sorts, I am imposing on myself a probation from technology purchases.  The only caveat is if something fails and needs replaced.  I think I’ve put enough financial stress on my wife for a year or so in that department regarding this and my recent HTPC purchase.