Dustin’s Blog

I’m watching the election results on msnbc.com and they’re actually putting the full 16:9 aspect ratio to proper use. Most of the time they shoot things in widescreen but virtually all shots are framed to fit the older 4:3 format. Along with election results msnbc is showing poll closing data on either side of the screen. While the data isn’t extremely useful it is nice to see the space is getting put to use.

If you’ve spent any time at all on this site then you know that VIM is my preferred text editor. Even though I’ve been using it for years I still learn something new about the editor from time to time. Here is something that I just figured out a couple of weeks ago. It turns out VIM provides a simple way to repeat exactly what you last did. By simply pressing the period key, VIM will repeat whatever command -or- text you last entered.

For example, lets say you’re editing an HTML file that has a list of links. Before each link you want to add a generic image. You could do this a few ways; type in the text each time, use a search and replace or copy and paste. Using period is just one more method to add to your toolbox. To use this trick, enter INSERT mode by pressing i. Enter in the text you want to enter before each link (or whatever it is you need to repeat a few times) and when you’re done press ESC. Move to the next line and press the period key. Whatever you typed previously will be inserted to the right of the cursor. You can do this as often as you like but as soon as you delete a letter, line, insert different text or whatever the “period key” shortcut will begin to do that action instead.

Another way to use this is if you’re deleting lines of text over and over. Say you want to delete 10 rows of text at a time until you’ve deleted what ever it is you need to delete. You could press d 10 down arrow and then each time you press the period key you’ll repeat the same action.

After a week with the iPod touch here is what I have learned. Keep in mind I have a first gen model with the 2.1 upgrade. This stuff is probably documented somewhere but I generraly skip the dogs.

While using mail, if you swipe left on a message in the message list you are given the option to delete it.

While in any app you can double tap the home button to get a volume control and ability to pause/play or skip tracks.

The keyboard will auto correct a lot of things yet it can’t spell check.

I think that is it for now. If there is something you know about that I didn’t list here leave iron the comments area.

Although I’ve had the hardware and software for a little while the setup had never been put to too much of test until tonight. Tonight was the start of the new season of Heroes but it also overlapped with an episode of Sarah Conner Chronicles. I am quite pleased to report that EyeTV handled the whole process very well. It managed to record both shows and deal the overlapping shows (it is configured to record 2 minutes before and after the show) by swapping which tuner it was recording from.

Virtualization. Despite being around for years it has suddenly become a hot topic today and it seems that everyone is trying to get a piece of the action. Sun is no different.

Virtualization has been around since the mainframe days but virtualization as we usually see today started with VMware (to the best of my knowledge). VMware has had available for years a few different products that allowed you to dedicate and entire machine to hosting virtual machines or simply run other operating systems on your desktop PC. Today’s computers are more powerful than ever before and even the cheapest of computers today typically has some power to spare. With the abundance of computers with excess power continuing to grow, it is no wonder virtualization has gotten to popular.

About a year ago VMware noticed that virtualization was getting more popular and decided that then was the time to really hook people. They released a free virtualization product (and since then some more) allowing people to run virtual machines on their computer for free.

Soon other virtualization techniques came to market, many of them also free. VirtualBox is one of them and is a relatively new entry into the virtualization market but is already showing some great promise. Unlike some other virtualization products, VirtualBox is cross platform covering the usual suspects like Windows, Linux and Mac. Of course, being from Sun it also runs on Sun’s Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems.

VirtualBox, while young, shows great promise and it is available for free (for personal using and testing). It brings together some of the things I love about VMware. Simple to manage, cross platform and easy migration from one host machine to another. Some of what VirtualBox adds is native iSCSI initiator support, Remote Desktop Protocol support for running virtual machines and the ability to run on Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris. It even supports the seemless mode seen in VMware’s Fusion and Parallels.

If you’re looking for a free way to get into virtualization then give VirtualBox a shot. I think you’ll be impressed.

In all my playing with OpenSolaris and iSCSI I decided to give iSCSI using Linux and OS X another shot. Turns out the GlobalSAN iSCSI client for OS X, available for free from Studio Network Solutions, works much better than it did just a couple of months ago. Lock ups, so far, seem to be a thing of the past.

To make use of it I decided to pull the drive out of my external case and put it in my Linux system. I then exported it via the iSCSI Enterprise Target software (available here) already installed on the system. After installing the latest GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator software (available here)on my mini I was able to connect to the iSCSI Lun on my Linux machine.

So far I’m finding that I’m able to get nearly full speed out of the disk and am able to copy large files to the drive at around 44MB/s.

Update: One caveat I have found is it takes a lot longer for the Mac to enter sleep if it is connected to the iSCSI share.

One of the first things I really hoped ZFS could do when I heard about it (and its ability to share using iSCSI) was the ability to resize things at will. Resizing file systems is something that has been possible for a while but it has never been this easy, at least in my mind. With the ability to resize storage volumes you can put a ton of disks into a single system and then share out exactly what is needed to your systems and then resize if you need more later on. Today I got a chance to test ZFS’s ability to resize volumes as well as how Windows handles the task.

Although the ability to resize file systems has been around for a while it has never been as easy as it is today. Linux has been able to resize file systems for some time and the latest versions of Windows provides the ability right in Disk Management. I run a number of Windows systems and the ability to resize NTFS iSCSI volumes is what I’m primarily interested in.

Click read more to learn how this is done. This isn’t a full how-to but more of an overview of how to make it all happen.

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A really good friend of mine likes call me an OS whore from time to time. It’s all in fun but he is right, I am. I can’t make up my mind which OS I like the best. Windows, Linux, Windows, Mac? Which is it? To be honest, I don’t know. I change my mind depending on my current needs, current capabilities of the operating systems of the day and I really just like to tinker. I also like to use whatever works based on what I need to get done.

Although my current favorite OS is definitely OS X I’m not exactly afraid to try out other operating systems. OpenSolaris is an OS I’ve played with before simply because I wanted to get to know ZFS, an incredible file system that should not be over looked. I have written about ZFS before but haven’t really worked with it much since then.

My interest in OpenSolaris and ZFS has been renewed as of late because of the need for a good amount of storage in the most cost effective manner possible. In the coming weeks I’ll be posting quite bit as I learn how to use OpenSolaris. Many posts will simply be reference information for myself and others might be more educational. Stay tuned.

People are sometimes amazed at how quickly I get some things done. Truth be told I’m lazy and hate having to do more than I need to. Sometimes it is great to have just enough programming background to be dangerous.

I’ve posted about for loops before and they are probably one of my most liked bash items. Here is another reason why.

I’m working on a web site and I need to edit a bunch of files, they all need the same edits done and there is no reason I should get interrupted from working on them all in series. Enter the for loop! With the following command I can edit each file in VIM and when I close the file the next file will open for me.

for I in `ls *.php`
do
vim $I
done


Nice and simple.

Not to toot my own horn, but it is rare that an article comes across with tips that I truly find useful. Up on the IBM website are some UNIX tips that I think are great. Some of them are truly new to me while most of them are things I continuously forget about.

UNIX tips: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits