Microsoft Courier, the device I’m looking for

I’ve been looking at the details of the Microsoft Courier and it looks like the digital pad device that I’ve been looking for. Up until now the Dell Mini5 has probably been the closest to my dream device, what it represents it a larger android phone. The device I’ve been looking for is something that is lighter than my laptop ( in weight and interface ) and has the ability to do my contact management (email, address book) and note taking, task management and calendaring. Ideally this all sinks back to a centrally available storage. My Droid has handled most of this but I still turn to my Franklin planner for note taking and jotting down ideas at this point. A blank slate and a pencil is something that can’t be replicated by a touch interface or a keyboard in quickness and ease of use. Previously I used my Franklin for most of my task and calendar management, my Droid and the Touchdown application specifically have replaced most that functionality. Equally important is that I almost always have it in my pocket or hand and I don’t feel out of place, that it’s disrespectful or distracting typing key reminders in it during a meeting.

The Courier in the marketing material ( which of course always makes a device look amazing ) seems to fit into the niche that I’m looking for. A device the could be used to blank slate jot down notes, write arrows, box things in and scratch things out. I’m very impressed by the idea of a pen interface into a tablet type device. It could replace my Franklin as the place I jot down things I want to keep, as well as the note pads I keep on my desk which are just places to jot random crap down to remember 5 minutes to 2 days later. It’s a device that would fill a gap that  I have, and I imagine I’m not the only person that is looking for a device that would fill that space. I would call it’s primary focus a digital journal, which is exactly what I want.

Tags: Microsoft Courier, notepad, tablet

Date stamps in cron

Dropping date stamps into output files of cron:

0 1 * * * /usr/bin/nightlythingthatruns.sh > nightlythingthatruns-`date +\%m\%d\%y`.log

Determining Devices in Solaris

To determine PCI devices at the Solaris 10 command line:

prtconf -pv

In my case I was looking for my nic so “model: ‘Ethernet controller’” is what I was looking for

pull the vendor-id and the device-id and you should be able to find what the hardware is at

http://pciids.sourceforge.net/

Virtual Box Disk Clone SLES10

So I wanted to create a copy of a Virtual Box SLES10 .vdi in Ubuntu, it’s not as easy as just copying the file.

On your host:

VBoxManage clonehd Original.vdi NewCopy.vdi

Create a new machine and point to this new image.

In the virtual machine:

When you boot it’s going to drop you to a prompt because the boot parameters are using the UUID of your old system and VBoxManage create a new UUID when you cloned the disk. So at the prompt:

mkdir /mnt

mount /dev/hda2 /mnt

/mnt/sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hda

Get the new UUID and replace the old one in the following two files

/mnt/bin/vi /mnt/etc/fstab

/mnt/bin/vi /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst

reboot

Android Apps

Apps I’m using on Android

• Barcode Scanner
• Better Terminal
• ConnectBot
• Dolphin Browser
• FTPServer
• FileDroid Pro
• Google Voice
• Open Home
• Pandora
• ShopSavvy
• Task Switcher
• TasKiller
• Twidroid
• Vincent!

Google ChromeOS – What’s up with that

There’s been a lot of speculation about Google ChromeOS and what it’s target is. Many originally thought it was set out to be the Windows killer and have taken that assumption back. The deliberate disabling of the use of hard disk drives in favor of SSD or flash drives makes this very clear it’s going to be a tough sell on the desktop for now.

The current thought is that it’s targeted at the netbook market. It’s my supposition that ChromeOS is really targeted at the tablet market. Talk is that Apple will be coming out with a tablet in 2010 and it’s going to be the break through device. It will only be a break through device if it can be more than an e-reader as the current incarnations of the Kindle and Nook are. I’ve found the Kindle to be a very cool device yet when using it I feel like I’m missing something, the something is the true two way interaction available on a mobile phone or computer. If Apple can make their tablet a light a device as the Kindle, a true two way device like a smart phone and enable the app store they have the pieces to bring a powerful new device to market. Missing any one of those three pieces and it ends up being another niche item, not that the Apple faithful niche is anything to scoff at.

This is where Google and ChromeOS step in. My read is that ChromeOS will be an excellent choice for a tablet device and it’s made to be an application platform from the get go. Google has hedged a safe bet in letting Apple break water with their device. Apple is good at marketing and has the mind share to make a new device type “cool”. Google can then allow hundreds of other device manufacturers to make use of ChromeOS to power multiple renditions of similar devices. These competitors will be leap frogging each others hardware faster then Apple can wait through their release cycle. It something we’re starting to see in the Android phone market and will only work quicker the next time around.

Could not read tty from store

xenconsole: Could not read tty from store: No such file or directory

I see this message a bit more frequently then I would like bopping around from server to server. Generally the problem is that xenconsoled is not running. The fix:

/usr/sbin/xenconsoled

ubuntu snmp spam

with the default settings in ubuntu server /var/log/daemon can fill up pretty quick with SNMP spam like this:

Oct 18 07:01:48 Build01 snmpd[2245]: Connection from UDP: [monitor01]:47674
Oct 18 07:01:48 Build01 last message repeated 19 times

every time a connection is made to snmp the default is to log a message and this is way to much in a normal environment. to turn this off

edit /etc/default/snmpd and change

SNMPDOPTS='-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid'

to

SNMPDOPTS='-LS5d -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid'

this sets the default log level above the point where you will get spammed and it will make your disks happy

MySQL AppArmor

So I was getting these messages

“mysqldump: Got error: 1: Can’t create/write to file ‘/db_backups/mysql/table.txt’ (Errcode: 13) when executing ‘SELECT INTO OUTFILE’”

What I’ve come to find is that on a default install of ubuntu APPARMOR will block mysql from writing to any directory other than a few key ones needed by the app.

Edit the /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld file and add the directories you need to write dumps to:

/db_backups/mysql** rwk,

Getting Found

One of the biggest problems being faced today by companies in the business of content is that of discovery.  It used to be that if you could weasel your way into a spot in the newspaper odds were that you would get a reasonable amount of people to look at your product. Ideally those people would tell their friends to check it out in the paper and eventually you have an old school social media explosion. In the last ten years this has really started to change. The internet has provided for an experience where you not only go get exactly what it is you are looking for,  but people have also been trained to look away from those things that look different or aren’t specifically what they want. In the old days a reader would pick up the paper and thumb through looking for the Dave Barry column, get a chuckle, and would probably read a few columns around it. These days a person pops open the web page reads the column and is off to do something somewhere else on the internet or doesn’t want to click that side link because who knows where it will take them. With the newspaper no longer being theubiquitous medium the built in mass marketing and cross promotion that came with it is simply gone.

The new battle is building brand digitally at the start and most content producing companies are still in the process of figuring this out. You have to let people know the “New Tide” is out there and simply putting it on the shelves isn’t going to make it a best seller. Socially engineered digital marketing has to be the first step because the keyholders’ no longer have a set of golden keys. Content producers need to go directly to the public, which in an ideal case, when the content appeals will create a demand for more of it (note the tv show life cycle). This build brand from the get go outlook is starting to show it’s head in the content world but it’s a slow process. Old habits, old ways and old comfort zones are hard to break out of. If you are comfortable though, someone is probably doing it better than you.