Corporate Lawers at Creative and T-Mobile are like Dumb and Dumber

 Credit to Ryan Block for the image.

Just when I thought corporations and their lawyers couldn’t get any dumber, I’m proven wrong.  There’s been two incidents in the last few days that show just how out of touch most corporations care.  First, Creative sent a Cease and Desist to an independent developer for writing working Vista drivers for some of their products.  (Warning: This post is high on internet dramaboy-ism.)

Then our friends at T-Mobile send a Cease and Desist to Engadget for using the color magenta.  Apparently the color magenta is trademarked property of Deutsche Telekom.  Who knew?  Anyway, Engadget and the Internets are fighting back.  Engadget is “Painting the Town Magenta”  and others are joining in solidarity.  I’m joining in on the fun because I can’t resist a meaningless internet revolt.  Besides, someone has to stand up against the over-excited corporate lawyers.

So for today, I’m painting the blog magenta.  And I’d like to say to Creative and Deutsche Telekom in the words of Ben Stern: “Don’t be stupid you morons.”

InfoWorld: The MacBook Air is the Starbucks laptop

I just read the InfoWorld review of the Macbook Air.  It’s a good review if you’re considering a MacBook Air.  Here’s the bottom line.  The MacBook Air is a great laptop for showing off at Starbucks and basic computing.  Otherwise, buy something more substantial.  Here’s the two quotes that should tell you if you should consider buying a MacBook Air.

“It’s unfair to classify the MacBook Air as a laptop. It’s not, unless you’re Mini Me. It’s an ultraportable, along the lines of the Sony Vaio TZ, though it has a larger screen than the Vaio. It’s also faster and cheaper.”

“I figured the best place to work with the Air would be a coffee shop, which is essentially its native environment.”

 Want one?  Apple Store

A year on WordPress

The blog has now been up a year.  It has been a fun, interesting, and educational experience.  I’m proud of what I have been to contribute over the last year.  I’m looking forward to another exciting year.  Thanks for being a part of it!!!  Harry

Where do the candidates stand on technology? Most of them won’t tell you.

It’s extremely important for IT guys and gals to understand where the candidates stand on technology issues.  I am going to link to each of their technology pages here.  Overall, I am disappointed with the lack of focus on technology.  The Democrats are much better than the Republicans.  All of the Democrats except Kucinich make a mention of technology or “innovation.”  Barack Obama is the only candidate to feature technology as an issue on his website.  Mitt Romney is the only Republican to have information about technology on his website, but it’s not an issues page.  I linked to it anyway.  Have a look:

Democrats

• Barack Obama: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology (Includes speech at Google)
• John Edwards: http://www.johnedwards.com/issues/innovation  (A few sparse comments) 
• Hillary Clinton: http://www.hillaryclinton.com/feature/innovation (Only a couple paragraphs)
• Dennis Kucinich: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.

Republicans

• Mitt Romney: http://www.mittromney.com/News/In-The-News/TechCrunch (Interview with TechCrunch) 
• Rudolph Giuliani: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.  Did somebody say 9/11?
• Mike Huckabee: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.
• Duncan Hunter: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.
• John McCain: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.
• Ron Paul: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.
• Fred Thompson: I can’t find anything obvious or through search.

Based on whether the candidates feature technology, Obama and Romney are the leaders for their party.  Obama is the only candidate to feature technology as an issue, so he is the leader.  If you can find information that should be added, let me know.

I upgraded from ESX 3.0.2 to ESX 3.5 and it was a pain.

I upgraded our ESX servers over the Christmas break.  I had to install a new ESX server, so I took the opportunity to upgrade the rest of our environment.  It was a pain in the ass.  There were a few bugs that caused me problems.  Details below:

I decided to wipe the ESX servers and install 3.5 fresh from the CD.  I did the upgrade from 2.5.2 to 3.0.1 this way and it worked well.  I upgraded the Virtual Center server from 2.0 to 2.5.

VMotion caused me a lot of problems.  I was not able to ping the VMotion port after the upgrade.  This happened to varying degrees on all of the servers.  The last server was the worst.  It was driving me crazy.  I had enabled VMotion and named it properly.  It just would not work.  Eventuall I called support.  They ran vmkping to the IP address of the VMotion port on the server while I pinged the IP address from my workstation.  This seemed to magically enable the VMotion port.  Running just vmkping or just ping didn’t work.  The combination of the two worked for some bizarre reason.

“No Active Primaries” message when I tried to add a server to the Cluster.  This one perplexed me for a while.  It comes from the way clustering works.  Clustering doesn’t work perfectly in mixed 3.0/3.5 environments.  The first server added to a cluster is considered the “primary.”  When I initially created the cluster, ESX1 (server name) was the first server in the cluster.  When I did the upgrade, I took ESX 1 out of the cluster.  It didn’t pass the role of “primary” onto one of the other servers.  So when I tried to add ESX1 back into the cluster, it gave me the “No Active Primaries” error.  I fixed this by removing all of the servers from the cluster and adding them back in.  This thread pointed me towards a solution:  http://communities.vmware.com/message/701671;jsessionid=AA7526EEA3E0EE5EAFAFDB7A761815ED

“Unable to read partition information from this disk”: I got an error like this when I was installing ESX on a machine attached to a SAN with raw drive mappings.  I disconnected the server from the SAN and started the installation over just to be safe.  A good piece of advice… Always disconnect the server from the SAN when you are reinstalling ESX.  There is a decent possibility that you’ll accidentally overright your LUN’s.

 I had some other general problems, but nothing too serious.  Let me know if you have any questions or issues that I can help with.

Happy New Year!!!

2007 was a fun year in technology.  I can’t wait for 2008!

Must read blog for the 2008 election season

If you’ve read my About Me page, you know that one of my interests is politics.  I’ve found a blog that’s is the best of both worlds for a politics loving geek like me.  It’s called techPresident.  Here’s what they say about themselves:

TechPresident was started by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry as a new group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and vice versa, how content generated by voters is affecting the campaign.

The 2008 election will be the first where the Internet will play a central role, not only in terms of how the campaigns use technology, but also in how voter-generated content affects its course. TechPresident.com plans to track all these changes in real-time, covering everything from campaign websites, online advertising and email lists to the postings on YouTube and who’s got the fastest growing group of friends on MySpace.

Our team of bloggers is made of veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, ranging across the political spectrum. Their expertise covers everything from website design to the latest in mobile tools and social networking sites. And we’ll look closely not just at what the campaigns are or are not doing, but what voters and activists are doing online to independently affect the election.

There is also a long list of contributors.  Have fun and Remember to Vote!

Advice to Apple Store shoppers: Don’t take pictures of yourself.

I went shopping yesterday at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island.  I stopped at the Apple Store to check prices and do a couple minutes worth of surfing.  I noticed a shared drive on the desktop, so I decided to look around.  One of the funny things I found was pictures people had taken themselves (probably using iChat).  The first picture I saw was by far the funniest.  Enjoy:

Trend Micro sends an alarmist email that looks more like a hoax than a warning

Check this email out.  It came from our Trend Micro support rep.  They are acting like the reported Electronic Jihad virus might be catastrophic, even though they don’t know if it will work.  Their last sentence is the most bizarre because of its alarmist overtone and misspelling.  Let paranoia reign!

Dear PSP Customer,

Real-world terrorists are once again threatening to take their jihad (Holy War) to cyberspace. The notorious Al-Qaeda has threatened to launch a Web attack on Western anti-Muslim Web sites on the 11th of November, according to DEBKAfile, an online military intelligence magazine. An attack like this could be unleashed via the Electronic Jihad Version 2.0 software, which is not actually new and has been around for about three years now. The said software is capable of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. It is also configurable and flexible, which makes it easy for cyber-terrorists to be more effective in the said attacks. Detailed Malware description: http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/grayware/ve_graywareDetails.asp?GNAME=HKTL%5FDAHIJ%2EA&VSect=Td
Researchers across the industry have raised quizzical eyebrows as similar threats have turned out to be a dud, like the cyber attack that never happ ened against U.S. banks and financial institutions in December 2006. However, such software was recently discovered by Trend Micro researchers. The hacking tool, which is detected as HKTL_DAHIJ.A, arrives as an installer package and may be downloaded from a remote site. This hacking tool connects to a URL for verification purposes. After successfully establishing a connection, it downloads a list from several URLs. The said list, which contains another set of URLs, is used by the affected system to launch Denial-of-Service (DOS) attacks for the so-called e-jihad.

Law enforcers and other experts say that threats such as these should not cause much of a fuss as Web threats happen on a regular basis. Eli Alshech, Director of the Jihad and Terrorism Studies Project at the Middle East Media Research Institute, considers these e-jihadists as more of a nuisance than a threat. But with these terrorists, we will never know what they will do next. Is 11/11 going to be another date to remember?

The next big Web attack may unfold on the 11th of Novemb

Thank you,
Trend Micro Premium Support

Microsoft is stalling in the SaaS area

I received an InfoWorld article called “Microsoft exec: Desktop application software is not dead.”  The short story is that Microsoft claims that Google and others cannot provide the same level of service and quality through web based apps as Microsoft can through installed apps.  While Microsoft is technically correct in the short term, this will change.  Let me predict what Microsoft is going to do right now.  Microsoft will develop a fully functioning version of Office.  Then they will market it as a brilliant idea that they thought of and perfected.  Microsoft will claim that they did it first and they did it best, when in reality neither will likely be true.  Until then, expect Microsoft to deride Google, IBM, Sun, and others.  What’s new?