Solo Technology

Interesting Updates

01.Sep.08  Leave a Comment

BeTwittered – I first mentioned BeTwittered in passing in my Social Bankruptcy post. It is one of many clients for Twitter, the popular micro-blog.

I haven’t used it for the past few months (Socialthing has become my favorite/easiest way to monitor all the social thingies) but I decided to have another peek at BeTwittered this weekend just to see what’s new.

Wow, it has come a long ways since I last checked! If you’re an iGoogle and Twitter user, you really should give the Google Gadget version a look. Nice stuff.

iGoogle – Speaking of iGoogle… want to experience the next version? Browse to the site and then paste this into your address bar:

javascript:_dlsetp('v2=1');

(source: CyberNet News)

Dropbox (beta) – Dropbox is my (current) favorite online storage application (last mention). One consistent complaint I’ve seen about it, however, revolves around the fixed location for your sync’d files. While it doesn’t bother me much, I know it drives some other folks batty.

There’s now a beta version (announced in this forum post) that will allow you to move your Dropbox location to anywhere on your PC or Mac. Linux version following closely behind.

Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 – I’ve been dabbling with Internet Explorer beta 2 this weekend. Generally I like it (the colored tab grouping is, imho, brilliant!). I’ve had to use compatibility mode for just a few sites (netvibes and Google Reader leap to mind) but most sites seem to be working just fine.

One major issue I have though: There is a huge pause when a link is opened in a new tab. The sort of delay that causes one to wonder, “did I really click the link or did I miss?”.

Minor issue? Be careful of the “Suggested Sites” feature. While it could be cool to use, you’re sending all your browsing history to a 3rd party (presumably Microsoft in this case) so make sure you’re comfortable with that…

Other than that, though, it’s not too bad. Worth a look if you’re on a Windows machine.

Digsby (beta) – not much to add to my last post about Digsby, but I’m still loving the beta versions. Memory usage is staying low and stability keeps increasing. Great multi-protocol IM client with some very handy features around Twitter, Facebook and email notifications.

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Don’t Sell Yourself Short

31.Aug.08  One Comment

I realize this isn’t really a personal improvement type site, but I just had to share this little story.

Last night the wife and I were at the wedding of one of her co-worker/friends. We were seated with the other co-workers and their spouses or S.O.’s at a table and had some time to socialize while at the reception.

As we’re making idle conversation (and keeping keen eyes on the open bar) one of the gents shares a little story in which he mentions that he sells windows.

A little while later there’s a lull in the conversation and my wife asks, “Say, you mentioned you sell windows. Who are you with?”

His response? “Oh, a little company you’ve probably never heard of.” He then changed the subject.

Don’t sell yourself short!

This guy blew a potential sale. Wife and I have been talking about replacing a couple large windows in our home and here we were, socializing with a window guy. Perfect! We could learn a bit more and he could’ve had a solid lead.

But no, he immediately killed the topic.

Perhaps he doesn’t like to mix business and pleasure? Lord knows, I don’t care for diagnosing your network or PC issues while working on a scotch either. But you know what? I’ll fish out a card and suggest we talk the next day or real soon about that issue. I certainly won’t respond with “Gee, I stink at that stuff, how about them Packers?”

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The 250 GB Challenge and How to Measure

31.Aug.08  6 Comments

The GigaOm site has an interesting article up about the upcoming 250GB/month cap from Comcast. I must say, as a Comcast internet user,  that the whole thing makes me sad. But I also don’t think we ever get close to that cap so, to be honest, I’m not sure if I care or not.

Should I?

The article went on to list some tools that can be used to monitor your own bandwidth which can be helpful. Now, in our household, we have a bunch of computers all networked and using the one broadband connection. I really don’t want to have to install an app on each computer.

I figured I’d share my approach: ntop.

ntop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform and on Win32 as well.

At work I use NTop-XTRA on a Windows 2000 machine and have had good luck with it monitoring the primary network. [previous mention]

Just add a cheap hub into your mix and run all the traffic through it. Connect your ntop machine to the hub to listen and measure.

For instance, I’d put a hub between my Comcast “modem” and firewall, ensuring all my local network traffic goes through it. Either use an old/spare machine to run ntop or you can even go the virtual machine route. Just make sure the VM host has multiple network cards and that you can dedicate one of them to the VM image running ntop.

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Document Scheduled Jobs with Google Calendar

27.Aug.08  Leave a Comment

I’ve literally spent years trying to come up with a rational and simple way to document the scheduled jobs that I have running on multiple servers.

My jobs tend not to be anything fancy – in fact, Windows Task Scheduler and the scheduler in SQL Server tend to satisfy my requirements just fine. But lordy, I have a heck of a time keeping track of what jobs are running where. And most importantly: When

I’ve tried spreadsheets. Visio diagrams. Tons of different document and wiki layouts. Nothing ever has made it easy to see it at a glance or keep track.

Oh sure, when I had 3 servers to work with it is was quite simple. I have a lot more now though.

My latest technique just might work though: Google Calendar.

As you see in the image, I’ve created a calendar for each server (hint: the “Create” link at the bottom of the list).

I then replicate each server’s scheduled jobs on its calendar. Frequency, duration and I’ll even add notes to capture what batch file or process is ran. I spent over eight hours going through all my servers today and I’m still not done, but the end is in sight.

Once that’s all done I have a nice visual representation of all my scheduled jobs. I can click on servers in the calendar list to hide/show their jobs. For instance, if I only want to see the jobs going on the servers at data center A, I just toggle all the other servers to hidden.

When all the servers are toggled to “on” I can very quickly find open spots (the few that are left) to schedule new backups or other data intensive jobs. For me, that’s really been the challenge: Making sure I don’t have cross-site backups or syncs going at the same time. I have to hoard my precious bandwidth against all the site-to-site VPN tunnels.

Each server’s wiki page now has a link directly to its specific calendar and my Job Schedule page in the wiki also has all the links collected. They’re all viewable by anyone in my domain, so co-workers can also have all this information readily available if they want or need it.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with this approach. Now if I can just remember to update it when I update jobs I’ll be golden.

Of course, when I have all servers being shown it can be a bit overwhelming:

But, a click on any of those little blocks brings up a little dialog with details so it actually works quite nicely.

Oh, the Agenda View in GCal is pretty good if you want to generate printed or printable documentation.

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