Phasor Burn

I’m watching an email thread zip past my inbox today with puzzled amusement.

We use Watchguard firewalls and while I have some limited experience with futzing with their rulesets and adding vpn accounts and so forth, I didn’t know about this gem of a ‘feature’.

Apparently when you get a new Watchguard, it is just hardware.

No OS.

One must download and install an OS onto it.

Okayyy…..

Where else can you buy a hardware appliance and not be able to use it out of the box, essentially leaving you with a brick because the unit can not be flashed with an OS unless you have a valid LiveSecurity license for this particular instance of the hardware.

WTF?

It’s only taken us 5 years of generally ignoring the whopping huge jumble of crud in the basement before knuckling down and doing the first round of purging this weekend.

Stiff and sore today, but that’s because it was totally unlike couch-computing and tv watching. Need to get more exercise, but at least this was honest exercise with a visible work product involved vs sit-and-pedel on the exercise bike.

Looking at what we did yesterday afternoon, I wonder why we left it for so long. It really wasn’t that bad. Just moved the Apple Airport Express downstairs and plugged it into the aux-in on my old boom box, set up an itunes playlist upstairs, and then had-at-it.

Like anything else, this has been subject to Newtonian Physics. Inertia can sometimes be a pain to overcome but once the mass is moving . . .

There’s an interesting new prosumer / multimedia-focused small-business desktop diskarray product out, the drobo. Check out the demo video.

Now, it does seem interesting in that it allows you to mix and match drive sizes and have the new space be ‘instantly available’ on the fly. There’s some proprietary non-standard-raid stuff going on under the hood with some virtualization stuff inbetween that makes the whole external array look like a 2TB box even if you only have one small drive in it from the beginning. Actual capacity used and available is indicated from the friendly front panel leds and management software.

OK, this is appealing. However, looking more closely at this thing and hearing that Sun is going to be releasing an opensource NAS device sometime ’soon’, I would probably hold off for now. A little embedded Solaris X86 in a box like this with ZFS etc could kick drobo’s ass methinks.

Worst case, for geeks who are capable of this, you could take a ZFS nas box’s drives and connect them up to a generic x86 box with solaris x86 to recover the data. Not sure how it would work with drobo if for example they went out of business and no replacement chassis were available.

Then again, I am trusting a large portion of my current data at home (for my consulting company, my wife’s consulting company, email for both of us and both our parents etc) to idb, which is proprietary as well. Hmm. Doublestandards, yes, that’s me.

Here’s an interesting thought. If we’ve already seperated the smokers from the non smokers etc, why not split up a city between the drivers and non drivers? Here’s an illustration (and from which I got the notion)

Hmmm. I wouldn’t mind being able to walk to some local shops etc, but the city doesn’t seem to want to design or require new community designs to have the small-shops-in-walking-distance feature. The nearest convenience store for example, is about 1 block from the nearest mall to my house. About 5 min driving or 45 min walking away.

People probably won’t walk to get random small bits of shopping done unless the stores are within about 3 long blocks. Sad, but true.

Officials scramble to fix errors at Vimy memorial

How embarassing.

Something that isn’t specifically mentioned in the article, but which I strongly suspect as being true, is that the ‘errors’ on the Vimy memorial are actually a reflection of how Quebec French has severely drifted from the French language as spoken in France.

Bill 101 notwithstanding, I have heard it said by more than one source that the French spoken in Quebec has been compromised to the extent that it is no longer easily intelligible to people of France.

Anyways, even if that was the case, you would have thunk that someone in the group putting this memorial together, to be installed in France, would have thought of all this and done a triple check on making sure it was in “proper French” way before it got to this late stage.

Insert Nelson soundbite from the Simpsons here : “Haw Haw!”