Monthly Archives: January 2008

Make yourself uncomfortable

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I just listened to some great advice from a podcast “Venture Voice” Show #43. It talks about Fred Seibert who brought Hannah Barbara back from the brink of failure. In the podcast he talks about “making yourself uncomfortable”. I thought this was a great idea. What better way to improve yourself, except to push your boundaries and what you’re capable of?

Generally I like to stay comfortable in what im doing. it’s safe. i’m in control and everything around me stays within my control. But staying like this doesn’t help me grow in any way. I’ve started to implement this and have seen small changes already. A main thing i’ve seen is my health improve as i’ve started to make myself uncomfortable by working out! :) .

A friend of mine who came across this philosophy at about the same time has started putting himself in situations that he would normally not do! And wow, has it worked wonders for him! He’s even competing in an Architectural challenge for his company! I think its awesome.

The biggest hindrance for me is my ego. Putting myself in uncomfortable situations can be quite a blow to my self esteem. I’m trying hard to get over this and hopefully, something great will come out of this!

If anyone has any great stories about this, i’d love to hear them to use as my own inspiration!

Mint.com gets a thumbs down.

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I just started using Quicken for myself and Quickbooks for my consulting business. I really like the ease of use and time saving that these tools offer me. However, I always thought that the reporting functionality of each application was quite lacking. I heard some nice things about Mint.com and decided to check it out.

Mint.com is an online money mangement tool, that allows you to analyze how and where you’re spending your money, with nice looking graphs and reports. I loved the idea but was a little wary of putting my financial login information into the system. I decided to test it with one of my credit cards that I use pretty frequently despite the concern. I was hoping that they had some sort of mind blowing technology that would make me thousands of dollars richer!

No luck. The setup was fairly simple and its a very nice design and it was very simple to enter in my login information for my credit card. Once I logged in, it started downloading all my transactions from the last month. It even told me that there were a better APR offer on another account. I started setting up a budget and analyzing my data. After finishing everything, I still wasn’t very impressed with the functionality. While the design and display of everything was nice, I still felt cautious about placing my bank account information onto the system. In the end Mint.com didn’t offer me the value for me to override my security fears. The reports, while very pretty, still is about the same as Quicken.

To make matters worse, when I logged off, the following day I received an email that Mint.com updated my account information WHILE I WAS NOT LOGGED ON. What, are you kidding me??? You went into my account and grabbed new transactions without telling me that you were gonna do that? Uhh. A little too scary/creepy for me. I decided in the end that they had waaay to much access to my information. If a hacker was able to get in, the could empty my account and charge a new tv on my cards!!! I decided to terminate my account. Hopefully Mint.com does in fact totally delete all my information.

In the end, I just couldn’t trust a relatively unknown startup to secure my data. The fact that they had updated my account information while I wasn’t there just made it feel 10x insecure to me. They totally lost all credibility with me when that happened.

Mint.com : Thumbs down

Coldfusion 8 on Redhat 4

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So i’m installing Coldfusion 8 for Adobe on some of their Redhat 4 servers and came across this nasty bug:

./Coldfusion-8-lin.bin: line 2479: /tmp/install.dir.31880/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java: Permission denied
./Coldfusion-8-lin.bin: line 2479: /tmp/install.dir.31880/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java: Success

So I go into /tmp and try to execute the java command. No luck. For some reason I think to copy the entire dir into my home directory to give it a try. It works. I did a grep on the Coldfusion-8-lin.bin file and found these lines:

if [ $IATEMPDIR ]; then
INSTBASE=$IATEMPDIR
if [ $LAX_DEBUG ]; then
echo "Forcing install base (including tmp dir) to: $IATEMPDIR"

So I did a `export IATEMPDIR=/home/dwang/tmp` and created the tmp dir in my home directory. Booya! It worked.

Strange error. I saw a couple of people having the same error. Hopefully this can help you guys out

Update:The wonderful guys at Rackspace said that the server /tmp directories are mounted with a noexec as a security precaution: To fix that :

mount -o remount,exec /tmp/

then execute the script again, then change it back to noexec:

mount -o remount,noexec /tmp/

My Drobo Review (and not really intended, Time Machine)

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So a little background: drobo is essentially a mini machine that manages raid on drives that you insert into the box. its neat (or at least i hope so) because its a tiny compact machine that can handle any size drive that you can put in. this is really cool because most of the raid configrations i’ve setup in the past required drives of all the same size.

ok, so why drobo? originally I was a pc user and was happy with my lacie drive formatted in NTFS. I swapped over to a mac, and sadly my external drive wasn’t writable anymore. I installed ntfs-3g which is a mac “driver” that allows it to read ntfs drives. That worked for a while until my drive got accidentally unplugged (by my foot, d’Oh). On top of that the ntfs-3g was extremely slow. My only other option was to get a new lacie drive or download 250 gigs of music, movies, and backedup up docs onto another machine and format the drive for FAT32.

So, I was stumped, I poked around on the net and ran into a post that talked about a nightmare of a time recovering data from a lacie harddrive once it crashed. uhhh, that made me a bit nervous, so I decided to go with the drobo option ultimately. My laptop has about 5 years worth of pictures, all of my code, my business documents and data files, and a whole mess of other stuff. I really can’t risk all of that on the lacie drive (oh and the drobo looked prettier too).

Ok, to the fun stuff…..

First Impressions

So i go the drobo box … cute packaging… the “welcome to the word of … drobo” was a great touch. reminds me of opening up my macbook pro box for the first time. (coicidence that the drobo guys are mac guys… hmmmm).

My first impression is that it’s much bigger than i thought, at least in depth. I thought that it would be about half the size depth wise. I dont know why… just from the pictures on the site, thats what I would have figured.

Setup

I love it when companies provide huge big dumb Step 1 Step 2 and Step 3 things. It allows me not to think about anything and follow directions.

Insert drives.. sure thing. I happen to have 4 400GB drives from a server that crashed a year ago (that i never bothered fixing). So here we go. Opened the drobo casing…oooh magnetic… nice… not a swivel based door WHICH ALWAYS BREAKS.. another great touch.

oooh another great feature, you just slide the drives in… no stupid bays to deal with.. awesome.. all four drives slid in without a problem. ooh i think my lacie is getting jealous.

Step 2 plug in stuff… weird the power cable has a white plastic covering… never seen anything like that… i dont think the mac even had that… kinda neutral about it… if they could save money to me as a consumer by taking that off, I would’ve been happy about it…

plugged in… ITS ALIVE!!!!

uh oh… i hear clicking… thats usually not a good sign… it looks like two of the drives might have gotten damaged when i was moving them.. crap. nice that i got an error on my screen! cool.

ok.. lets see how easy this really is.. ok i swapped out the drives, but nothing has happened… so i guess i’ll unplug this guy again. a quick not about the drive.. its pretty quiet.. which is awesome… so now i have three drives in and not all 4… (still all 400 gb drives). hmmm it says my total capacity is 2 tb, that’s definitely not right… i wonder if it matters..

wow… time machine picked up that i have a new drive (im not currently using time machine)… awesome! another example of just working!

Looks like time machine is starting to backup all my data… cool beans! ehhh time machine looks like it messed up a little. i didn’t want to use the entire drive as my backup drive, so i went into disk utility to partition the space into two spaces, 1 TB each (i still dont think i have 2 tb, but drobo does, so lets see what happens).

Ok, it looks like that kinda messed up time machine… So im going into system preferences and changing the time machine drive. hmm It looks like I can’t force a backup.. thats annyoing. found a post on mactips that says right click on the icon allows me to do it. ok! back in business!

Time to transfer my crap over!

Overall i’m pretty happy with the way that the drobo is working so far. I’ll give another update in the next month or so.

Sun buys MySQL

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I think this is a great step for Sun. It enters them into the huge database market with the leading database system, and further commits them to an open source initiative (i hope). <!--More-->

With Sun’s resources behind MySQL, they should be able to really beef up mysql’s backup/replication issues. yay!!!

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080116.1.xml

More info from the CEO: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/