Craig's Musings

We had a Science fair yesterday where different folks around our division showed off the cool stuff they had in the labs. I saw lots of cool stuff but all of it super secret. In fact, this blog post will self-destruct in 30 seconds by my merely mentioning that words "secret".

There were a couple of things that were not secret – like Microsoft Surface, which I have to say, is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. When I first came to Microsoft at the beginning of April, my temporary office happened to be right in the middle of the Surface team while they were assembling the hardware and getting ready for their launch event. I got a chance to play with it furtively late at night and I thought it was cool then even before they had it fully baked. It keeps getting cooler every time I see it – the interface is really a breakthrough idea.

The other not-secret thing was Microsoft Sync. Last time I had something in my car from Microsoft was the AutoPC back in the late 90s, which while a neat idea, was a little ahead of its time. Well it’s 2007 and Sync kicks ASS! I was blown away by how well everything just worked - I paired my iPhone in about 30 seconds, and suddenly my contact list was integrated into the car. The voice recognition is terrific - I didn't have to train it, it was a super noisy environment, and random names from the phone book worked great. If you plug in a Zune or an iPod/iPhone (or a 'Play From Device' player or even a portable USB harddrive), you get the same cool interface for music as for contacts – your whole catalog of music is available via voice control, including the ability to jump straight to an artist or song. I have a dealer installed iPod interface in my car and the interface is HORRIBLE. I really frickin' hate it, whereas the Sync interface rocks. All that, and the thing you plug your device into is USB and so your device charges while you drive. This is double-extra cool with an iPhone since you don’t have to worry about how long you talk and all your music is right there.

All that cool stuff, and I got a parking spot in the garage literally right under the science fair. It took me exactly 30 seconds to get from my car to the event. Sweeeeet!

Posted by Craig at 6:50 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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It's international Talk Like a Pirate Day. Avast, ye scurvy dogs! A bucko o' mine got me this t-shirt a while aft, and it seemed like a good shirt for talk like a pirate day. Yaaaarrrrr!

Posted by Craig at 11:53 AM | Permalink

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Way, way back in the technology time machine - Christmas 2004, to be precise, I set up a Promise VTrak 15200 with 15 400gb drives for my digital media home. 4.8 Terabytes (RAID 50 with a hot spare) seemed like an infinite amount of storage. Given what it cost, it freakin' well BETTER be infinite was my thinking at the time. Fast forward almost 3 years now, and I'm down to 480GB. My infinite storage space has vanished - I'm hoarding media files on my media center PCs because there is no space on my darned server. I have a ton of DVDs to archive still and I'm outta luck. I have to spend time cleaning out old crap off my storage array. I am almost out of storage on my 'infinite' storage device - how did that happen?!

When terabyte drives were announced, I figured that was the milestone to upgrade my storage world. But having had a double drive failure in my RAID 50 config (and as luck would have it, one drive failed in one RAID 5 stripe and one failed in the other) and having sat around biting my nails for a day and a half hoping the rebuild would finish before another drive failed, I was unwilling to move to terabyte drives (with 3+ day rebuilds once they were full) until RAID 6 was available. RAID 6 in hardware is the ultimate in coolness for large drives - 2 parity drives instead of 1, so you can sustain 2 drive failures and keep on ticking.

Tonight I did my monthly troll of Promise's web site to see if they had a 15+ drive RAID 6 appliance available, and sure enough, they did - the M610p is out, with 16 hot swap slots and support for RAID 6 and the Hitachi terabyte drive. And with the terabyte drives being only $329 from ZipZoomFly (a great price), the 17 drives I'd need (16 + a spare) would cost a mere $5,593. So with the M610p around $4000, all I need is $9,600 laying around to have 13TB of storage (2 drives for parity + a hot spare - never leave home without a hot spare in your storage array).

So it looks like I'm just gonna be almost out of storage for the forseeable future. Sigh. I hate waiting.

Posted by Craig at 10:10 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I may have mentioned I have a drunken version of the Saturday Night Live living in my head, chattering non-stop 24x7. One of the cast members living in my head has a tendency latch onto simple phrases and tie them to 80’s and 90’s music. Let’s call him Skippy.

So I’m writing a mail to my team last night and I used the phrase “Ship it”. Well, all hell breaks loose with Skippy and he starts singing a variant of “Whip It” by Devo in my head NON STOP last night and through the day. So for your (quasi-)amusement, Skippy, the drunken SNL cast member living in my head, brings you “Ship It”, with apologies to Devo for my abuse of the lyrics. Oh, and for those of you young 'uns who don't remember Devo, you can hear the song and see their stylin' hats and outfits on this video.

I gotta stop staying up until 2am the nights before I fly to SVC.

Posted by Craig at 6:02 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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My anniversary date at Microsoft is complexified by my leaving and coming back, so I don't really have an anniversary date so much as I have an anniversary Excel formula. It occurred to me this weekend that my 7 year anniversary might be coming up, so I worked out my anniversary Excel formula:

=DATE(2007,3,30+(7*365.242199-(DATE(2000,2,1)-DATE(1993,6,28))))

It turns out I missed it: it was August 24th. (Technically, it was August 24.69539, but I'm going with the 24th)

Happy 7 years to me - it only took me 14 years, 1 month, 26 days and 4 hours (or so) to get there.

Posted by Craig at 8:26 PM | Permalink

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About two weeks ago, something magical happened. The spamtards figured out how to slip by the Movable Type 3.3 and 3.2 spam filters, and suddenly my blog and KT's blog have been getting hit with about 80-90 "not-spam" spam comments every 24 hours. Sometimes there's a break, and then the fricktarded spamtards shovel a whole bunch more in.

I have tried to find the gold in the pig dung, but I apologize if I deleted a comment that came from a human instead of a fricktarded spamtard.

I did love vmark's theater comment once again - you crack me up, dude! And yeah, you can get at Exchange via imap, but imap doesn't pass the security requirements of our and no doubt other IT departments - we require that the device be able time out to a password after a certain amount of time (and that policy needs to be a requirement that IT can enforce, not a voluntary thing), and that you are able to remote wipe your data from the device if you lose it. Given the confidential nature of the mail I get, I fully embrace and support this kind of requirement - it would be a pretty big disaster if I lost my phone and someone could get into my email. That's what makes Windows Mobile + Exchange so cool, really - you get secure real time access to your corporate directory, email, calendar. I dig it. I hope to see those features on the iPhone someday, so I can dig it there, too.

Posted by Craig at 10:01 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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