There's many ways to measure productivity, but of course some are more effective than others.
Few are entertaining however, but this one changes all that. Now you can have your very own hamster wheel, which based on how fast you type adjusts its speed appropriately.


Oh, did I mention it's USB powered? This would make a fine addition to the collection, alongside the USB missile launcher which made its way into our office a few weeks ago.

A definiately worth cause, I thought. I know that online petitions never really go anywhere, but in the interest of raising awareness and just generally giving a wag of my finger to those annoying websites who do this, go maybe jot down some comments to hopefully sway at least one or two content providers.

fullfeeds.com - a petition against intentionally disabled RSS feeds.

I was curious to know what the Microsoft Windows XP license said about installing the OS on multiple partitions, virtual machines, or anything similar. As it turns out, the license is quite restrictive. The reason I was looking into this was to determine the answer to a simple question: am I legitemately allowed to install XP on my Mac, using the same license/serial for both a copy under parallels, and a copy using Apple's Boot Camp. The short answer is no, you cannot.

That's reasonable, I guess, in some ways. What worries me is what the Microsoft Windows XP Home EULA says about its use, and license to use:


That quote alone brings a lot of gray areas. Different vendors have different definitions of what constitutes a 'processor' - I have it on reasonable authority that Microsoft are saying that multi-core processors are considered a single processor. So that might mean you're okay to use XP Home on your iMac, or under Parallels on an iMac/MacBook/MacBook Pro.
If you want to use XP Home on a Mac Pro however, you're SOL - quite clearly the license doesn't allow for it. The XP Pro EULA is a little more forgiving, and I'm not exactly sure why you would want to run XP Home, rather than Pro, on a Mac Pro under Parallels - typically most people who are going to run Windows under Parallels are going to run XP Pro anyway, but it does raise an interesting annoyance regarding restrictive software licenses.

With all the use of Virtualisation though, and Virtual Machines, it might be about time Microsoft looked at the situation and revised their thinking on allowing people to install copies on Virtual Machines and similar. The current Vista beta/RC1 EULA allows you to install the software on "any number of copies of the software on your premises", so during the beta this won't be a problem, but I think we can all bet this will go back to being one, and only one, when Vista is released. As Macs become more popular, and VMs go the same way, tweaking the Vista license would certainly be a wise move to allow this. After all, what home user is going to purchase multiple licenses to Vista just so they can 'legitemately' install multiple copies of their VM image to run under various environments?

It would be nice for Microsoft to do the 'right' thing by users on this one... but holding your breath on that one might be a bad idea.

For those of you who have ugly-ass websites with this impression that you need to provide feed buttons for every one of the fifty bazillion RSS/feed providers out there, PLEASE go and take a look at this website and clean your act up.

FeedButton - a nice way to clean up all that crap. Seriously, one is enough. I'm not saying that you have to use this particular one, if you happen to find this one ugly... but at least do something about the dozen icons you have.

I've been saying for a while how ridiculous these 20" notebooks we're now seeing on the market look, so some guy in NYC decided to test it out, and take note of the reactions of passers-by. This could almost have been a job for Improv Everywhere, but in fact this time was just done by Laptop magazine.

Some of the reactions are priceless - I can't imagine what reactions would be had if someone pulled out a 20" notebook on the train home - like he decided to do.

One of the cool things that Apple give you, if you have OSX server, is the ability to use that local server to provide software updates to other machines, usually on your own LAN. Microsoft currently provide support for a similar piece of software for their own software, but they'll be terminating support for this at the end of the year. The significant difference is, though, is that the updates you get for Apple OS X seems to be significantly larger in size. Granted, most large businesses usually have a lot more Windows systems, but in a small business, especially one with many Apple systems (such as our own), the 50+MB patches needing to be pulled to a dozen Apple systems can chew up our bandwidth pretty quickly.

Apple's Software Update Server provides a simple way to get around these bandwidth issues, allowing a local OSX Server to store, cache and serve updates to other systems. Configuring it is incredibly simple, and done through the Server Admin application.

On the client side, you then need to simply specify what server that OSX system will use to get its updates from. A single simple commandline command will specify this:
defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL http://:8088

This of course assumes that you haven't changed the software update server port. Future updates on that client will then be taken from your own local server.

This should certainly be a useful feature for any businesses with even only a couple of Macs, since it will save on external bandwidth.

Ah, what a helpful error:

Because of all the performance testing I'm doing as part of my job, writing code for multiprocessor systems, HP agreed to loan us a beast of a system - their new, top of the line, HP-DL380. This thing is nuts (or at least, the one we have sitting on a desk is). Two Dual-Core 3.0GHz Xeons (so four cores total), and this one came standard with six(!) 72GB hot-swappable Serial Attached SCSI drives.

The DL380 has redundant modular power supplies, so that's pretty cool, but I can't really begin to describe the noise this thing makes.

Let me put it this way: Two months ago we took up Sun on a try-and-buy offer for the UltraSPARC T1000. Problem was, I couldn't run it most of the time because it was so loud. We had to lock it in a soundproof office, and even then we could still hear the faint noise of the server.
Well, this thing… it's louder. But louder in a cool way. Maybe I should record an audio clip, because the sound of the fans is so incredibly cool it has to be heard to be believed. That said, I'm not 100% sure that they're actually fans in the DL380-G5 - The new HP BladeSystem (C-series) uses jet turbines for cooling the blades and chassis. I didn't make that up either - HP and Boeing actually jointly took out 30 patents to make these things.

But wait, it gets cooler.

We have the DL380 so we can do performance testing. So what might we be testing it against, you'll probably want to know?

AHA!

That's right. That would be four Mac minis, the first in our intended super-cluster. $12,000 worth of HP hardware, and $5,000 worth of Apple hardware - which I'm predicting to be a close battle, in terms of performance.

The minis are, obviously the cheaper solution. Long term, we intend on having a set of racks consisting of a total of 100 Apple Mac Minis.