Planet Geek!: Redhat geekery and, of course, swag!

Got to attend a Redhat presentation today on virtualization. They were pushing a lot of very interesting stuff, and while the marketing drivel was in fact kept to a minimum, they did pitch RHEL5 pretty hard, as well as their relationship with Intel.

Of course, the important stuff is the SWAG! Today's haul was a 256meg stainless pen drive - all in all, one of the better bits I've seen at presentations. It's stocked with all the presentation data, so that's nice, and it's sort of pretty.

I have to admit, part of the goal of this was successful with me. The stuff going on with Xen and RHEL is pretty impressive, including cluster management and 'paravirtualization' (basically environments that realize they're virtualized, and can be managed easily via standard API's). Moving forward on platform design for my clients and for my own hosting stuff, I'll take RHEL into serious consideration (and not just because they said at the meeting here that RHEL5 will be Yum based, not up2date).

The drawback is that the Xen stuff doesn't really support Windows as virtual guests. For that I'll need to focus on VMware. (The other option is naturally Microsoft Virtual Whatever, which, in my experience, has been frighteningly unstable and buggy. I can't boot my Kubuntu CD into it (installation locks up), and I've had serious keyboard issues even trying to configure the installer. I'll hold off on a full rant against this until I've tried vmware, but at the moment, I'm unimpressed with Virtual PC.

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Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Business yammerings
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Planet Geek!: When the geekery works!

About 2 months ago, I picked up the Blueant X5 headphones, and had high hopes of them being my primary audio interface to my machines. Unfortunately the Treo fell down pretty hard as my primary music player, but I've managed to shift over to other sources, and today I had my first "okay, that worked really well" moment.

As most folks know, clipper is my primary platform now, and, despite it being saddled with WindowsXP, has been doing pretty well by me. One of it's drawbacks was that it did not have a bluetooth adapter in it. I played around with a USB BT dongle, but was very frustrated with the support stack for it. I eventually picked up a card specifically for the Dell D620, and installed it. Ahh, much better - built in bluetooth and no dongle.

A little fiddling, a call or two to Blueant, and I had the headphones configured properly for basic stereo music listening. This has been very pleasant, as I can listen comfortably without dealing with cables or plugs or the like. The only drawback has been that the microphone arrangement has a very low sensitivity, so it hasn't worked well using X-lite. Despite this, getting 8+ hours of listening time on a usb-charged battery really does go a long way to making them useable.

Today, I was sitting in a hotel lobby (a comfortable environment for me), doing my work on my laptop, availing myself of the free wireless, listening to music, when a call came in on my Treo. The X5 headphones happily switched into 'handsfree' mode, and trilled a little "You have a call" sound. I touched the button on the side of the headphones, and lo! I was talking to my wife. The call went along, and when we were done, I touched the button on the headphones again, and RadioParadise was once again in my ears. At no point did I touch my cell phone.

It's nice when technology actually works. Now if I could have my laptop always streaming audio, and function for 8+ hours on a charge, and have ubiquitous network access, and NOT feel like I'm holding a small fusion reactor on my lap, all would be perfect!

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Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Geekitude
Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )