College students built their own “facebook” before Facebook
I graduated from college about a year before Facebook really took off among college students. It was around, but was limited to students of about 15-20 universities. Then fast forward to today and social networking is a big deal and nearly everyone in the world has an account on the service.
College students actually built their own system very similar to Facebook using AOL Instant Messenger as a platform starting in the late 90s. The away message took the place of the status update, and the user profile was where people posted their schedule, inspirational quotes, and the emo kids would post song lyrics that meant something to them.
This of course required leaving a computer powered on and connected to the Internet 24/7, and the only demographic that could really do that consistently were college students living in dorm rooms.
This was not really even that long ago. Most universities actually advised their students against buying laptops in the late 90s/early 00s. The quote was always something along the lines of "Desktop computers are more powerful and a better value for your money, and are less likely to be stolen." The idea was that a laptop was somewhat of an impractical luxury at the time. Laptops had limited utility anyway since only a select number of universities had wireless Internet access, and even the schools that did have it had relatively spotty coverage. Even if you had a laptop, it may or may not have had a wireless card in it. So computers stayed parked on desks.
All across the country, hundreds of thousands of desktop computers were sitting on desks in dorm rooms, fully powered on, running AOL Instant Messenger 24 hours a day 7 days a week so that everyone could see what their friends were up to.
Facebook essentially moved this "service" people hosted on their desktop computers to the cloud.
I'd bet money that the college students of today don't even realize this is how we did it a decade ago.
Back to blogging in 2012
I'm hoping to get some more blogging done in 2012. I have a few ideas waiting, but just need to take the time to write them up.
ESXi 4.1 on a Mac Pro
I retired my Mac Pro (the Mac Pro 1,1, or the model from 2006. More info available at http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/stats/mac-pro-quad-2.66-specs.html), and decided to see how it would run ESXi.
A default install of ESXi 4.1 worked beautifully on the machine with no customization. It recognized both NICs, and saw the storage. A Mac Pro could make a decent server for someone for home or non-production use since it is fairly quiet and has 4 drive bays. I imagine the newer Mac Pros probably won't have the necessary driver support to run ESXi, but then again it'd be a strange choice of machine to run it.
There were a couple of annoyances, namely that you can't open and close the optical drive once the machine has booted into ESXi since it requires that you run Mac OS X (or Windows with the appropriate BootCamp drivers).
ESXi 4.1 + Optiplex 980 = FAIL
I tried installing ESXi on a stock SFF Optiplex 980 just to play, and the installer crashes halfway through. The error looks like it doesn't support the storage controller.
I'll have to play with it more later. I just wanted to see what would happen without doing any heavy thinking.
Sending HTML email from a bash script
I had a situation where I needed to set up a cron job to send email reports based on the contents of a dynamically generated web page. I tried piping the output of wget and curl to the mail command, but each time the recipient would receive raw HTML instead of an HTML formatted email.
This was far more challenging than one would initially guess.
After a lot of googling and trial and error I came up with the following:
(cat <<EOCAT
Subject: ##Subject##
From: from@address.edu
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Disposition: inline
EOCAT
curl https://www.edu/url/?view=123) | /usr/sbin/sendmail email@address
Posting it here may help someone else, or help me later.
Thoughts on VMware ThinApp in Higher Ed
I've had enough people ask about ThinApp that I'm throwing together this blog entry. Here is a semi organized opinion piece/rant on ThinApp.
We started looking at application virtualization for our instructional labs. The idea was to get the applications off our image. We also had a number of older applications which required admin access to run. We looked at ThinApp and Microsoft's App-V (or Softgrid, or whatever they called it at the time), and ThinApp seemed simpler to manage, and could handle poorly behaved apps which needed admin access (and App-V could not).
We ran ThinApp through a bunch of testing and threw about half of our apps at it, and decided to make the purchase.
Our plan was to stream applications off a CIFS share. Unfortunately, the project has not gone as well as we would have liked.
When ThinApp works, it works really well. We used it to package a number of old, weird applications for specific markets used in our courses. I'd list the names, but it's nothing anyone reading this has ever heard of. Once the app is packaged, we drop it on a file share. The Start menus on our PCs are mapped to a network drive, so we can instantly make an app available on hundreds of machines without doing much work. It's great.
Streaming applications off file shares works as long as the app is relatively small. Large apps don't stream well. I got a lot of unpredictable behavior once the size got over about a gig. You don't get any feedback that an app is loading when it is large, so it is confusing for users and looks like nothing is happening.
What doesn't work? Most of the major applications. I can't get the Adobe CS5 suite to work. The CS4 suite worked, but performed poorly. This goes against what you would expect since the small poorly designed apps work fine, and big well known stuff fails.
What major apps do not work?
- Adobe CS5 Suite (licensing manager doesn't work, so it fails)
- ArcGIS - 9.3 appeared to work initially, but many functions perform poorly such as a 30 second task taking 15 minutes
- AcrGIS 10 - fails to launch
- SAS - I can't get SAS to work, period. VMware tech support tells me apps with chained installers don't work well
Since these apps are our biggest, our hope to keep them off our image to speed up the imaging process failed.
When apps don't work, we have to deploy them the old fashioned way.
VMware tech support was initially very unhelpful but they ramped up support considerably in the last year or so. Support still isn't adequate because it is so slow. Usually by the time there is an answer, my deadline has passed and I have had no choice but to deploy the app the old fashioned way. At this point it would be a poor use of my time to pull the app and push out a ThinApp version, so we just give up.
We had this problem with the following:
- Stata - support found a bug that still hasn't been fixed (reported in August)
- Mathematica - they discovered weeks later that it doesn't build properly due to long paths and think they found a solution. Since I had already pushed out the app I never tested it (no time)
VMware does not test applications (even common ones like Photoshop). These problems shouldn't be handled by support, but should be handled by the developers. At minimum, the Adobe products should work. I believe each release of ThinApp needs to be tested against a large number of common applications, but they do not do this. They also do not keep track of problems people have, so if many call in with Adobe CS5 problems, this isn't shared. They also don't test against scientific or statistical applications.
I can't imagine imagining instructional labs without ThinApp, but I spend an awful lot of time mad at the product. I may have unrealistic expectations for App virtualization. It isn't an easy thing to do, but I'd love it if ThinApp worked better.
Remotely powering on Optiplex 780s using Wake-On-LAN
I've been struggling with trying to figure out why our new Dell Optiplex 780s can't be remotely powered on using Wake-On-Lan. In order to make this work, you need make the following changes in the BIOS:
- Internal NIC must be enabled with PXE (this was the gotcha!)
- Enable Low Power Mode should be unchecked
- Remote Wakeup needs to be set to enabled
The kicker was realizing that the Internal NIC needed to be enabled with PXE. Prior to adjusting that setting, everything looked ok, and WOL worked to wake computers from sleep, but I couldn't remotely power them on.
In order to save power, we turn try to turn off our instructional lab machines when they're not in use. Because some of our labs are open on weekends, some are open every day, and schedules change during the summer and semester breaks, we try to adjust this and keep the machines off when not in use. I have scripts that power on each room as a Windows scheduled task.
Google Maps Street View appears black
Google Maps Street View has been appearing all black instead of showing images when using Safari on my Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. I noticed the same problem with FireFox, so I figured it was a Flash problem.
I googled around a bit and found other people had the same problem, and were getting a series of unhelpful suggestions I tried upgrading to the latest Flash just in case, and it did not solve the problem. Also tried clearing Safari's cache which didn't help, but seeing as the problem was occuring in FireFox as well, I didn't have a lot of hope.
A couple of the postings suggested removing Arial fonts from ~/Library/Home/Fonts, and while this didn't make sense to me, I tried it, and it worked. My theory is these are old fonts left over from back when this machine was running 10.5 as my other Mac wasn't having this problem (nor did it have those fonts).
I just had a handful of fonts in that location, and am not really sure why they're even there or why my user needs its own set of fonts, but in case anyone else runs into this I figured I might as well post this.
Video Blogging and Podcasting
I've noticed an increasing trend where both bloggers, and even some larger companies now post an entry on their web site that basically says "download this podcast" or "watch this video" to hear more about XYZ.
This is great, and there is a place for multimedia content, but at the same time I'd much rather read something. It's so much easier to quickly scan a document and get the main points, or go back and read it in detail than it is to watch a video or listen to a podcast.
At the moment Google can't search the words spoken during a video either.
So, for now, I hope people stick to posting content as text and include multimedia as an additional resource for those who want to watch it.
The Joys of Project Management
I'm taking a graduate level project management course this semester. There are a few things so far that may directly apply to my job and would allow for some improvements in how we manage projects, but the political implications of doing so would be...interesting.
The textbooks used for this class really need to give better examples however. I understand the point is that we should focus on the process, and not the actual project, it is still kind of silly.
A tutorial for Microsoft Project 2007 suggests a small CPA firm I work for wants to network its 5 computers with a budget of 50,000 dollars, and a time limit of 6 months. I actually laughed out loud when I read this.
First of all, the book has a copyright date of 2009. This isn't an old book. There are no small businesses who are not networked at this point. Even at minimum, every small business in America has some haphazard network connecting all their machines to a cable modem or something to get out on the Internet.
The whole thing could be done in literally hours cowboy style, and if done properly with structured cabling (as opposed to holes bashed in walls and random patch cables run room to room), documentation, backups, etc , it wouldn't take more than a few days.
So yes, it's all about the project management process, but they really could have chosen a project that has more realistic costs and timeline. This isn't doing any of the non-technical people in the class any favors.