Oct 04

The International Internet Home Theatre

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Since settling in Sydney, I’ve been dabbling in setting up internet home-theatre. At this point I have all home entertainment media (local and online streaming) available through a single connection and server. Why, well partly because the technology is easy to figure out without cracking a manual and partly due to the fact you don’t really need a dedicated phone line and cable/satellite TV contract anymore. Granted, back in the US I had a tendency to keep these services alive, and ignore the fact you’re dumping 1000’s a year on services that are 5% utilised.

So here’s the setup:

  • Naked ADSL 120 GB/month internet connection (fortunately only a few hundred feet from the DSLAM)
  • VPN connection (www.strongvpn.com) (which is absolutely required for most US media streaming services, setup to run all the time for all traffic)
  • NetFlix Account (9.99/month)
  • Various free accounts (Pandora, LastFM, Hulu, etc.)
  • Plex (www.plexapp.com, free software for an internet home theatre)
  • PlexAeon skin (installed to Plex application to make it intuitive)
  • Itunes (for inventory of audio library)
  • Mac Mini (2.4GHz Intel Core 2, 2GB RAM base model, which is earning it’s keep)
  • HDMI cable (for Audio/Video from Mac Mini to HDTV)
  • RCA stereo cable (for sound from HDTV monitor outs to my sound system, since you can only route sound from one interface at a time from the Mac Mini)
  • Apple Remote
  • Macbook (for remote administration, which you could do just as well with a Bluetooth mouse/keyboard)

So after a lot of tweaking, the Plex/Mac home theatre is working well. It still requires some nurturing, but in general the solution is an incredible alternative to web-browsing and using separate applications for streaming video, photography services, online and local music, etc.  So all the standard issue streaming giants (NetFlix, Hulu, Last.fm, Pandora, etc.) and the dozens of others (Picasa, National Geographic, PBS, Pitchfork Media, etc.) are all available in your living room all the time. When it works, you have a personal cloud portal to video, music, and photography user services available with a silly-simple Apple remote interface.

A couple of key items to note:

  • Plex is geek-friendly software for setup, but extremely user friendly once stable and running, but you still may need the geek when it needs to be restarted, modified, etc.
  • Plex with it’s native interface/skin is confusing, but the PlexAeon skin is a functional makeover
  • Energy saver mode on Plex does nasty things (wiping out media inventory, freezing application, kicking VPN connections, etc.)
  • US media services are getting smarter to VPN international users – keep it on all the time and don’t let them log repeated login failures
  • Remote management and login is absolutely required – so either have an OSX machine nearby to remote login, or get a solid Bluetooth keyboard/mouse (this is a major barrier for non-geeked out households)
  • Why spend the extra dollars for expensive, hardware? Basically so I’m not spending my time rebooting or dealing with driver and compatibility issues, and instead spending my time with semi-stable applications
  • Turn down the bells and whistles (like music visualisation emulators) – Plex is doing a lot of lifting and some of the ‘slick’ features get in the way of stability/performance

Overall, the value for money is incredible once you get this setup. Next the server will start additional-purpose roles as a DVR (for over the air recording), a private FTP server, and IP/Skype dedicated ‘land-line’ home phone.

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Sep 02

The Great AIX vs. Solaris Debate

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Jun 05

Data Centres of Antiquity

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For the last 20 years, power and space have been treated as endless commodities. We procure, rack and stack, run, and decom, growing the data centre infrastructure until the facilities department pulls the ‘out of power’ alarm, or the data centre manager forecasts space at a premium, and reactive measures take hold.

Enterprise data centres (say of 500 assets or more) usually don’t maintain an accurate inventory of what’s running inside and how much energy/power is being consumed.  Scattered inventory of applications to host relationships, inaccurate inventory of equipment, and no earthly idea of power consumption is more the rule than the exception.

According to Connection Research, only 3.5% of CIO’s have responsibility and budget for the data centre power bill, 66% have NO visibility or responsibility, and the remainder have some visibility and some accountability (which isn’t saying much since this is a self-assessment scoring, usually biasing results to the favor of the assessed!).

Many ITIL advocates envisage cloud public/private architecture as the 3rd incarnation of ITIL, but seriously if basic inventory and asset management didn’t manifest in the last 10 years of ITIL adoption, I’m not sure it’s going to happen now when the pace of data centre virtualisation/consolidation is accelerating. If people power couldn’t keep pace with physical inventory there’s not a hope in the hell of asset management it will keep up with virtualized infrastructure….

If you look at a non-innovative data centre, you might be looking at over 1000 watts per server, while the present day opportunity to virtualise and consolidate could collapse an entire data centre into a score of high-density racks of x86 infrastructure and an astounding 45-60 kW/rack power draw nearly demanding water cooling, or high-velocity air-cooling techniques only found in containers or psueudo-containers.

All of a sudden, space (and it’s cooling design) and power are crucial considerations as data centre footprints have an opportunity to shrink in the face of steady growth.  As this happens, application to virtual asset inventory will become more crucial, and the physical inventory itself may become less relevant as non-virtualised infrastructures diminish. Logical management, metering, and measurement of the virtual infrastructure (still in it’s infancy) articulating power draw per application, and virtual compute/storage run-time consumption will then be the true measure between private and public infrastructure.  But then, the graph above underscores the primitive nature of our ways in the midst of accelerating changes to the distributed computing landscape.

Feb 20

Sydney vs. Melbourne, a Tale of 2 Cities in the South Pacific

Enterprise Technology 2 Comments »

One of the more perplexing aspects of spending time in Sydney & Melbourne as of late is the non-stop rivalry between the cities.  Coming from Boston (and rival NYC), this originally seemed like old news (big city, smaller city, sports teams, etc.).  But digging in, this is more than a sports-team rivalry, something brewing in the fabric of each city culture.

At first, it’s subtle commentary from people on both sides. Nonchalant jabs to the groin, “I detest Melbourne”, “I’d never live in Sydney”. While I really don’t mind either way, it’s amazing when you see both cities are brilliant in comparison to let’s say, MOST port cities in the rest of the world.

So while my taste of both places is fresh and not-yet tainted by experiential bias, here is a collection of naïve first impressions.

SydMel

Feb 15

MindMapping for People Networks

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In planning this next stage of the career, one of the questions I tabled to all the top business developers I could meet was ‘what do you use to manage your business contacts and networks’?

The responses varied from whiteboards, to weekly planners, to moleskins, to prodigious use of www.linkedin.com, all with their strengths and limits for keeping track of a rapidly expanding network of contacts and relationships.

But the problem I’m grappling with is that your average notebook requires consistency and ‘reviews’, yet ultimately will be mothballed when spaces are used up. For pages turned, you have ‘out of sight, out of mind’ issues, and with sales databases (such as www.salesforce.com) you have powerful relational database schemes, but again the tendency for information to become entered, catalogued, and ultimately forgotten unless searched upon.

Linkedin is incredibly powerful and helps you visualize network connections, search in and out of network, and view the ‘degrees of separation’ between you and key contacts, yet involves it’s own gamut of online eqituette, and ultimately leaves your network wide open to those in your network. Not always what you want or need…

So, as part-experiment, part-need, I’ve started using mind-mapping software (mindjet’s mind manager for mac since the XP version is more costly and my mac is better for this) to build and visualize the network of people, relationships, and contacts currently in the works. It was tough coughing up the funds and departing from the open source equivalent Freemind, but the transition has been worthwhile already. Some interesting results that you won’t find elsewhere:

  • Ability to visualize networks and intra-Networksnetwork relationships
  • Add tasks with date reminders to contacts
  • Single view of all network contacts, due dates, action items
  • Dynamically scale, add, delete, link, unlink relationships
  • Highlight high-priority contacts and activities
  • Keep track of contacts that require follow up weeks/months down the path
  • Export data to other standard formats (office, flat files, etc.)

So far so good, and eventually this may cost-justify a 27″ imac to manage the overall network in a large screen view!

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