Snakes on a Plane

Posted by on August 19, 2006 No comments

In short: Don’t bother. I just walked out in the middle of it, and the manager at the theater was nice enough to give me a pass to get into another movie for free, so technically I’m not out anything but an hour of my life.

I was expecting campy, ridiculous, funny bad. Instead, I got rancid-meat-in-a-bucket-of-egg-yolks-and-kim-chi-left-out-in-the-sun bad. I like bad movies, mostly because I enjoy mocking them, but this was simply terrible. Seriously. I can’t even come up with a word to describe how utterly awful it is.

Save your money, or if you must, go see “John Tucker Must Die” instead — even though I’ve not seen it, I’d rather encourage people to support a movie which uses MySpace in its advertising, so long as it keeps them from going to see “Snakes on a Plane.”

I’m Getting Fed Up with Apple

Posted by on August 9, 2006 1 comment

After a terribly disappointing round of announcements at WWDC, I’m giving serious reconsideration to my affiliation with Apple and the Mac OS X platform. I’ve grown weary of Apple’s constant push to upgrade – if you’re not running the latest version of Mac OS X you may as well be running DOS. I’m tired of their flirting with the server and enterprise markets – they offer some fairly decent servers in the Xserve, but they run Mac OS X Server on them, which is an excellent server operating system if you don’t mind system management practices that date back to the early Eighties and a reliance on GUI tools – almost all of which only run on a Mac OS X client, by the way – for doing things remotely. I’m not the only one leaving or considering leaving the polished white and brushed metal of the Apple camp. I agree with both Mark and Cory’s reasons, but I’ve got my own personal gripes to air.

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Going in Circles

Posted by on July 23, 2006 1 comment

I find myself suffering again from one of my many character flaws that’s plagued me my entire life: Indecision. I’m still thinking about the D&D campaign I’ve discussed before on this site. It was primarily brought about by my waning interest in reading and learning about the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting — the book had been sitting on my floor for a while, and every time I’ve tried to get back into it I’ve failed. This doesn’t give me much hope for the setting as a whole, as if there’s one person in a D&D group who needs to be invested heavily in liking the setting it’s the DM.

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So Much for Sun

Posted by on July 10, 2006 No comments

So Sun finally got back to me about the Try and Buy thing. Long story short, they wanted to authorize a roughly $5,000 — the price of the Ultra 40 I was looking to test drive — charge against my credit card in order for me to get the system. I don’t have that kind of credit just hanging around, so I’m unable to participate in the program. This is unfortunate, and does tend to unfairly punish individuals who aren’t as likely to have that much available credit, unlike businesses, but I can understand why they do it that way. Sun is a business, and they need to protect their assets. Oh well.

SketchUp and Creating Things

Posted by on July 4, 2006 No comments

I’ve developed an interest in MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, and have decided that I want to build myself an arcade cabinet in which I will house a dedicated emulation machine, acting like arcade games and consoles of yesteryear (and, in most cases, yestermillennium). In the course of trying to design a cabinet, I came across one of the coolest tools I’ve used in a long time: SketchUp.

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Sun Microsystems Experience, Part 2

Posted by on June 28, 2006 No comments

So I called again to follow up on my Try and Buy order of my Ultra 40, and I spoke with a very friendly and helpful lady who informed me of some things of which I was not previously aware.

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Sun Microsystems Experience, Part 1

Posted by on June 26, 2006 1 comment

While I still haven’t gotten my Ultra 40 yet, I did take an opportunity today to call Sun and ask them where my order was in the process. The menu options were sensible and easily navigated, and I was speaking with a friendly gentleman in short order. He was unable to find my order in the system, and he said it’s probably in the Try and Buy processing queue or something to that effect. I gave him my email address at his request, and he said he’ll follow up once he knows what’s going on with the order. I’ll update you folks once I’ve heard back from him.

All in all, though, a rather quick and painless phone call, even if it didn’t yield immediate results. It was a rather nice change from the phone operations with which I’m accustomed to dealing. We’ll see how things play out from here.

Test Plan (Draft 1)

Posted by on June 23, 2006 No comments

This is the initial plan for how and what I’m going to be testing on the hopefully forthcoming Sun Ultra 40.

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Fun with a Sun

Posted by on June 20, 2006 1 comment

So I got the quote for my Ultra 40 that I’m going to be using for participating in Sun’s try before you buy program. Hopefully they’ll soon be shipping me a $5,000 system for testing Ruby on Rails.

One thing that I did notice, thanks to a comment on Jonathan’s blog entry about the promo, is that Sun explicitly forbids benchmarking in their Solaris Software License Agreement. To wit, in part 5(f):

You may not publish or provide the results of any benchmark or comparison tests run on Software to any third party without the prior written consent of Sun.

So, to that end I’m going to not post any hard numbers for benchmarks in Solaris. Instead, I’ll be commenting on how performance feels in relation to Linux — basically whether or not I think it would be a contender in an environment where performance was very important. Then again, it does say “third party.” If I’m publishing them myself, would that not be publishing to a third party? I might take that up with Sun’s legal department, just to be certain.

Sun’s “First One’s Free” Push

Posted by on June 19, 2006 1 comment

Sun Microsystems, venerable system and software vendor of the Unix world, has a rather interesting promo going on. It’s part of their try-before-you-buy deal, where you can get a free 60-day run on one of their mid- or high-end servers and workstations. According to Jonathan in his blog post, if you post a thorough review (in the eyes of the product team) regardless of whether it’s favorable or not, you can keep the system for free. Presumably they’ll take your words and use them as marketing copy if appropriate, but for a free Sun system they could use them to promote an end to tooth-brushing for all I care. ;)

I’ve already submitted my application for an Ultra 40 dual-Opteron workstation. I intend to use it for testing Ruby on Rails deployment and performance. I’d like to install Rails on Solaris 10 (preinstalled!), Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Server 2003 to see which one comes across as most manageable, and with the best performance. This is the first of my entries in that series.

I selected the Ultra 40 workstation primarily because that’s what will fit best in my office at home, under my desk, and it gives me the ability to test Windows in the equation as well as Linux distributions that don’t support SPARC64. We’ll see how this shapes up, and I’ll try to keep you posted.