gtuhl: startup IT and software development

Despite my recent move to OSX for work environment I am a big fan of Dell. Their servers, especially the latest lines, are solid, well-constructed machines that perform very very well for their price. The desktop and laptop business lines are also good machines (I especially like the no-tools-required construction of the Optiplex line) and they have never failed to satisfy the terms of the purchased warranty on any piece of hardware. I paid for 4hr onsite hardware replacement on our first couple servers due to the sales rep lumping it in at virtually no added cost and when a CPU failed in one of those servers they were on site replacing the CPU in less than 3 hours. Also as a small business customer you get to talk to Americans living in Texas when you call for support.

In any case, the one thing I hate about Dell is every damn time you use support they follow up a week or so later with a phone call and email both asking you to complete different surveys. I don’t want to get a call every time a hard drive fails and needs replaced or every time a server power supply fails. These are relatively common, harmless events. Just ship or bring me the part depending on the warranty terms and leave it at that. The phone version of the survey is at least an english-speaking, generally pleasant person but they use that call-ahead garbage where you have to wait for them to take the call after they have called you and if you ignore them or hang up they will call back every day. My responses are rapidly growing more venomous.

My development environment at work lately has consisted of a personally owned 17″ Windows XP clunker laptop and a company-owned desktop with dual 19″ LCDs running opensuse 10.2. All together I had 2 machines and 3 monitors cooperating happily with synergy. In general, I was pretty happy with this setup. The desktop made a great workstation but the laptop, even with a bump to 2gb ram awhile back, was starting to show its age (28 months). At the office this wasn’t such a big deal but when I had to use the laptop at home it was a real pain.

In any case, a well-equipped nearly-new 17″ macbook pro recently freed up at the office and on the urging of my coworkers I took it home to try yesterday evening. I haven’t used a mac for any significant duration since the pre-OSX days so it has been a bit fun exploring an unfamiliar environment. Thought I would share my thoughts after banging on it for the first few hours.

Things I don’t like:

• Why the hell is the ‘fn’ key where CTRL should be?
• I currently prefer the xp/gnome style of maximize/user-pref for windows over the mac ‘zoom’ approach.
• Took me more than 5 minutes to find a subversion client that was useful. First one I grabbed didn’t support SSH making it completely useless.
• I keep trying to use CTRL for various shortcuts instead of ⌘
• …

Things I like:

• bash
• F9-F11
• Spotlight is incredible
• The display is excellent
• Text looks wonderful
• I prefer the dock greatly over the minimized window approach in xp/gnome

So whether its the OS or the newer hardware or a combination of the two this thing is pretty nice. My issues are all related to familiarity and given that Microsoft fumbled a bit with Vista perhaps this was the next logical step in terms of laptop anyway. It just happened sooner than I anticipated. The laptop is running tiger as it was purchased barely before leopard was released. Perhaps if it sticks with me i’ll have to pull the trigger on the upgrade.

Welcome to the new blog. It hopefully is identical to the last as everything appears to have imported cleanly. I went ahead and hosted the latest from wordpress.org so that I can take more control over the pages, plugins, and themes. This should mean better code formatting in the future.

I am using https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ for the host and would highly recommend them for hosting a wordpress blog. It only took about 30 minutes to get everything installed, active, and imported.

A real post about Zenoss Core should be showing up real soon. It is a pretty fantastic tool I recently setup to monitor our servers and devices and I want to share the experience and offer some tips and tricks.