Inquisitive

Essential iOS / Mac Interface cables & connectors

Being an Apple user for the last 4 years & I had successfully integrated Mac, iPad & iPhone to my personal & professional life. Many times you will suffer the lack of interfacing to other set of users & devices.. like you can't read SD card from your camera, can't connect your MBA to an ethernet port, connecting MBP to a LCD panel with HDMI & simple things like this.

Over time I had burnt cash to acquire certain set of cables & connectors. You will have always a choice of buying it from apple if you are an early adoptor or wait for OEMs to come up with the same thing at a lower price later.. 

For iPad/iPhone :

Camera Connection Kit, SQUARE credit card reader, Digital AV adapter

Camera Connection Kit : For reading SD card & Connecting to digital camera/card readers using USB

SQUARE : For taking credit cards from friends who says no cash but card. You may pay a commission if you swipe your Indian card & of course you need an US bank account

Digital AV : Connect to your LCD/projector panel using HDMI. Works well with HDTVs (tested with Sony Bravia & Panasonic Vierra)

For MBP/MBA :

Minidisplay to HDMI, DVI & VGA (all you know). Mono price sells it for very cheap than apple

Of course buy this stuff for MBA or for sure you will be left out without connectivity many times. I am not sure about buying OEM stuff as many complained of having problems. Remember it is just 100MB/s not your giga bit.

The future is going to be super for iOS devices with the introduction of red park cable. You can develop your own devices for your iPad or iPhone.

With the lot of stuff going over cloud, we may not fiddle around with SD, USB etc but there is a long way to go. Same with display tech as well. I am amazed to see videos & music streaming to my Vierra panel with Dlna player for iPad. No cables & it is seemless. Whole new generation of AirPlay enabled devices are coming out as well.

The future is going to be awesome with less connectors to carry around

Business Model Generation blocks (ppt)

It's the best business book that I had read recently.... It doesn't matter if you are an entrepreneur or a game changer in a large corporation, BMGEN do wonders for visualizing your business model & communicating it better.

I had created BMGEN building blocks for using it in your presentation. The content is the property of Alex, businessmodelgeneration.com

 

Download Business model gen blocks in pptx format. 

Tracking cars on a freeway using Roborealm & a webcam

This project is the first step in creating a low cost lane assist / pedestrian warning system for Indian roads. The objective is to detect cars with just a webcam & roborealm. That was achieved here with a Microsoft Webcam & a Core 2 Duo laptop. Roborealm is wicked cool & damn easy to use. By the way it doesn't need any programming experience.

Download Car track << .robo file

 

 

Does moving to cloud reduces your carbon footprint?

Here comes another case for moving to the cloud. This time it is not financial or business efficiency but a social imperative.. Yes, it is sustainability. 

A joint white paper by Microsoft, Accenture and WSP informs that the traditional advantages of cloud also translates to environmental benefits too. The attributes that cloud service providers tend to do better are :

• Dynamic Provisioning
• Multi-tenancy
• Higher Infrastructure Utilization
• Improved Data center PUE
• Better Hardware lifecycle management 
• Tailored hardware
• Efficient application codes & configurations

 

 

Another interesting find is about relationship between server utilization & power consumption. The figure shows that by increasing utilization from 5 to 20% gives 4 fold performance increase while the power increases by 10 to 20%. So this performance gain can be enjoyed by anybody operating their servers at this utilization range but the paper assumes that cloud service providers will have a better chance of operating most of the servers at this range.

Overall the paper is excellent when it comes to Service provider clouds. It uses three main Microsoft enterprise apps - Sharepoint, Exchange and Dynamics running on Microsoft cloud and on-premise as examples. You can download the paper here.

But the question is whether private clouds gives you the same environmental benefit? It may not because private cloud is operated in a different way than public cloud service providers. Let's wait & watch for a similar study from private cloud technology provider. Now there is another reason to move to cloud & that is good for our planet too.. 

VMware Tip 6: Configuring paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) for boot disks (Win 2003 & 2008) in ESX & ESXi 4

With vSphere 4.0 update 1, PVSCSI adapter can be used for boot disks of virtual machines and it is supported for Windows 2003 & 2008 guest OS. Since Windows doesn't have drivers for this SCSI adapter, you will get "Setup did not find any  Hard Drive Installed on your computer" error during installation. 

The following floppy images are available - pvscsi-1.0.0.5-signed-Windows2003.flp,  pvscsi-1.0.0.5-signed-Windows2008.flp & vmscsi-1.2.1.0-signed.flp in /vmimages/floppies of ESX host

Edit the virtual machine floppy settings. From the floppy options, select use floppy image and browse to the vmimages/floppies/pvscsi-1.0.0.5-signed-Windows200x.flp. Do not connect it now (doing so may result in a blank screen in the console, when the VM is powered on)

During the Windows OS installation, press F6 and connect the floppy now from settings. Press S & PVSCSI driver should appear. Press Enter to continue.

For using PVSCSI in ESXi, please refer to this community post - http://communities.vmware.com/thread/243972?tstart=0

Please refer to this VMware KB on how to configure disks with PVSCSI - http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1010398

Update: Good information on why PVSCSI doesn't improve performance in few cases - http://communities.vmware.com/thread/213313

 

iPhone 3GS - Thermal Images

Infrared Thermography is an exciting technology with lots of applications ranging from predictive maintenance, defense, medical and now to find out my iphone's body heat signature

When iphone 3GS was launched, there were few reports of iphone getting overheated. Whether the reports were true or not, apple released an advisory on keeping the iphone within operating temperatures. You can read that here  - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2101. Even there is a temperature warning screen built in.

    

So I picked up my thermal camera and prepared to do a test with my iphone 3GS which includes taking a image after a period of charging and another image after using the phone intensively for some time by playing games and watching videos. The tests are to find out the hotspots and maximum temperature that the phone is reaching after a period of normal usage.

The thermal images below shows the hotspots of iphone 3GS taken after ten minutes of usage. To put the thermal images in context, I had attached a terrible paint brushed image below. I am pretty sure that the big red spot is because of battery but not sure about the spot at bottom right corner, when you face the back of iphone towards you. I had searched ifixit 3GS tear down but couldn't figure out what causes it to overheat at that particular spot. But there is nothing to worry about as it is within the operating temperature but I am just curious to know. 

 If you are aware, please comment.. 

     

            

But I never felt that my iphone is overheating.. Do you??

Snow Leopard..... Rawrrrrrrrrrrrrss

I had recieved my Snow Leopard DVD, a day before what Apple had promised. My Mac fleet includes a 13.3" Macbook aluminium and a 13.3" Macbook Pro. Since the Macbook pro was bought recently, I was eligible for the Apple Up to Date program and I got my upgrade disk for just 9.95$

You can get yours here if you are eligible >> http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/

My Macbook pro has 4 gigs of memory and it took nearly 45 mins for the upgrade to complete. I didn't face any glitch during the upgrade process. 

Then came the surprise.. I didn't notice much new visually when I booted into Snow Leopard. My bad.. I remembered what Apple had said.. Refined not re-invented. Let's look at some of the great improvements..

Technology Improvements :

  Invented to take full advantage of today's multicore and multiGHZ processors.  It helps developers to develop applications that runs efficiently on multicore systems. For a normal user, will experience the speed and performance of new generation applications

        Now you can have tons of RAM for your Mac (upto 32 gigs) now with Snow Leopard than just 4 gig before. With 64 bit you can crunch twice the data per clock cycle. All your inbuilt OS X applications are 64 bit. Again a normal user will experience the significant performance in designed for 64-bit applications

  Again a developer stuff and now developers can leverage the gigflops of computing power available in new gen graphics cards

  Shame on you Microsoft !!

 The Chinese character input is cool, an innovative use of the touchpad 

As promised, I had gained back few gigs of hard disk space. Some say it's because of new math that Apple is using for Snow Leopard. Overall there are nice improvements, small and big everywhere.

Good reviews :

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/26/snow-leopard-review/

http://gizmodo.com/5346418/snow-leopard-review-lightened-and-enlightened?skyline=true&s=x

Snow Leopard Rawrrrrrrrrrrs!!

HFT.. Yikes!! Time to buy a supercomputer to make pennies

HFT (High Frequency Trading) is the latest buzz of wall street. You know what.. computers are earth's biggest stock trader and an estimated 70% of trading volumes are generated by computers trading against one another. Those who have the best code and tons of computer chip wins.

At stake is billions of dollars for the Wall st giants and they are using computers to bully small investors like me.. It's time to buy a super computer to make my pennies.

From FT..

The technology essentially involves automated tick-by-tick, high turnover buying and selling, which relies heavily on the speed and sophistication of the network and computer systems involved. These are lightning fast and voluminous trades to take advantage of minute and fleeting changes in prices. Speed is obviously essential — as is beating the competition to an arbitrage opportunity.

Great HFT articles..

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/weekend-opinionator-is-wall-street-picking-our-pockets/

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/nyse-builds-computer-trading-mothership-worries-abound.ars

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/-it-sounds-like-something.ars

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/07/08/60761/the-cold-war-in-high-frequency-trading

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/weekend-opinionator-is-wall-street-picking-our-pockets/

Haaaaeeeehhhhhhh!! I am going to MARS!!

VMware Tip 5: vSphere Volume Grow Tips & Tricks

vSphere volume grow allows dynamic expansion of a VMFS volume without disrupting the virtual machines running on that datastore. 

The underlying LUN on the storage array should be extended first which is then made available to the ESX host. There are two possibilities here - Extend the same LUN in the storage or create a new LUN and add it as an extent. Extending the same LUN may or may not improve performance based on how the LUN is laid out on the spindles. This method will have less management complexity and safer as there is only one LUN to protect

Creating a new LUN to add as an extent will improve performance if they are laid out on different spindles on the array. This adds more LUNs to manage and the datastore will be inaccessible even if one LUN is corrupted. So there are more LUNs to protect & manage.

With VI3, creating a new LUN in the array and adding it as an extent will work without the need to turn off the VMs. Extending the same LUN will not work when the VMs running on the VMFS volumes are powered on. A simple workaround is to do a storage vMotion to extend the same LUN

With vSphere, there is no need to turn off the VMs to extend the same LUN in the storage array.

VMware Tip 4: Thin provisioning with vSphere - Tips & Tricks

With vSphere 4, thin provisioning was supported at virtual disk level through vCenter GUI. With thin provisioning, networked storage space utilization is improved because of dynamic allocation of storage to the virtual machines. vSphere has built in capabilities to provision, manage and monitor thin provision storage to virtual machines

Thin Provisioning Tips & Tricks :

• Monitoring the datastore space utilization is very critical to prevent running out of space by overcommitment. Leverage vSphere Datastore alarms like "Datastore usage on disks" and "Datastore disk overallocation %" to trigger alerts
  
• Take virtual disk size, snapshots, swap and other files into consideration while planning for storage space for datastores and not just virtual disk size
  
• Avoid running guest OS disk defragmentation programs on a virtual disk which is thin provisioned as it might inflate the disk. Using storage vMotion using thin option will defragment the virtual disk
  
• Use storage vMotion to convert a existing thick virtual disk to thin
  
• Use thin/virtual provisioning at storage array also if it supports for better efficiency
  
• Enable alerts on the storage array to monitor the utilization of thin filesystem/LUN 
  
• As deleting data inside the virtual disks cannot claim the space back, storage vMotion using thin option can be used to make the disk thin again. 
  
• VMware FT cannot be used with thin provisioned virtual disks. Enabling FT will make the virtual disks thick
  
• Avoid using thin virtual disks for applications in guest os which zeroes out the space before actually writing into it
  

Different virtual disk formats :

Thin - vmkernel allocates space only before an I/O is committed. Virtual disk size will be equal to the utilized size and will grow till the user specified size

Zeroed Thick - vmkernel zeroes out the required free space only before an I/O occurs. Virtual disk size will be equal to the user specified size during virtual disk creation

EagerZeroed Thick - vmkernel zeroes all the free space during the creation of virtual   disk. Virtual disk size will be equal to the user specified size during virtual disk creation

VMs having virtual disk with thick formats can be converted to thin format using storage vMotion in vSphere

Great Thin provisioning resources :

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/04/thin-on-thin-where-should-you-do-thin-provisioning-vsphere-40-or-array-level.html

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/pointers-for-using-thin-provisioned-disks/

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/thin_provisioning_datasheet.pdf