Discovering bacteria’s amazing communication system (Bonnie Bassler)

What Took You So Long?

• Often things ARE as bad as they seem.
• Even so, some of the time it's possible to enjoy life as it is.
• But the better anyting gets, the more you will miss it when it's gone.
• Why grieve when nothing helps? We cry because nothing helps.
• If you stubbornly refuse to mourn your losses, you get depressed.
• Revenge is a form of nostalgia.
• Suicide can be a case of mistaken identity.
• What's a person to do about feeling helpless? For a while there's just no way to see what's funny about being stuck.
• At last, a cry out in anguish: "Why me?" God answers "Why not?"
• You CAN so stand it!
• After all, it's only pain.
• What makes it seem unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.
• Everything is difficult at first.
• I have never begun any important venture for which I felt adequately prepared.
• Not everything worth doing is worth doing right.
• Without knowing for sure what is right or wrong, take your best shot.
• There's just NO way to get it all straight. Mistakes are inevitable.
• Control is an illusion.
• You wait for everything to be all right, knowing all the while that the next problem is already in the mail.
• Life just keeps coming at you.
• Complaining can become a way of of boasting about how much suffering you can endure.
• If we allow pain more of our attention than it requires, we lose some opportunities for joy.
• Escape is not a dirty word. None of us can face what's happening head-on all of the time.
• It's all right to pretend sometimes. The only danger lies in pretending that you are not pretending.

Time

"And then you went your way
I stumbled down a highway, I went mine
You know, I think it's funny the way infatuation gets beat up by time
Woo, woo baby, do you think that's fair?
Do we really have to be so lonely and so scared
Woo, woo baby, do you think that's fair?
Well, I know this is up to me and you
We can make this thing turn out like we want to"

- Do You Think That's Fair
by John Cougar (Mellencamp)

In the belly of the whale

So being adverse to specialization and drawn (like a moth to a flame) towards generalization, I have greatly enjoyed Windows IT Pro's new(er) article "What Would Microsoft Do?" written by Michael Morales, an MS Global Escalation Services team Senior Escalation Engineer. Just when I finally learned how to get Windows to not create a memory dump when it crashes, Mr. Morales has started piquing my interest in understand how to use those memory dumps (and other debugging and troubleshooting logs / tools).

Perhaps it's my tendency to want to make the simple complicated, but time and again I find that having an understanding of HOW something works (which is often best learned by studying something when it is failing to work), leads to being an all around better user, administrator and designer of interconnected systems (e.g. Microsoft software/networks).

Anywho, kudos to Michael Morales....oh, and I assume this MM is NOT the more infamous M.A.M. but then, maybe that prison vocational training really paid off.

Uncle Bob (aka Robert Dilger)

Uncle Rob died last night. Farewell and RIP, Bob.

Anthony Sloan RIP

Background: http://www.ridemonkey.com/forums/showthread.php?t=218200

His (memorial?) site (some incredible photos): http://www.anthonysloan.com/

DSD Comment: I don't know if I ever met the guy, but if I did, I missed a key opportuntity to chat with what appears to have been a very interesting man.

:-(

Moving Hyper-V VMs

Ok, in my never-ending attempt to keep all electronic files for the Deron S. Dilger Presidential Library, I added another TB of storage to the home LAN. I put it in the Windows Server 2008 box that has become my primary server. As this machine is acting as the Hyper-V Virtual Host for several VMs running on GTech's LAN, I wanted to get a second SATA drive in this box to try and get some better performance outta the VMs who were running from the system drive.

Anyway, got the 1TB drive added and formated and ran Robocopy to move a bunch of stuff (including the VM folders/files) off the C drive. Last time I moved around my Hyper-V VMs I had to export them and re-import them in Hyper-V Manager to get the type of directory structure I wanted (i.e. to keep the VM's XML and VHD files in their own folders for ease of grouping and backup). This time I figured there had to be an easier way.

Not only did I (ok, Google) find this great explanation of how Hyper-V Manager keeps track of "its" VMs, that link in turn pointed to a freeware utility (DiMASoft's Hyper-V File Manager Utility) that makes the whole moving of HV VMs super easy. I was cursing at Hyper-V at first, especially now that I've also been running VMWare for the last few months. Much easier to move around VM folders/files with VMWare! But now with this utility, I'm back to feeling like Hyper-V and VMWare are comparable (for my purposes).

I also learned about mklink. Plan to use that tool more to organize my electronic rat's nest. Let's hear it for abtractions and vitualizations.

Virtualize On, Baby!

Motorcycle boy has a blog!?!?

Holy crap! C has a blog?!?!? Seems he is a bit shy and only lets invitees view and comment. Man is it the 21st century or what?

http://ch21squestforlorettas.blogspot.com/

My Favorite Superbowl Ads

Beer-flavored Doritos: http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/43/videos/commercials#page:2/video:09000d5d80e7a273

Conan party starter: http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/43/videos/commercials#page:3/video:09000d5d80e80945

PepSuber: http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/43/videos/commercials#page:3/video:09000d5d80e81831

eTrade Babies: http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/43/videos/commercials#page:5/video:09000d5d80e7bdf3

Jackie Moon Bud Light: http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/43/videos/commercials#page:7/video:09000d5d8067384c

Installing MS PerformancePoint

Damn, just keeping the names of the components straight is a bitch. Almost as bad as Sharepoint. Quick link to self to help keep it straight and get a quick overview of the PP install process... http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/37939

Virtual Reality

So I was evangelizing OS virtualization software to my dear friend W this weekend. He's a power-sysad who maintains both Windows and *nix systems for a living. Sadly, he hasn't had an excuse to get into playng with virtualization tools such as VMWare, Hyper-V, XenServer. Many with much more experience with VM offerings than I have written much on comparisons of each (e.g. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8880 ). Although I was introduced to virtualization with MS's Virtual Server 2005, I primarily have used MS Hyper-V on my research server to really start poking into using VMs. But as of late, I've started using VMWare Workstation v6.5 at work. Although I didn't much like the admin console in VMWare as much as the simpler (and I think, more intuitive) one in Hyper-V Manager, I've come round more and more to liking VMWare. The performance of the VM guests seems a bit better on my laptop's VMWare than what I see on my more robust hardware running Hyper-V. This could be that the configuration of the host OS and the overhead of Server 2008, yet I would have expected that 64bit dual-core CPU to be a bit faster than my WinXP 32bit laptop acting as a host.

So it seems that MS has now released a free version of Server 2008 Hyper-V. I'm not sure I'd want to bother with the nuances of this version for the sake of getting Hyper-V, but for those who want to experiment with yet another "free" version, there is now an option for true MS Hyper-V without having to buy a Server 2008 license. Personally, it seems that with the availability of VMWare Workstation and Server created VMGuests, one might be just fine with VMPlayer for personal research of alternate Guest OSs. For a more robust network solution, I will be sticking with Hyper-V (since I'm so Microsoft biased), but am curious to hear my *nix-capable friend's conclusions as he digs into the plethora of (wider) options available to him (e.g. Red Hat Fedora's KVM, opensource XEN). There is no doubt in my mind that those who have wrestled with maintaining networks too small to justify enterprise-class systems-management tools MUST investigate virtualization tools or risk being rightly identified as holdouts of an antiquated-mindset.