VMWare is in Microsoft\’s sights

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , ,

Microsoft has released its Virtual Server product, aimed at VMWare. Price is an aggressive $499.

I have mixed feelings about it.VMWare is expensive, with a list price of about 8 times as much. But I’m still not terribly impressed.

For one, with VMWware ESX Server, you get everything you need, including a host OS. With Microsoft Virtual Server, you have to provide Windows Server 2003. By the time you do that, Virtual Server is about half the price of VMWare.

I think you can make up the rest of that difference very quickly on TCO. VMWare’s professional server products run on a Linux base that requires about 256 MB of overhead. Ever seen Windows Server 2003 on 256 megs of RAM? The CPU overhead of the VMWare host is also very low. When you size a VMWare server, you can pretty much go on a 1:1 basis. Add up the CPU speed and memory of the servers you’re consolidating, buy a server that size, put VMWare on it, and then move your servers to it. They’ll perform as well, if not a little bit better since at peak times they can steal some resources from an idle server.

Knowing Microsoft, I’d want to give myself at least half gig of RAM and at least half a gigahertz of CPU time for system overhead, minimum. Twice that is probably more realistic.

Like it or not, Linux is a reality these days. Linux is an outstanding choice for a lot of infrastructure-type servers like DHCP, DNS, Web services, mail services, spam filtering, and others, even if you want to maintain a mixed Linux/Windows environment. While Linux will run on MS Virtual Server’s virtual hardware and it’s only a matter of time before adjustments are made to Linux to make it run even better, there’s no official support for it. So PHBs will be more comfortable running their Linux-based VMs under VMWare than under Virtual Server 2003. (There’s always User-Mode Linux for Linux virtual hosts, but that will certainly be an under-the-radar installation in a lot of shops.)

While there have been a number of vulnerabilities in VMWare’s Linux host this year, the number is still lower than Windows 2003. I’d rather take my virtual host server down once a quarter for patching than once a month.

I wouldn’t put either host OS on a public Internet address though. Either one needs to be protected behind a firewall, with its host IP address on a private network, to protect the host as much as possible. Remember, if the host is compromised, you stand to lose all of the servers on it.

The biggest place where Microsoft gives a price advantage is on the migration of existing servers. Microsoft’s migration tool is still in beta, but it’s free–at least for now. VMWare’s P2V Assistant costs a fortune. I was quoted $2,000 for the software and $8,000 for mandatory training, and that was to migrate 25 servers.

If your goal is to get those NT4 servers whose hardware is rapidly approaching the teenage years onto newer hardware with minimal disruption–every organization has those–then Virtual Server is a no-brainer. Buy a copy of Virtual Server and new, reliable server hardware, migrate those aging machines, and save a fortune on your maintenance contract.

I’m glad to see VMWare get some competition. I’ve found it to be a stable product once it’s set up, but the user interface leaves something to be desired. When I build or change a new virtual server, I find myself scratching my head whether certain options are under “Hardware” or under “Memory and Processors”. So it probably takes me twice as long to set up a virtual server as it ought to, but that’s still less time than it takes to spec and order a server, or, for that matter, to unbox a new physical server when it arrives.

On the other hand, I’ve seen what happens to Microsoft products once they feel like they have no real competition. Notice how quickly new, improved versions of Internet Explorer come out? And while Windows XP mostly works, when it fails, it usually fails spectacularly. And don’t even get me started on Office.

The pricing won’t stay the same either. While the price of hardware has come down, the price of Microsoft software hasn’t come down nearly as quickly, and in some cases has increased. That’s not because Microsoft is inherently ruthless or even evil (that’s another discussion), it’s because that’s what monopolies have to do to keep earnings at the level necessary to keep stockholders and the SEC happy. When you can’t grow your revenues by increasing your market share, you have to grow your revenues by raising prices. Watch Wal-Mart. Their behavior over the next couple of decades will closely monitor Microsoft’s. Since they have a bigger industry, they move more slowly. But that’s another discussion too.

The industry can’t afford to hand Microsoft another monopoly.

Some people will buy this product just because it’s from Microsoft. Others will buy it just because it’s cheaper. Since VMWare’s been around a good long while and is mature and stable and established as an industry standard, I hope that means it’ll stick around a while too, and come down in price.

But if you had told me 10 years ago that Novell Netware would have single-digit marketshare now, I wouldn’t have believed you. Then again, the market’s different in 2004 than it was in 1994.

I hope it’s different enough.

Converting Bachmann On30 cars to O or O27?

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s always a discussion about the cost of O gauge/O scale somewhere, mostly because it’s hard to find new locomotives for less than $500 and new train cars for under $75. You’d think this was a hobby for trial lawyers and brain surgeons.

One guy pointed out how much bang for the buck he’s getting when he buys On30.

Now, a bit of terminology here. O scale is 1:48 scale. One quarter inch on the model is equal to a foot on the real-world equivalent. O27, the cheaper brother of O scale, is actually 1:64 scale, though it runs on the same track. “Serious” hobbyists often look down on O27, but the nice thing about O27 is it lets you pack a lot more into a smaller space.

So what’s this On30 stuff and what’s the difference between it and regular O or O27 scale?

I’m glad you asked.

On30, On3, and the like refer to “narrow gauge.” Most train track in the United States has its rails 4 feet 8 inches (or 8 1/2 inches) apart. That’s “Standard gauge.” Occasionally, a railroad would lay its track 3 feet apart, or 30 inches apart, or some other measurement narrower than 4’8.5″. This was especially common out west in regions where they had to deal with a lot of mountains. On30 refers to 1:48 scale models of 30-inch gauge trains. On3 refers to 1:48 scale models of 3-foot gauge trains. On2 refers to 1:48 scale models of 2-foot gauge trains. And so on. I’ve talked more about On30 here if you want to know more.

Now it just so happens that the distance between the rails on regular old HO scale track measures out to 31.3 inches in O scale. For most people, that’s certainly close enough. O scalers have been living with track that’s 5 scale feet wide ever since we decided that O scale was 1:48, back in the 1930s or so.

So Bachmann, the makers of the cheap HO and N scale train sets you see in big box stores, decided to take advantage of this convenient accident, make some 1:48 scale cars, put narrow trucks on them, bundle some HO scale track and commercialize On30. So now it’s actually easier in some regions to get a Bachmann On30 train set than it is to get a Lionel O train set.

I found this page on converting Bachmann On30 cars to S scale. What the author did was remove the Bachmann trucks and couplers and substitute American Flyers. Since S scale stuff is even more scarce than regular O scale, this is a slick trick. And, as you can see from the pictures, for the most part the stuff still looks right. Rivet counters won’t like it, but if you’re a rivet counter you’re probably not reading this page anyway. For people starved for inexpensive trains, or for trains, period, they’re fine.

Well, I like my Lionels. I’m not going to convert to On30. But I don’t like Lionel prices. So I build some of my own stuff, and the stuff I do buy, I buy used. So I’ve amassed a pretty sizeable collection, even though I’ve spent a lot less than most hobbyists will spend on a single locomotive.

But I’m always looking for something new and different.

A K-Line passenger car costs $117. A Bachmann passenger car costs $28.

A pair of K-Line freight trucks costs $8. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

You can’t put freight trucks on a passenger car. That’s what I’m thinking. Freight trucks are different from passenger trucks for some reason. Something about people wanting a smoother ride than cows.

But you get the idea. $36 is a lot less than $117.

K-Line passenger trucks are $25 apiece. That’s more than the car. But $78 is still less than $117, though I’d just live with using freight trucks, myself.

If the S scalers can do it, why can’t we?

Sick.. AGAIN.

Dave Farquhar Personal

I’m sick again, so I’m back on the Numotizine Cataplasm, which is Dr. Farquhar’s secret weapon against a cough. No, I’m not playing doctor. My dad and his dad were, and it was what they used.

Use at the first sign of a cough. You won’t regret it.I’m also using Zicam-branded zinc spray and cheapy generic zinc lozenges. And I’m taking my sister’s anti-cold vitamin *censored*tail three times a day: 3 grams of vitamin C, 1,200 IU of vitamin E, 150 mg of zinc (but only 50 mg in the morning–bad things happen if you take too much zinc early in the morning), three echinacea tablets, and some vitamin A. Vitamin A is lethal in large doses, so I’m not comfortable saying how much I take. Lawsuits and all.

That’s a lot to remember, so I like to buy bottles of 400 IU caplets of vitamin E, 50 mg tablets of Zinc, and 1,000 mg tablets of vitamin C to make it easy on myself. Three of each, three times a day, for three days.

After three days, back off to three of each once a day for another seven days.

There are people who claim that certain brands of vitamins are better than others, and while it’s true that some brands give better absorption than the rest, the cheapie vitamins from Kmart have done just fine for me.

None of these things will cure a cold, although those vitamins seem to be able to knock one out if you manage to catch it early enough. Any one of them has the potential to severely cut down on the symptoms, and together, they’re even better.

Your mileage will vary. I’m not a doctor. Talk to your doctor first. I’m not responsible for what happens. And all other standard disclaimers apply.

Lean, mean Linux

Dave Farquhar Linux

LinuxToday linked to a story today about Building a lo-fat Linux desktop. Basically it’s a list of applications you can run on a 233 MHz machine without feeling like you’re standing in line at the bank.

Most of the apps are things I’ve mentioned here before, but never in one place, at least not as a list of apps that run superfast. The closest I ever came was that last link. So I’m glad someone else did.

One nice thing: That last link was from 2002. Two and a half years-plus later, not much has changed. I think that’s good. It means things are stable.

Here’s a general principle to follow: KDE gives a nice, integrated environment and lots of apps that play well together, but the price is overhead. If you want something that reminds you of Windows and a Mac, run KDE. But don’t complain if Linux is slow on anything less than a cutting-edge machine, because it will be.

If you’ve heard that Linux runs fast even on ancient hardware and you want to live up to that expectation, Gnome apps are faster.

Sylpheed is a nice e-mail client if what you need is an e-mail client and not an all-out PIM. When I’m running Linux it’s what I like to use.

Dillo is a minimalist web browser. That has its advantages. Popups? Flash? Blinky ads? What are those? It’s a great choice for slower machines, and even for fast machines if what you’re wanting to do is get the information on the web without distractions and then get out.

Icewm is my default desktop no matter what machine I’m running. If I had a quad-CPU 3.4 GHz P4, I’d still run Icewm.

I haven’t used a newsreader since Google bought Dejanews, but back when I frequented newsgroups and ran my own client, Pan was tops. Pan did things that the for-pay newsreaders like Microplanet Gravity wouldn’t do. And that was something like five years ago. I’m sure it’s better now. Not only was it full-featured, it was fast.

I hadn’t heard of the picture viewers the article mentions. I’m not sure that I have a picture viewer installed on my current Linux desktop. I guess I just haven’t needed one. Hmm. But as I recall, GTKSee was reasonably quick, and its user interface was familiar, since ACDSee is a very popular program.

As far as links to the apps, I don’t provide them because you’ll need packages specific to your distribution, assuming your distribution didn’t already come with them (which it may very well have). Do a Google search on the app name and your distribution–“Sylpheed Mandrake” “Sylpheed Fedora” or what have you.

It’s a good article that I recommend reading, as is the follow-up, linked at the bottom.

A first look at Inkscape

Dave Farquhar Software

I’ve been playing with the Windows version of Inkscape, which bills itself as an open-source SVG editor. It doesn’t bill itself as an Illustrator/Corel Draw/Freehand killer, but as a simple vector drawing program, it works.

It takes getting used to. But I think I like it.I’ve talked before about free Windows graphics software but I didn’t mention Inkscape because the Windows port did not yet exist.

I don’t try to draw scaleable pictures of people. I draw objects, typically boxy objects. It works for that.

The ability to draw and finely position polygons and curves is there and obvious. The ability to do fills using patterns is there, though its use is a bit less obvious. (I did find an Inkscape pattern tutorial, but haven’t tried it yet.) The ability to group and ungroup objects is there and obvious. As is the ability to change an object’s dimensions using the keyboard, so you can get an object to be exactly 2.5 inches long if need be.

It also has the ability to simplify a shape you select. This is good if you have a shaky hand and couldn’t quite get something straight but came close. It can also bring an artsy feel to something, since simpler objects often appear more pleasing.

My biggest gripe is the grid. I don’t know what it’s measuring or where its origin is. It doesn’t line up with the ruler, so if I want something offset by a quarter-inch relative to another object, it’s difficult to do. I found myself drawing a lot of lines the length of the offset I wanted and using those to position objects, and just using the grid to get me in the right neighborhood.

But it’s a promising piece of software. I’ll use it because the price is right (free) versus the alternatives (hundreds of dollars). And if it’s anything like other pieces of open source software, it’ll steadily improve. It’s only on version 0.39 right now. Mozilla had some rough edges at version 0.3x too.

The key to drawing, which my art-teacher girlfriend told me and I’d never heard anywhere else, is not to look at the whole, but break the object you’re drawing into the simplest shapes you can. Draw and arrange those shapes, and you get a whole drawing.

If you can think like that, you can use Inkscape. If you can’t, it’ll frustrate you. (But most drawing programs probably will.)

Is there hope in Kansas City for baseball?

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , , ,

I spent some time in Kansas City this weekend. If I had any doubts this season, where the Royals went from favorites to win the division to worst team in the league in a matter of about a week, had eroded fan support, that doubt is gone now.

So now what?First, there’s the question of what went wrong. To me, the biggest thing that went wrong was Juan Gonzalez. Gonzalez proved a lethal replacement for Manny Ramirez in Cleveland not so long ago, so there was reason to believe he could be the big booming bat in the cleanup spot the Royals have never had.

The question was whether you got the healthy Gonzalez or the Gonzalez who’s more injury prone than George Brett and Fred Lynn combined.

They got the latter, and thus a waste of almost enough money to keep Carlos Beltran.

Ah, Beltran. The guy who someday would have broken the Royals’ record for number of home runs hit and bases stolen in the same season. The most underrated defensive center fielder in the game. The Scott Boras client.

Trading Beltran was the only thing the Royals could do. Scott Boras is going to ship Beltran to the team willing to pay the most money for him. Can the Royals afford to give $18 million to one player? Doesn’t matter. George Steinbrenner will top the Royals’ best offer, because he’s got Bernie Williams and Kenny Lofton in center field.

I find it very encouraging that none of the Royals’ high draft picks this year was a Scott Boras client.

The fear in KC right now is that the Royals will never keep any good players they develop, because they look back at Carlos Beltran, Johnny Damon, and Jermaine Dye. Beltran and Damon were Boras clients. They couldn’t keep them. I won’t try to explain the Jermaine Dye trade, other than to say they didn’t think they’d be able to re-sign Rey Sanchez and they felt like it was easier to find outfielders than shortstops, and they thought Neifi Perez could hit his weight outside of Colorado.

Judging from the production they’ve had out of left field this year, I think they were even wrong about that bit about outfielders being easier to find than shortstops. But at least they’ve learned.

I see upside out of this year. I really do. David DeJesus is turning out to be a fine center fielder. It would be nice if he could steal more bases, but he’s a good defensive center fielder and he can hit, and he has good speed, even if he doesn’t know how to use that speed to steal bases. Ideally he should be a #2 hitter, but even still, he’s the best leadoff hitter the Royals have had since Johnny Damon left.

Abraham Nuñez is turning out to be a steal. He may or may not be a superstar, but he’s a good defensive outfielder with respectable speed, good power, looks like he’ll be able to hit .270 or better, and can play center field when you have the need to rest DeJesus. He’s an affordable Jermaine Dye.

I haven’t seen John Buck play since his first series in the majors, but he has managed to pop some homers even if his batting average is still below .220. Still, he got off to a tremendously slow start, so hitting .220 indicates he’s making progress. But an even-up John Buck for Carlos Beltran would be a better trade than Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez turned out to be. Buck is already a better hitter than Perez, and the Royals didn’t have much in the way of catching prospects before Buck.

Angel Berroa has been a disappointment this season, but he’s in his second year and he watched the team implode around him. Of course he’s going to be jittery.

Zack Greinke looks like the best young pitcher the Royals have developed since its amazing Class of ’84 (Bret Saberhagen, Danny Jackson and Mark Gubicza). If Runnelvys Hernandez comes back from Tommy John surgery and pitches like he did in 2003, and if Jose Bautista lives up to expectations (he’s Pedro Martinez’s cousin, so hopefully that counts for something), the Royals might have fearsome pitching again for the first time in a decade. Jeremy Affeldt could come back from the bullpen and start if Mike MacDougal is healthy, and suddenly the pitching rotation looks awfully good.

I don’t know what the Royals will do in left field or at second base. But with Gonzalez gone, that leaves them some money to go after a better-than-average player for one or both positions. Or maybe they can swing a trade in the offseason for a prospect.

As hard as it may be to believe, they do seem to be getting smarter. They seem to have learned a lot from this season. Which is really all you can ask.

Any Unix gurus care to help me with mod_rewrite?

Dave Farquhar Apache , , , ,

I’ve watched my search engine traffic decrease steadily for the past few months since I changed blogging software. It seems most engines don’t care much for the super-long arguments this software passes in its URLs.

The solution is mod_rewrite, and I think my syntax looks correct, but it’s not working for me.The goal is to fake out search engines to make them think they’re looking at static files. Search engines are reluctant to index database-driven sites for fear of overloading the site. Since I can’t tell them not to worry about it, I have to make the site look like a static site.

To that end, I created a section at the end of my httpd.conf file:

# rewrites for GL

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/article/([0-9]+)$ /article.php?id=$1 [NC,L]

This line should make the software respond to Thursday’s entry (https://dfarq.homeip.net/article.php?story=20040902200759738) if it’s addressed as https://dfarq.homeip.net/article/20040902200759738.

Once mod_rewrite is working, in theory I can modify the software to generate its links using that format and watch the search engines take more of a liking to me again. But I’ve got to get mod_rewrite going first, and I’m stumped.

Any expert advice out there?

Thanks in advance.

I\’ll try to check in later this weekend.

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

It’s a long weekend, and it’s going to be a busy one.

In the meantime, for those of you who like old trains, here’s a link: Standard Gauge Blog. Primarily it’s dedicated to the old Lionel 2 1/8-inch “Standard Gauge” (there wasn’t anything standard about it, in reality). But if you want to talk about showstopper trains, the biggest showstoppers were this style.

I like this guy because he acknowledges there’s more to the world than MTH (and MTH isn’t even the center of the universe!), he talks to experts, and once he even showed how these things were/are made. Worth checking out.

The big question: PC or Mac?

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , , ,

I haven’t stirred the pot in a while, so to prove that I am a professional writer after all, I’ll go tackle the most inflammatory question I can imagine, something that makes Bush vs. Kerry look like a game of paddy-cake.

What’s the better computer, a PC or a Macintosh?OS X closely follows the history of the first Macintosh in that the first version showed lots of promise, but had lots of problems, probably shipped too soon, and lacked some important capabilities. But Apple, to its credit, washed its dirty laundry in public, fixing the problems and adding capabilities. And now, OS X has a reputation as something that “just works.” And it has something to back it up with.

Windows XP, well, that joke about 32-bit extensions to a 16-bit graphical interface on top of an 8-bit operating system originally written for 4-bit computers by a 2-bit corporation that can’t stand 1 bit of competition is almost true. Microsoft bought the 8-bit OS from a company that may have stolen it. And while Gary Kildall‘s first operating system was 4-bit, he may have written CP/M from scratch. But I digress.

Unlike Apple, Windows XP tries really hard for backward compatibility. And for all the stink about the things SP2 breaks, I’ll bet you a dollar you can go download the 1981 edition of VisiCalc for MS-DOS and it’ll run just as well on your three-point-whatever gig Pentium 4 running XP as it did on the first IBM PC. And if you can find old copies of WordStar and dBASE II and Turbo Pascal, chances are they’ll run too. Old programs that break are at least as likely to break because of timing problems with CPUs that are almost a thousand times faster than they expect as they are because of Windows. Probably more.

Sure, you’ll find programs that break, but you’ll probably find a thousand that work for every one that breaks. Especially if you limit yourself to titles that aren’t games.

This is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that software you bought almost a quarter century ago still runs if you need it. If you think that isn’t important, I’ll introduce you to one of my clients who’s still using dBASE II. It sure is important to him. The curse is all that spaghetti code you need to keep those billions and billions of old programs running.

I have a little bit more sympathy for Microsoft when I remember that Windows XP is really OS/2 1.3 with DOS bolted on, and Windows 3.1 and 98 bolted on next door.

Just a little.

When you look at it that way, is it any wonder that sometimes when you plug in your digital camera it acts goofy?

But truth be told, more often than not, your mouse and your digital camera and all your other stuff works, whether you plug it into a Windows box or a Mac. And when it doesn’t work, it’s every bit as infuriating on a Mac as it is on a Windows PC. When Windows has an error code, it spits one out in hexadecimal. The Mac spits out an error code in decimal. I guess that makes the Mac friendlier.

But I guess it doesn’t matter whether I say “deleterious” in English or in Pig Latin. It’s still not going to be a word you’re likely to have heard today, either way. And there’s a decent chance it’ll send you reaching for a dictionary (or Google).

I’ll be frank: I hated OS 9 and OS 8 and everything else that came before it. I tried to get the Mac Toss turned into an official olympic sport. If there are any old Macintoshes in the pond in front of the office building where I used to fix Macintoshes, I know nothing about them.

But Apple knew it was b0rken and threw it away and bought something better. I still think they bought the wrong something better and would have gotten here a lot sooner if they’d bought BeOS, but they bought NeXT and got Steve Jobs back, so here they are.

All things being equal, I’d go with a Mac, if only because it’s got a Unix layer underneath it.

But all things aren’t equal. Macintoshes cost a lot of money. And when you’re 2 percent of the market, you don’t have a lot of software to choose from. I know. I had long love affairs with Amiga and with OS/2 before I threw in the towel and installed Windows. And it wasn’t until 1997 that I actually used Windows as my everyday OS.

When someone hands me a disk, I can read it. When someone tells me I’ve gotta try out this new program, it runs.

On the other hand, there’s virtually no problem with viruses and spyware on the Macintosh. If I want to spy on people or cause enough damage to make the front page of USA Today, I’m going to set my sights on 90+% of the market instead of the Macintosh’s 2%. Being a minority can have its advantages.

But, after living for years with good computers and operating systems that were years or even decades ahead of their time but had no software availability, I run Windows most of the time and exercise caution to keep my system clean. I don’t use Internet Explorer, I keep my virus definitions up to date, I don’t read e-mail from strangers and don’t open unexpected attachments, and I don’t install freeware software unless it’s open source.

And guess what? I don’t have any problems with my computer either.

I know and respect other people who’ve gone the other way. For me, there never was much choice other than PC hardware. I can afford a Macintosh, but that’s money I really need to be putting towards paying off my car and my house sooner, or saving for retirement. Or any number of other things. I’m a legendary tightwad.

Other people may have had their own other reasons for making the same decision.

Getting rid of some rust on old toy trains

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , ,

I’ve seen some old tin 6-inch Marx cars in nice condition, but I sure seem to have a talent for finding Marx rustbuckets too. I also have a set of very nice Lionel tinplate–nice except for their rusty couplers.

Professional restorers remove rust by bead blasting. How do you deal with rust if you don’t happen to have a sandblaster laying around?A number of products exist catering to auto restorers. They claim not even to damage paint in some cases. I’m told that Oxisolv works safely on toy trains, or at least on Marx trains. Finding the stuff is another story. Every place I’ve looked wants as much to ship it as they want for the liquid.

As I was poking around under my kitchen sink this evening, I came across a household cleaner intended for removing rust stains from bathtubs. But the label also said it would remove rust stains from tools. Not seeing any difference, chemically speaking, between soaking a pair of pliers in the stuff and soaking a Marx train wheel, I broke out my rustbucket Marx 553, removed its wheels, put them in a plastic container, and dribbled on enough cleaner to cover it.

An hour or so later, there was visibly less rust on the wheels and axles.

Most of these products use a mild acid that readily eats away iron oxide, but has little effect on plain old iron. If you’ve heard the legends about Coca-Cola dissolving rusty nails or freeing rusted bolts, it’s the same principle.

I’m not quite brave enough to try it on the painted surfaces, and different brands will almost certainly vary, but this is a cheap way to at least improve a car’s wheels, especially if you happen to already have the stuff on hand.