Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » August 2007

August 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft LiveWriter64

TAGS: Lab Freaks, Testing notes, Toys and tools

First and foremost, many thanks to Joe Cheng of the Microsoft LiveWriter team for rushing through his burrito to help me out. LiveWriter for 64bit platforms (Windows XP 64, Vista Business, etc) installs a slightly different version of LiveWriter and while my 32bit versions were able to post successfully to Movable Type (our blog engine), the 64bit version would give me weird and wonderful errors.

New to the 64bit version is a richer selection of multimedia handlers (video, tags, etc) and more blog engine specific items (like the split post aka 'more') button that's oh so important in blog engines like WordPress to avoid clogging up your front page with long posts. Additional plugins are appearing rapidly.

So getting to the point, the solution is that the registry entries for LiveWriter64 are case sensitive (though registry entries normally are NOT case sensitive) due to some hashing algorithms. So fire up 'regedit' and navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows Live Writer\Weblogs\some long alphanumeric value assigned to the particular blog\UserOptionOverrides

Then you need to change the subkey of:
UserOptionOverrides =>  subkey characterset => characterSet

You first MUST change characterset to something like 'foo' and THEN change it to characterSet otherwise it will give you a duplicate subkey error. The subkey MUST be blank/null so don't add anything.

Hope this helps out my fellow bloggers as they migrate from a 32bit Windows platform to one of the newer 64bit platforms.

Brian Chee

Posted by Brian Chee on August 22, 2007 12:21 PM

August 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Doing the right thing...

TAGS: Industry Trends

It was a bad week for the folks at Skype, with a system wide outage due (they say) to an algorhythm problem in the login process. I use skype to keep my international long distance charges under control and depend upon it to coordinate vendors for shootouts and product reviews. I know of a couple of companies that have setup Skype interfaces to their Asterisk based VoIP systems to handle all of their long distance. The bottom line is that the age of VoIP is here, but VoIP still hasn't reached that magical "five 9's" of reliability yet. (i.e. five 9's is 99.999% uptime) Nor will it ever reach the magic five 9's since VoIP typically runs over a general purpose network instead of the ultra expensive dedicated network that is POTS. (Plain Old Telephone System)

So finally getting to the point, the folks at Skype aparently did their homework and have resorted to an old fashion bribe to buy forgiveness from their userbase. In an email blast:

When the unexpected happens, it's important to remember the people who stuck behind us and whose loyalty humbled us. I want to thank everyone for their support, patience and being part of the Skype community. And for those of you who missed out on using Skype last week - I want to especially thank you as well.

As a goodwill gesture to all you faithful Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers, we're adding an additional seven days to your current subscription, free of charge. And even if you didn't miss out on using Skype last week - you can still have a week free on Skype, on the house!

Now if only the mobile carriers could learn to be so magnanimous when they have outages.

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on August 21, 2007 10:08 AM

August 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Behind the scenes of "Pimp your data center" Part 3

TAGS: Testing notes

"Man is it hot in here" is one of those phrases you just never want to hear in a data center. So while this project is purposely being done in a smaller data center, we are running some mighty expensive Dell Clusters that don't like getting hot an sweaty. Little did we know that we were in for a huge education in industrial air conditioning systems that even included EPA licenses.

This just isn't your dad's split system air conditioner, here are some of the gotchas we ran into:

• The outside units (aka Condensers) are about 400lbs each, but to reduce air conditioning costs we re-roofed recently with foam insulation and a asphalt composite membrane roof. So this means we have to build a platform on stilts to rise above the insulation and waterproofing membrane to support the weight of the condensers. (Click here for PDF of the mechanical engineering diagram showing how we're doing the mounting)
• Oh did I tell you that the condensers will be out in the hot Hawaiian sun and we're only a couple miles from Waikiki Beach? The hot salty air will eat the galvanized steel in nothing flat, so they have to be sent to a contractor to be taken apart, and literally dipped in anti-corrosion formula, and that will still only get us a 3 year warranty on corrosion.
• If you're in a coastal area, make sure your project manager orders the anti-corrosion coating from the factory.
• Then the air conditioning grade copper pipe has to be run through a wall, down a utility corridor, and through the back wall of the data center. (Click here for PDF of the room layout drawings, showing the stub outs on the back wall)
• Here is a picture of the back wall
• Here is a picture of the utility corridor
• Here is a picture of the roof where the condensers will go
• Once we get through the back wall, we need to bring the copper pipe to each APC InRow RP unit, change to a Rotax (sp?) air conditioning coupler and go directly into each compressor unit.
• Oh yeah, each compressor unit is getting a dedicated 100amp 3phase power input hard wired from the breaker panel.

The big gain over traditional air conditioning systems is that we're putting the cooling right where we actually need it. So by arranging our racks into "hot aisles" and "cold aisles" we dramatically increase the overall efficiency of the cooling system.

 

Posted by Brian Chee on August 8, 2007 05:10 PM