March 31, 2009 by Jeff Pabian

inconceivable, yes… impossible, no.

please stop the voices

I’ve posted before about innovation and creativity. Recent events have brought this back into my daily thoughts and how I continue to try and define myself. Those are mere details that I don’t want to get into, however I do have some things to share.

you’re not helping

On Twitter, someone tweeted about this incredible post (apologies to you; I can’t find the original tweet):

The Makers of Things

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

Rands has quite a following. I had not seen his blog before but you can bet I’ll be following it. To me, the message is that despite the impossible, don’t stop trying. Sure, I over simplified it, but that’s okay. It’s such a great post, any summation I do would not do the post justice. Just go read it.

realizations

However, it does help slam some things I’ve been juggling into perspective. I don’t have or know all the answers, but I am not afraid to try new things and take some lumps, (or teeth marks on my skull) for something I believe in. Change is scary. New ideas can seem silly. The wrong motivation can really crush the spirit.

In preparation of this post, I was trying to come up with a catchy title so I looked up innovation in the thesaurus:

Main Entry: innovation

Part of Speech: noun

Definition: change, novelty

Synonyms: addition, alteration, contraption, cutting edge*, departure, deviation, introduction, last word*, latest thing*, leading edge*, modernism, modernization, modification, mutation, newness, notion, permutation, shift, variation, vicissitude, wrinkle*

Antonyms: custom, habit, old, old hat, rut, tradition

Naturally, the synonyms are all familiar to me, but what was interesting was seeing them in this context. The synonyms that speak to me are:

addition
alteration
departure
deviation
introduction
leading edge
modernism
modernization
modification
mutation
newness
shift

nuggets

The element that all these words have in common, is “change.” Could the essential nugget of wisdom of innovation boil down to one thing? Change? Yeah, I think it does.

I’m conflicted. I like to think of myself as an “Agent of Change” but I sure feel like a jerk saying that. And there are probably people out there who think I’m a jerk for saying it, but the truth is, I do like change.

what about the risk?

But what about risk? I’m not afraid of the risk of a change or a new idea, what I am shy about, is the risk of exposing myself. For the most part, I feel like I am confident in who I am, but it’s one thing to pitch my ideas to higher ups or more experienced people in my arena. It’s a personal risk, for sure, but also it’s pulling back the kimono a bit, right? It’s exposing myself to someone who could squash my spirit or worse. So it is risk? Or fear? Or both?

What holds me back? What holds you back?

Alright, I feel like I am rambling a bit. I think I went down the rabbit hole. Anyways, where was I…

Back to innovation. Whatever word you pick to use to describe it, I’m okay.

March 6, 2009 by Jeff Pabian

vmware esxi @home

I’ve been getting a bunch of emails about the progress I’ve been making on my VMWare ESXi server. I figured it might merit a post.

So far, I got three VM’s each running CentOS 5.2. One is a ZenOSS installation, one is a Trixbox installation, and one is a stock linux install that I plan to use for Web and PHP developing.

What’s interesting about the 3rd on, is that I cloned it from a snapshot of the first one. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

First off, in answer to most of the questions, I am experience NO problems with my Trixbox install. Keep in mind, I am using RAID 0 with three 72GB SCSI drives in a Dell 1750. These are NOT IDE drives. I noticed no stuttering or voice quality issues. Second, keep in mind this is for our home and not a busy office.

Interestingly enough, my biggest problem has been power outages. The power goes off and the box goes down but comes back up. I don’t know of a way to automatically power on the VM’s or start them from the command line. If you know, let ME know please!

The second question I get is, how’s my power bill. Actually, it seems fine. My wife hasn’t said anything about it being high or abnormal so “mums the word.”

February 8, 2009 by Jeff Pabian

home project update

Okay, so I haven’t been updating as much as I would like.

Regardless, I have been busy.

I am happy to report that my VM of Trixbox is working fantastically.

I am equally happy to report that my ZenOSS installation is good, too. I had only one instance where the network just sort of disappeared but I restarted it and all has been good.

We had some neighbors over and they commented on how many computers I have. They said, “Gee, we count four right here and we only have laptop that we’re borrowing.” After they left, I started thinking about that and I was a little embarrassed.

I have way more computers than the average guy and while I do a lot of cool things, (at least cool to me), it means nothing. I mean, yeah, I can say “Look at all the cool stuff I do!” But the reality is that our phones work, our video is displayed on our TV, our iTunes are played through our stereo, our Xbox as XBMC on it, our Wii gets the weather, you can get WiFi in every inch of our house, and all of this monitored.

Yeah, it’s probably overkill, but it’s fun for me. It’s what I do to relax and it helps me keep up on the latest tech out there.

January 11, 2009 by Jeff Pabian

a weekend with Windows 7

I’m pleasantly surprised.

I downloaded the DVD ISO for the Windows 7 beta release. For some reason, I was really excited that Microsoft was putting out Windows 7 for beta and letting the community take it for a spin. I have enjoyed playing around with other OS releases such as Fedora and Ubuntu.

I have a Toshiba laptop that’s a year old. It’s got an AMD Athlon X2 CPU and came with Vista on it. When I first got it, I put Fedora on it right away. But I did a dual boot so if I ever needed Vista, it was there. I played around with Vista and even though I never bashed it like others did, I liked it okay. Coming from WinXP to Vista, it was sometimes frustrating to find the apps I was looking for or to change the settings. For the most part, I used Linux on this laptop probably 95% of the time. So I thought this would be perfect to try out Windows 7.

Installation

Installation went really smooth and much faster than XP or my experience restoring Vista from the DVD’s that came with my laptop. Once it was completed, I noticed that I couldn’t set my screen resolution beyond 1024 x 600 and that I didn’t have any WiFi connectivity. Clearly I was in need of some drivers, so I plugged in an ethernet cable, got connected on my LAN and started up Windows Update. It found nine updated, all of which were all my device drivers.

While that was downloading, I downloaded the latest drivers from ATI for my video card. I picked my model and downloaded the Vista drivers.

Windows was also complaining about the fact I didn’t have any anti-virus installed, so I installed my favorite one, Avast!.

When everything finished installing, it of course wanted to reboot. Once it did, everything just worked. I had Wifi and I was able to get my screen resolution to 1280 x 800. I re-ran Windows Update and it reported that I was all up to date.

Customizing

Now, I was ready to get down to business. So I installed my apps I typically install;

Firefox with Foxmarks
Digsby

After syncing my bookmarks, I had all my stuff that I feel is important. I tried out IE8 and honestly, I couldn’t tell much of a difference between it and IE7. I will say that my company’s Exchange 2007 web portal wouldn’t work with IE8.

I also made the icons tiny on the taskbar. I felt the default taskbar took too much real estate. I also picked a different background.

Joining my wireless networks was a breeze. I was surprise how easy Microsoft made it. You can pretty much click on the list of wireless networks and click on one to join.

One thing that threw me for a loop was plugging in my headphones. Both the laptop speakers and the headphones were active. I had to right click on the speaker in the systray and open up “Playback Devices.” Both my headphones and the speakers were there. I had to “Deactivate” the laptop speakers.

Windows 7 tried to make you feel good about your headphones, regardless how crappy they may be by calling them a “High Definition Audio Device.”

Initial Final Thoughts

I like it. I told someone that it was like they took the good stuff out of Vista and the good stuff out of XP and mushed them together. It is much more inituitve than Vista and I would feel much better about upgrading from XP to Windows 7 than I ever did with Vista.

As I installed items and ran Windows Update, I got the initial “Do you want to run this…” pop up, but no where near as in frequency as I did in Vista.

I also really like some of the new apps you get. I noticed it comes with Powershell, (which I’ve heard great things about, but never played with), and some neat process and memory management tools.

It may be an illusion but it seems that my laptop runs things faster with Windows 7 than with Vista. I have no real benchmarks, but it sure seems that way. I did notice that my memory consumption is very low in comparision with my XP machine.

I like how Windows 7 found all my needed drivers via Windows update. I was worried I would have to load drivers off the OEM DVD that came with my laptop.

My battery is lasting a little longer, too. It could be that the cooling fan isn’t coming on at all, (under Vista, hot air was blasting out, but I haven’t seen it like that yet).

I haven’t really done much but email, surfing, listening to music, but I must say that I think this is really promising. I applaud Microsoft for releasing this out to the public for feedback and testing.

I’ll continue to do things with it and post more info.

January 7, 2009 by Jeff Pabian

my favorite music videos

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. Since there is Youtube and Google Video, it’s easy to find your favorite music videos. Granted, the quality isn’t always perfect, but I rarely watch videos on MTV or the other music video channels. So, that’s where I get my fix. There are several videos that I would consider to be my favorites and some that I would say were very influential in my life. I should also clarify that while these are songs I really really like, this list is about my favorite music videos. Without futher ado, here’s my list of Top Videos…

Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads.
I saw this video one night when I was spending the night at my Grandma’s house. My grandma would let me stay up late and I remember sleeping on a cot in the living room and it was a Friday night. SCTV was on, and this video was featured on the show.

Around this time, I bought my first LP… it was Devo, New Traditionalists. What, you want to know what my first cassette was? Sure, it was the self titled album by The Clash.

Rubber Biscuit by The Blues Brothers.
Okay, so this video isn’t that great, but I got lots of questions about “What’s with your tag line?” Well, I got it from this song.

You got to understand that I lived in Chicago when the first Blues Brother movie was made. As goofy as this song is, it will always hold a special place in my heart.

Everything is Everything by Lauryn Hill.
Damn, she’s got a voice. My wife was really into her and when I saw this video, I was floored.

I like the song and I like the who turntable motif. It’s a great video and song.

The Talking Heads – Road To Nowhere

I love this video. I remember when True Stories came out. It was a classic in my opinion and this video I thought really showed off some of the creative genius they had.

Great visuals.

They Wiseguys – Start the Commotion

I haven’t been able to find a lot of info on the Wiseguys, (apparently, there is German band with the same name and they overshadow these Wiseguys). But I love this video with the loops (both audio and video). It’s one of those songs that just sticks with you. I sure wish I could find a better version.

Johnny Cash – Hurt

I don’t care who you are and what you’re made of. If this doesn’t tug at the ol’ heart strings, then you are probably a cold bastard. The first time I saw this video, I had a household of contractors, (we had just moved into our new house). Everything came to a stand still and when the video was over, we were all teary eyed… “Uh, I musta got sumthin’ in my eye…”

I hope I go out like Johnny Cash.

Smog (Bill Callahan) – Rock Bottom Riser
I’m a recent new listener to Smog. I love it, or I should say him What I like about this video is the calligraphy-like draws that illustrate the song. I’ve always wondered how they did things, and I think this video is amazing. Much in the same way I’ve always enjoyed the opening to the old Pink Panther movies.

Cornershop – Brimful of Asha
I don’t remember where I saw this first, but I loved it the first time I saw it. In the same vein as “How’d they do that…” this video is cool. The song is good, too. I picked up the CD somewhere and there are a lot of good songs on it. Besides, Tjinder is a cool name, right?

Adidas – Hello Tomorrow
This really isn’t a music video, but rather a commercial. When I first saw this, I was about to watch the Simpsons with my son and after it was over, we just looked at each other with out jaws hanging open. We must have watched it 20 times on the TiVo. This video is so interesting, it got all sorts of press in the Ad journals:

And that girl singing is Karen O from the “Yeah-Yeah-Yeah’s”.

Einstürzende Neubauten – Stella Maris
Sure, I like the song, but this video is beautifully shot and composed. The subtitles also lend to the overall experience and tell a engaging story.

I would also like a hat like that.

Conclusion

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not up all the music videos these days. But much of the music that is churned and pushed out is just crap. The videos I’ve posted here are significant to me in that they were either the first time I was exposed to the music or I was a little kid and they made a profound impact on me.

There is a house built out of stone
Wooden floors, walls and window sills
Tables and chairs worn by all of the dust
This is a place where I don’t feel alone
This is a place where i feel at home

And I built a home
For you
For me

Until it disappeared
From me
From you
And now, it’s time to leave and turn to dust

(Instrumental)

Out in the garden where we planted the seeds
There is a tree as old as me
Branches were sewn by the color of green
Ground had arose and passed it’s knees

By the cracks of the skin I climbed to the top
I climbed the tree to see the world
When the gusts came around to blow me down
I held on as tightly as you held onto me
I held on as tightly as you held onto me

And I built a home
For you
For me

Until it disappeared
From me
From you

And now, it’s time to leave and turn to dust

– The Cinematic Orchestra – To Build a Home

January 1, 2009 by Jeff Pabian

Happy New Year!

Hey Folks! I hope you all had as nice as a New Years Eve as our family did. It was really nice and we spent some good times with our neighbors and met a lot of nice people. The kids had fun and even though I slept in, I feel pretty good.

Chinese TV

Today, I am going to finish helping my Chinese mother-in-law set up a Medialounge device on her TV. You see, she bought this rather cool set top box that was a wireless media extender but was pre-programmed to go out and get Chinese content on her TV. She would like to watch this on her TV while she did her treadmill, Lose Weight Exercise bike, etc. She doesn’t want to watch it on her computer monitor.

We got it set up and I was pretty impressed. I can’t read Chinese but it did look like it was going to be great. What she found out was, they get you hooked and then literally nickel and dime you to death. The first shows are free, then $.10, then $.50, and so on. She sent it back, but wished we could do something else.

D-link DPG-1200

We had a family trip to our local Fry’s and we were trying to figure out how to get the Chinese content off her PC onto her TV. Sure, Fry’s had a ton of the wireless media players, but they were expensive. They had two open boxes for the D-Link DPG-1200. I scanned the barcode with my Google G1 and found that the price was right but had a really hard time finding any reviews.

I brought it home to set it up and was impressed. Now this is no original XBOX with XBMC on it, but it would do fine for our needs.

Wireless Woes

What I didn’t plan on was that her PC is hooked up wireless as well as the DPG-1200. The DPG-1200 could get content from the Internet just fine, but watching content off of her PC sucked bad. I’m guessing it had to do with both devices being connected to the LAN wirelessly.

So the plan is when we go over there, will run Cat5 cable through the walls. This is always a slippery slope.

My thoughts on the Dlink DPG-1200

Honestly, I like DPG-1200, but I will admit the set up was very complex. I don’t think the less tech savvy crowd would have hung with it as much as I did. Additionally, there is almost zero documentation on what to expect with the device. Someone who never had a device like this would be like, “Okay, now what?”

I can’t even tell if it supports uPNP, but that’s just me. For my mother-in-law, I think she’ll be happy but if she didn’t have me around to help, I think she would have disappointed and frustrated.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes today.

December 31, 2008 by Jeff Pabian

VMware, Trixbox 2.4, and Viatalk

As I promised, I’d update more often about some of the things I’ve been working on. In my other posts, I’ve been playing around with VMWare ESXi in my basement on an older Dell 1750.

I had a couple of goals.

Update my Trixbox (Asterisk) installation
Run SpaceWalk
Run ZenOSS
Have a linux utility box
Screw around and push VMWare’s ESXi until it cried for mercy

Update my Trixbox (Asterisk) installation

I still get a lot of traffic to my site since I have some detailed instructions for setting up ViaTalk with Trixbox. Some time recently, my current server, version 2.2 stopped working reliably. The Tin Foil hat crowd pointed their fingers at Comcast but I couldn’t buy that in my hearts of hearts. Sure enough, ViaTalk updated some of there settings and I could get my Trixbox installation working about 50% of the time.

So, version 2.4 has come out. So I started fresh. All my VM’s are 2 CPU’s with 4GB RAM. ESX|ESXi does a great job of abstracting the amount of memory so even thought the OS sees all 4GB’s, the VM is really only taking up about 150MB’s on the hypervisor; YMMV.

After screwing around (the back up and restore method DID NOT work), I finally got a “golden image.” I got in the habit of snapshotting my VM image so I could always roll back if need be instead of suffering another complete install.

I have my VM’s to have their filesystem on the drives in the 1750, but the swap is actually served off NFS on my Freebsd box, (you might ask yourself why I did this. Remember, I wanted to see the breaking points of the VM’s so I did some things intentionally that would create some overhead).

I got everything set up and it worked great… except on tiny thing. Now, I have to have:

Allow Anonymous Inbound SIP Calls?
** WARNING **

Setting this to ‘yes’ will potentially allow ANYBODY to call into your Asterisk server using the SIP protocol

It should only be used if you fully understand the impact of allowing anonymous calls into your server

set to “Yes” in order to receive calls. Otherwise, callers get “This number is not in service” when they ring our number. It took me awhile to find this. It’s in the General Settings.

I have to say that it is working MUCH better. I tried to run Trixbox under Microsoft’s Virtual PC about a year ago and it sucked. Granted, the Dell 1750 is much different than my powerful, homebuilt WinXP desktop, but I must admit that I was a little skeptical.

Even setting up my Cisco 7960 was easy. I did have to refer to my older posts trying to remember how to unlock my phone.

The Rest… more to come…

The rest of the items I mentioned will come in other posts, otherwise I might be here all night.

December 29, 2008 by Jeff Pabian

behind a mountain

Man, have I been busy. I’ve been doing so many things; some of which are blog-worthy… others not so much, but either way, I’ve been neglecting my blogging habits.

Surprises

I’ve actually been surprised by how many people have noticed I have not been updating my blog. I didn’t realize how many people I know actually read what I’m up to. I’ve had people ask about things I’ve posted on Twitter about and they want to know the outcome. It’s flattering, for sure, and it is very encouraging.
Resolutions

So with the New Year, I need to be more mindful of what’s around me and more importantly, who’s around me. In this economy, the best thing I can do for someone is to help. I’ve set my self up as a “LION” and have helped introduce others to my network so I can help people and if I never need to reach out, I will have a support network that could also help me.

I also need to call a friend who works in a “white house” who will be out of a job in January just so I can say I’ve called this “white house.” wink wink

So, one of my New Year’s resolutions, (and I am sure I am not alone) will be more forthcoming with new blog posts.

Technology and Media

If you’ve known me for any amount of time, you know I am always looking for ways to bring the Internet out of the computer room and into my living space. I’ve been working on many personal projects to do this and have enjoyed helping others experience better living through technology. Yes, I know it sounds cliche, but I don’t know of a better way to put it.

Paging Dr. Roy… Dr. Rob Roy…

So, in turing over this new leaf, I’m off to upgrade my WordPress installation. Following that… please expect more posts, more often. Hopefully you’ll find something you like and which will help me think of new things to do.

October 24, 2008 by Jeff Pabian

T-mobile G1 / Google Android… Goodbye T-mobile Wing

A moment of thanks…

First off, I’d to thank a lot of you… most of the traffic I get to my site comes from people looking for information on the T-Mobile Wing. I had the phone for about 1.5 years and posted all sorts of information. Most importantly, many of you posted comments and offered help and tips to myself and others, and for that I am very thankful.

One door closes, another opens…

However, earlier in the month, my Tmobile Wing suffered a tramatic episode when all three of the children ran over it, (they were chasing eash other) and it got smooshed… really smooshed with a cracked LCD and everything. At that point, I got “executive approval” to get a new phone. My wife suggested an iPhone and I was about to pull the trigger until I heard that the T-mobile G1 was coming out on October 22. I decided to wait.

The countdown…

I was all nervous on launch day, the 22nd. I was worried I couldn’t find one and then I read that Costco and Best Buy would also be carrying them, but it was unclear when. So after my big presentation on Wednesday moring, I drove to Costco and they had ’em. Plus, you got a free “accessory kit” which was a Jabra bluetooth headset and a car charger. Hey, it’s better than nothing.

Final Verdict…

I LOVE this phone. I’m not going to rehash all the reason why I like it, there are a ton of other people who give it a thumbs up, but I am really impressed with it. And there’s been no shortage of coverage and it looks like everyone is on the same page.

Coverage…

Over at the Download Sqaud, they have some great pieces about the first hands on with the G1 and a good post about Twitteroid, (which I haven’t installed yet since the offical release comes out Monday).

Lifehacker has a hands on post. Gizmodo has a Android App Marathon and a category to get you going.

Walt Mossberg also seems to think the T-Mobile G1 is worthy. Btw, Walt is awesome.

There are plenty of forums dedicated to Android/G1 coverage, and they include:

G1 for three days…

I will say that I enjoy this phone way more than my T-mobile Wing. To be fair, I did not have a data plan with my Wing since I used Wifi with it so maybe that’s not a fair comparison. But I do like the seemless Gmail integration.

The IM’ing on the G1 is also okay, not great. Like all other phones I’ve owned, the default IM uses SMS for IM’ing. I’m not big on that but I don’t it will be long before someone writes a cross IM-platform client for the G1. Here’s a list of apps I think would be killer:

IM: Jabber/XMPP, AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN
Facebook App (using mobile web interface)
Brightkite App (using mobile web interface)

Apps I love:

Google Maps: This is totally awesome. You can do “street view” with the GPS and enable “compass mode.” This is too hard to explain in text but if you see it, it will blow you away.
Barcode reader: Yeah, yeah… I know the iPhone has this too, but I think it is really neat.
Various weather apps: All very useful
Gmail
Web browser: The web browser is better than ANY WM-base browser I’ve seen, including Opera-mini.

I’m still playing with it and rumor has it a slew of new app will hit the market place on Monday.

Expect way more to come.

Eat Your Vegetables

Author Archives: Jeff Pabian