OK, I admit that headline is a bit misleading, but it’s also true.  I spend time regularly working in an environment that is all Solaris UNIX running on SPARC chips, therefore we use SPARC based Sun Blade workstations exclusively.  This means that the platform we use to manage and develop on is the same as the platform we manage, which is a good thing when you are dealing with hundreds of mission critical servers.

I was speaking to one of my Sun contacts, enquiring about some workstations when I was informed that Sun has now dropped all Sun Blade workstations based on the SPARC chip.  You will only be able to buy workstations with Intel or AMD (x86) processors.

What!?  I personally think that’s stupid, and it puts me in a bind.  Before you flame, I know why they did it.  The SPARC workstations are expensive and I am sure they don’t sell very many so they decided it was more economical to stop making them altogether.  And yes, I know I can run Solaris x86, but why would I want to introduce a whole new architecture just for managing my existing systems?

Either way you slice this, I think it is a sign of the times.  Quality and performance will give way to cheap.  I read articles on the Web about how solaris is slow and the SPARC chip “sucks” because it “only” goes up to 1.5GHz or so when Intel goes over 3Ghz.  That just makes me smile because it just shows how little people know about how things work.

When you get right down to it, I guess it all comes down to money.

It appears that if you are running Windows XP Service Pack 3 and using ZoneAlarm firewall software, when you install patch KB951748 (MS08-037) that came out yesterday’s “patch Tuesday” bunch, it breaks ZoneAlarm. You cannot access the Internet until you either uninstall the patch or turn off ZoneAlarm. This patch is related to the DNS poisoning exploit that came out recently, so it should be applied. What to do? Well, one suggested workaround (other than the two mentioned above) was to lower the security settings to medium in ZoneAlarm. At least then you don’t have to disable it entirely. Another suggested fix has been to leave ZoneAlarm at High and set the Internet Security Zone to Custom and add the following rule “Allow outgoing TCP Ports:80,443″. I cannot verify that these fixes work, I don’t use ZoneAlarm myself, but others hit by this problem have had success with them.

Here is the Microsoft link with information about the patch:

http://www.microsoft.com/ … /ms08-037.mspx

Here is the official link from ZoneAlarm about the problem:

http://download.zonealarm.com/ … /LossOfInternetAccessIssue.html

I have been using Nero (Ahead Nero) Burning ROM for years as my preferred software for burning CD’s on Windows. The old versions of Adaptec CD Creator were pretty good, but when they spun it off to Roxio it went down hill so fast even my stomach dropped. Back to the point, I have been using and buying Nero for years and it’s always been a great product. As much for the CD burning tools and the other goodies they toss in. One thing that I especially liked was a tool called ImageDrive. For anyone that doesn’t know what that is, it’s a nifty tool like DaemonTools that lets you take an ISO file (or NRG) and mount it as a virtual CD drive. So Windows thinks it’s just another drive and you can use it as such. Great, huh?

Well, now comes the driver for this post. Recently I got a new Alienware computer that came with Vista. Funny how it would have cost me money to down grade to XP, but I digress. My Nero version 6 was not compatible with Vista, and Nero had no plans to make it so. Well, I thought, it had been a couple years so I payed up and got the latest and greatest version 8 so I would have full Vista goodness. Now, this was my fault initially because I made an assumption, and we all know how that goes. I just assumed that ImageDrive would work as it always had, but it didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even see it.

OK, I go do some digging on line and find that Nero 8 didn’t support ImageDrive on Vista. Well, it was new (Nero 8 and Vista too I guess), and it read like it was coming soon so I figured it was some kind of Windows thing and would be along shortly. Advance a few months and nothing, no word on it at all. Finally I email support and ask them about it, I really was missing this tool, and here is the reply that I got back.

Thank you for your e-mail and your interest in our software.

Unfortunately, Nero has dropped the imagedrive application from our software. Nero will no longer support this application.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Hmm. Gee, that’s nice. At this point I kinda felt cheated. Yeah, I know, I should have read up on it more before I bought it. However, I thought I had some trust built up with these guys. I have been buying their software for years now, several versions in fact. It wasn’t clearly stated that ImageDrive was gone for good, it was rather ambiguous. The point is that the version I had worked fine, they just made a decision that if you wanted to use it on Vista, you had to uprage. Then they didn’t tell me I was loosing functionality. So I had to pay more, and get less. I wrote back and told them that too, but I doubt I’ll hear anything back from them.

So, the end result of this post is that if you are a consumer, don’t by Nero if you want ImageDrive. If you don’t care about that, it’s still a great CD/DVD tool. If you are a business, take good care of your customers because we are a fickle bunch and once scorned we don’t come back easy.

By the way, before the flame comments start, I know I can just use DaemonTools or some such similar program. That though, wasn’t the point.

OK folks, this is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while, so I just had to share with everyone. It seems that a nifty fellow has written a command line interface or “shell” for Google. When you pull up the page (http://goosh.org), you get a command prompt and can search, browse, whatever all from the command prompt. For nix geeks like me that live on the command line, this is awesome! So, get out there and check it out!!

“Comcast has just announced its plan to lead an industry partnership in the creation of a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” that would apply both to users and to ISPs.”

This is an article about Comcast and their efforts to create this so called Bill Of Rights for P2P traffic. I would say that in light of continuing legal trouble over Comcast and their throttling of P2P traffic, this is a shuck and jive maneuver or PR stunt. But, that is just my opinion. I wonder if any “users” will actually get to help write this thing? Yeah, right.

Read it yourself and see what you think

Well folks, I thought I would share some good stuff that is happening on my end of the ‘net. After using my last computer for about 3 1/2 years, I decided it was time to upgrade. This is no small task for me, mainly because I am picky as hell but what can I say. For starters, I have always built my computers, again because I am picky and I want them my way. I have been doing this for more than a decade and this time I wanted to simply buy one. This meant that I had to do a lot of research to find a good quality machine that was going to live up to my expectations and also not break the bank. After lots of reading and digging I finally settled on Alienware. Now, Alienware has always had a reputation for building top notch machines and I must confess I have always wanted one. Even though the HP Blackbird looked like a mighty fine machine, I just couldn’t justify the cost. That plus did I mention I really wanted an Alienware???

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