Tech Talk

I’ve been silent for the last week and enjoying my newest toy – the iPhone 3.0 upgrade which dropped last week.  I’m very impressed with the release and with the incremental steps that Apple has delivered to all of us customers.  In the meantime, I’ve been one-up’d at work by many co-workers who have upgraded to the iPhone 3Gs handsets with video, improved cameras, and more speed (yes, just a wee bit jealous).

I am really enjoying many of the improvements in 3.0, including landscape mode for several applications – including mail and messages.  A blogger I follow tweeted this article from CNet which details how to enable tethering on the iPhone…  Draw your own conclusions as to its legality, but its one of the features I want most on the iPhone and AT&T is not allowing it at this time.

I’m also enjoying push notifications as of today for Beejive IM – an excellent pay-for IM client for all your different accounts.    I installed that app this morning and I’ve had it running at work.  Noteworthy features include Facebook chat, a really smooth chat switching method when you’re having mutliple conversations, and push notifications, of course.  The service/software keeps you signed into your accounts even after disconnecting and will forward any received messages or statuses to your phone via a push notification which displays on your home screen.  This is Apple’s work-around to background processes on the phone, which, they say, kills battery life.

iPhone 3.0 also grants the ability to subscribe to CalDAV calendars and integrate those.  I have a friend who needs this setup, so I should be trying that soon.  I use MobileMe, personally, for my family and our calendars and it works great – but to give enterprise customers who have invested in OS X Server the ability to leverage iCal Server is a great feature, in my opinion.

And speaking of my MobileMe subscription, a new feature has been added there – Find my iPhone – a locator service and the ability to display a message on-screen and have the phone play a tone.  For those of us who lose things, its a nice feature when you’re looking for your phone while its stuck in the couch.  At least one person has already used the service to successfully reclaim a stolen iPhone…  That story is a very good read.

I know that I should be switching from Money and making Moneywell my primary finance software, but I’m having a tough time.  I can’t seem to ensure that my checkbook balances to the accounts and that procedure is harder for someone who is so tied to online banking, like myself.  Let me explain.

I’ve covered before how Moneywell handles running balances and accounts.  Something that I haven’t mentioned is that Moneywell has some really good, powerful reconciliation workflows integrated in it.  The Reconcile screens are great for someone who is paper based and who reconciles the checkbook with the printed statements at the end of the month.  But, that’s not me – those aren’t my habits.   And it has to be a system that works with me, else I have to change and the chances of success decrease.

The reconcile functionality appears to be their solution for keeping your checkbook in balance.  For that type of system, I’m sure that it works well and the daily balances make much more sense — see, you’ll have a statement balance to match to every month in that style system.

But, what about someone who uses online banking – particularly someone who does it daily and whose reconciliation process occurs almost as often?  I guess that I could begin matching the running balance online with the daily balance in Moneywell and marking the transactions as reconciled once they hit the online account and clear.  That, I assume, is the same net outcome as reconciling to a paper statement.  So, that is what I am resolving today to attempt for the next week.  I’m going to try and modify my actions and see if I may be able to adopt a better way of accounting my personal finances.

In the meantime, I have been relying too heavily upon Microsoft Money.  I know this and I have paid money for a software which seems to be better long term.  I have to keep this in my mind and remind myself daily to do it.

Yesterday morning, I took the VCP310 test at my local PearsonVue testing center and I passed.  I have to say, the test was still extremely tough even with all the studying that I had done.  I knew from attempt #1 that I needed to study system requirements and the configuration maximums document and so I spent a lot of time with those two pieces of documentation – and that helped.  There were quite a few questions on my exam that I was sure of, which boosted confidence.

But this was a very different test than the one that I took when I was in Las Vegas last fall.  In the fall, the test centered around and focused on a lot of storage related questions.  And iSCSI was likely my downfall and the cause for me failing attempt #1.   We don’t use iSCSI in our environment – we’re a Fiber Channel shop and so that is what I know best.  I also don’t do any NFS, but knew there’d be some questions on that, also.   Even though I passed this go round, I felt like I did better on the last test (yeah, I know that doesn’t make sense – but subjective versus objective scoring, I guess).

Some things tripped me up this go round that I wasn’t expecting.   I apparently didn’t read everything I should have in the 3.5 documentation and had not noticed that VMware introduced a new method of multi-pathing for fiber channel, so not sure I got the questions about Round Robin multipathing correct.  Then there was the issue of traffic shaping.  Ok, let me admit, I’m not doing traffic shaping with my ESX.  Perhaps I should – my test obviously thought I should have been as there felt like there were 10 questions on the topic.

I guess I realize that I should be paying more attention to my resource pools, especially now that my environment has grown.  I believe I got those questions correct, but I didn’t feel like I knew the answers – it took some thinking.

I am still waiting for the official word on my certification from VMware.  I have my unofficial results from PearsonVue printed and on my desk to keep me company until that email arrives.  There is a nice note that says that if I have completed all the requirements for VCP on VI3, I’ll get a notice within 30 days.

So, changing platforms is never easy.  I experienced my share of hurdles moving from Windows to Mac OS . There were times when I said “why can’t it just do __”, but mostly I was happy with my platform change.  Over time, I’ve found so many great Mac-only solutions that when I’m at work, I’m wishing I had __ on my PC.

But right now, I’m at the why doesn’t my new product live up to my old product point and its over running balances.  See, in the Moneywell there aren’t any running totals.  See this screenshot below (from the Moneywell website):

Much of what I like about Moneywell is that they’ve re-thought traditional personal finance software.  But, I used running balances to play what if and make sure I don’t overdraw my accounts by posting upcoming transactions.  I know it seems archaeic but that is how I found best NOT to get into trouble.  Money’s cash flow forecaster was never accurate for me, so I couldn’t rely on it.  I went the more low-tech way and just added transactions and saw what was left.

So, I mentioned the Moneywell is a re-think product and in the case of balance, it rethinks  that too.  If you click on a transaction, in the bottom bar, it shows a daily balance amount for the day of the transaction.  That is great, but its not graphical or easy to see at glace to the “single window” interface.  There is also no “red flag” you’re in trouble indicator for a day, that I’ve found.

So, I’m searching for Moneywell’s better way.  I’m sure its here, but just in case – a cash forecast graph would be a great feature in the next release.  Take that daily balance and graph it…  I haven’t figured out how to read the bar charts at the bottom of the page (nor change them) so maybe that’s what they’re intended for, but if so, its not intuitive and its also not day by day…

As some of you know (check the bio), besides spending my time as a sysadmin, I also build websites for a venture I call Zeal Technologies.  Its a business that I started with a college friend who was also a collegue of mine at Coastal Carolina while I worked there.  Over the course of the past 5 years, I’d built a web framework that we used with almost every project we built, until about a year ago.

When I began my blog last year, I used Wordpress.  I had used it once before to build out a church website for my wife’s boss.  I was really impressed with it and how it could be extended and themed really easy.  So over the last year and half, I’ve implemented a few Wordpress sites, mostly using themes other people had developed – like the one on this site and my personal site.

Over the last month, though, I have been working on a project for a friend of my wife and I – a business called Keeping the Green.   Nicole has the idea of finding eco-friendly materials and marketing them under this label.   I’ve helped her get some things together – like logo and some designs for printed items – but the website has been more of a challenge.

At the same time, my wife has been working on a business venture selling paintings on recycled windows.  She too is using Wordpress with a plugin called WP E-Commerce on her site. We picked a nice looking free template for her site, so no big deal there.

For Nicole, though, I really wanted to create a custom designed website template for Wordpress.  After eight or ten sites, I now understand better how the themes are created and its pretty straight forward.  So, over the past few weeks, I have been tackling that, designing the site in Photoshop, working on cutting it and getting all the CSS worked out – I realy only want to build CSS sites from now on – and getting things together.

This week, I really hit a milestone.  Number one, I found time to work on this again (and as you can tell from the blog, my schedule has finally freed up a little to have time to play).  Number two, I took my sample design and I’ve split into a more standard Wordpress theme configuration.  And it worked!  I have built the design side of my first Wordpress theme.  Its really early in the design phase and nothing is live (don’t try to buy anything just yet!), but take a gander at it.  I’m pretty proud.  Its still got a ways to go, but its there…  And I’m excited!

I’ve been spending my day in a vacation rental unit on site where my wife is selling art today.  Her art show happened to fall on the weekend before I take my VPC certficiation exam, and I’m feeling very underprepared.  I’ve been studying for most of the afternoon since her show started and I’ve just attempted to take the Mock exam on the VMware website.  Its giving errors when I complete the exam.  Even thought I haven’t “passed” the exam, its telling me that there is a duplicate test and that I’m not able to submit my answers.  Funny thing is that I haven’t gotten 100% – the passing grade – on the test.  So, oh well, so much for scoring my progress.  Well, I’d better get back to studying.  My exam is on Wednesday morning.  I should have results immediately after taking the test.  Cross fingers for good news.

I came across Moblin earlier this week online and so I decided to impose myself against my buddy Jamie and try to run this on his Acer netbook.  So, we downloaded and prepped the live USB stick and booted the thing up to see what the distribution looked like.

I guess I should back up.  When I came across Moblin, it initially looks really promising from the screenshots.  The interface was intuitive and looked more like a large mobile phone type interface than anything I’d seen on a miniature desktop.  To me, it looked pretty well suited for the tween size of a laptop.

On first boot, the interface was much better than I had initially expected.  The 3D transitions and effects were pretty well integrated and someone has spent a lot of time working out the intricacies of this Linux desktop.

You can’t do alot from the live USB – its mostly an installer method, but you do get a good sense of what this software can do, and it looks good.  You have to change your thinking a bit (not hard for a thinking different Mac person to do) and understand that there is no desktop and that your applications live in zones.  Beyond that, the launcher bar (for lack of a better term) is your central location for switching contexts and zones to move between your applications and settings.  Its pretty efficient and has an autohide feature (a la OS X’s Dock) which saves the screen real estate.  Jamie wasn’t interested in installing, so some features weren’t easy to test.

Moblin features a status channel – with integrated Twitter and Last.fm support.  It also includes instant messaging for Jabber clients and a couple options I didn’t recognize.  The Jabber support has a dedicated Google Talk option, but didn’t see AIM, Yahoo or Microsoft chat – which would be nice additions.   The browsing experience is nice and nicely skinned to match the rest of the experience.

Beyond Internet, Moblin includes the ability to play media files – something good for road trips for movies and tv shows (too bad its not iTunes) as well as music.  These features aren’t fully integrated, but you can see that the interface will be nice once completed.

There is also a “pinning” mechanism integrated throughout the OS.  Think favorites for the whole OS.  You can pin things that like – whether its a website, media file, etc. for easy retrieval later.  That is a pretty nice feature.

We tried to update the OS using the integrated update and it ran through the motions (although it didn’t update anything – the Live USB stick must be a read-only image).  That feature makes for a full featured and always patched experience.

This is still an early beta, but it shows a lot of promise.  Its something I hope to test again in a later form… it might even convince me to plunk down the dollars for a netbook in the future – just won’t be a Windows netbook… {big grin}

I think that I have settled on Moneywell as my software of choice for Mac money management.  I really like how this software is setup for an envelope system style of managing your money.  I also like that it imported my QIF exports, although there is no way for it to preserve transfer transactions between accounts.

I initially had problems and had dimissed Moneywell because I could not connect to my primary bank.  After perusing the Quicken Financial Life forums (I was a beta tester), I found the issue – I was not using the correct username and password.  To work with my bank, I needed to provide my member number and PIN to authenticate – not my website username and password.  Worked that out, and now automatic updates are all set. Read the rest of this entry »

I setup CrashPlan for a friend overnight and the software really lives up to its advertising.  The software is really easy to install and registration is straight forward.  After install, you select what data to backup – which is less robust than Mozy’s default filters – but its easy enough to point to her user directory on her Mac and backup the entire profile.

After setting up her selections to backup, just need to point it to a destination.  CrashPlan makes that really simple.  You have 4 options – folders, computers, friends or online.   Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe I’m late to the party, but I found that my Quicken Financial Life beta build had expired.  Unfortunately, there is also no newer build to download.  So, no more testing of that software.  But I’m not crying. Read the rest of this entry »