LISA Conference

I am headed to Dallas TX for the USENIX - LISA conference. I am not staying the entire week, just through Tuesday. I will be attending High Capacity Email System Design, and Tuesday I am going to the Postfix Configuration and Administration. I am excited about both of them. We are currently using Sopho's PureMessage for Unix which I have been very happy with. I deployed it 18 months ago on a Sun 280R with 2-900Mhz procs and 2 Gig of Ram. 6 months ago I upgraded it to 8 Gig of Ram. It is currently way past capacity. I have configured it to quit scanning email when the load gets high enough so that it can catch up. I am replacing it with 3 servers each with 2 - Quad Core 2.0 Ghz Xeon processors and 8 Gig of Ram. That should keep us spam free for a while. I am also going to be adding either Mailman or Majordomo for a list serve. I am currently using LDAP groups for this, and I am starting to need a more robust solution.

I would also like to offer our users the ability to to SMTAUTH via TLS. Sophos includes a version of either Sendmail or Postfix, but neither are compiled with very many options.

First Weeks with MacBook Pro

Well it happened, much like I knew it would. There was one major reason that I ordered the MacBook Pro over the MacBook. I wanted to be able to upgrade past 2gig of memory. I was also hesitant to pull the trigger on the order because I knew as soon as I did that Mac would announce an increase in horsepower in the Pro line. Sure enough both things happened. You can now get a MacBook that is capable of handling up to 4gig of memory and my 2.4ghz Pro can now be ordered as a 2.6ghz. I know that technology changes fast and that as soon as you buy something it is obsolete. I also know that I will never notice the difference between a 2.4 and a 2.6. It is just the principle of the thing. I guess I should have known that Leopard would not have been enough of a boost for holiday sales, that Mac would have to do something else to boost their Christmas sales.

All that being said I am still loving the Mac. I am finding more and more software replacements that I can run natively on my Mac, and I am having to boot up my virtual Windows OS less and less often. Now if anyone can just point me in the direction for a good LDAP Administrator that comes even close to replacing this ONE, I would be most grateful.

Leopard Coming Late

I purchased my new MacBook Pro about a week before the official release of Leopard. I filled out Apple's form to have the new OS shipped asap. I was very disappointed to find that it shipped on 10/26, and not received on 10/26. I didn't just buy the OS, I bought a brand new computer. It would seem that would get me some sort of priority shipping on Leopard. Anyway as disappointed as I am about that, I am still extremely happy with the computer. It is the first Mac I have owned since OS 7. I have installed BootCamp, and set up a partition for Vista, which I am not at all impressed with, but since I don't have to use it daily, I figured it wouldn't bother me that much. I am also impressed with how many applications have been ported over to Mac. I am down to just one "killer app" that I can't live without and that is Softerra's LDAP Browser. I have not found anything that even comes close to working as well as this one.

Mac

Well here I am about to eat crow. I have busted people's balls about buying Mac computers. They are too expensive for what they are. Well this week I not only got a MacBook Pro. But I am typing this on my iPhone. Let me just say that both are better than advertised. You really must experience them to truly appreciate them. Especially the iPhone. They keyboard is way easier than you would think.

Diving Wife

Well if you can't tell I am very excited about our upcoming vacation. As I maybe posted a little prematurely about it. But the whole point of a blog is to write about what I want to when I want to right? Anyway, last night my wife did her first confined water dive, and I watched, "as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs." She did amazing. Got through confined water dives 1,2, and part of 3 on her first night. She had no problems learning to equalize on her way down. I have really come to love diving, and when I was able to dive for the first time with my 12 year old son, what fun. Now to add the rest of the family, and tropical waters like Maui, it should be awesome.

Vacation

It is almost here. June 23rd we leave for Maui for 10 days. My 12 year old son and I are both certified divers, and ready to trade in 50 degree water with 2-6' of visibilty for 75 degree water and 100' of visibility. My wife, who up until this point was not interested in diving has decided to get her C-Card as well. But she wants nothing to do with the cold water around here. So she is going to do the classroom & pool work here and then finish up the open water in Hawaii with Maui Dreams. I have 2 days of boat diving booked with Ed Robinson and then plenty of shore dives during the week as well.

Palm Misses the Boat

I started off with a Treo 600, then a 650, and then I went to the Motorola Razr, because of all things it was capable of making and receiving phone calls. The Palm devices were not. Now I support a handful of executives that "had" to have a Windows Handheld. So, I switched begrudgingly to the Treo 750. All I can say is "wow". The phone works, when checking email the phone still works. I will not say it is without bugs, and there are things that I don't like, but overall what I gave away in size from my Razr, the features and functionality are more than worth it. Now Palm has announced its Foleo. What a hunk of junk. $499 for a palm device that no longer fits in your palm, but is the size of a laptop.

Google Just Plain Rocks

I have long been a Google user. Their search results have always been superior. But now they have added Gmail, Google Docs,and Google Calendar. This weekend we had a family reunion and my wife was the only one who remembered a camera. She took about 75 pictures, and everyone wanted copies. It took about 3 minutes to download Picasa , and figure out how to upload the pictures to a private site.

All of which seamlessly just work. I have even shared a Google Document with another user, and been able to simultaneously be able to edit different sections of the same document. To say nothing of the fact that I can access it anywhere.

Google's ability to get applications that are actually usable to the public in the short time frame that they do is truly remarkable.