I was watching the news tonight while the doomsayers we’re plotting the course of Hurricane Gustav into the center of the Gulf of Mexico. I think I’m pretty well prepared for the storm regardless of where it lands and I’m just like everyone else on the Central Gulf Coast in thinking “I hope it lands far east of far west of us. The local weather man, who should be named “CHIEF DOOMSAYER” - which I might add is the same lamer who expressed through pouts and body language his disappointment four years ago as Hurricane Ivan took that little wobble to the east and missed Mobile by just miles and hit Pensacola instead - made his claim that gas prices would be increasing by about 20 cents/gallon this weekend in anticipation of the storm.
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Last night something I thought was not possible happened. Starship Troopers 2 was unseated as the worst movie of all time by one I thought would SURELY be a great flick — Miami Vice. This movie was absolutely awful. No real story to speak of, no acting, Hell - even Colin Farrell greased the Don Johnson role so badly I didn’t think I was going to be able to sit through the entire show. In most cases for my tastes in movies, anything starring Jamie Foxx is going to be a good movie but this turd castle of a film probably ended the acting career of both him AND Farrell. Not that I was a fan of the TV series back in the day; it was cheesy as ever but in most cases these movies are really good. Not in this case however - I can name my top five stinkers of all time and the 2006 version of Miami Vice is three of them. A definite must NOT see for future renters.

WHY… does this thing actually exist?

I mean - seriously… why mess up a good thing? I have an office full of XP clients on desktop and laptop computers that are backed up by Window 2003 servers and they run on autopilot despite the use of ADS, Windows DNS and backward-capatibility support of NBNS/WINS. The only problems I have with these computers are those caused by transport goofs and users. I’ve had server crashes - all caused by hardware malfunctions and any client PC crash I’ve seen since I brought XP online was caused by doing something it wasn’t designed to do.

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In my article The Future of Telephony and Communications vs. Toll-Quality I outlined that many years of beating by cell phones have lowered our standards in what we should expect from our carriers for voice quality. In an interesting paradigm, as we’ve given up quality for convenience in voice, we’ve demanded more and more in our desire to have bigger, better, higher quality video. From adding High-Definition to traditional broadcast TV to digital cable to satellite this has been easily accomplished but there’s another beast on the horizon that isn’t going to be easily satisfied: Internet Protocol Television or just IPTV.

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What’s next in the world of telecom?
Let’s just say early one morning someone calls you as you’re about to leave for work. You pickup and start talking to the caller as you start out the door to get into your car. While you’re driving and talking you decide to turn on the news while you’re stuck in traffic. You finally make it to work and you’re still on the call which was placed to you before you left home. Now let’s suppose the thing you answered wasn’t even a phone but instead some multimedia device with the ability to traverse home broadband seamlessly with cellular, IP, and secured corporate networks without signal drops or service interruptions. Your local dial tone and long distance voice is a free side-benefit of the subscription you’ve bought for this multimedia gizmo. The package is some news, local channels, weather, financial information maybe, and some metropolitan concierge type information. Is this a pipe dream? For now definitely however the future is very bright and promises to be very exciting for media, communications, and hosted applications.

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I’m nearing the completion of my green field build of my company’s new IT core. We’re moving from a Windows 2003 Small Business Server core to a Windows 2003 Server Standard (or Standard R2 as the license says) and Exchange server 2003. We’ve got about 18 servers in the core that cover everything from network management to email; the majority of which are linux or solaris machines. I’ve been an MCSE since the NT4 days and I’m here to tell you - there’s a lot of differences between the old and new however there are still a lot of similarities. One of which I’m really glad they kept is the Windows Internet Naming System or WINS.

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With some help from one of my co-workers I’ve finally got a functional linux workstation. It’s Redhat’s Fedora Core 5 running on a Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. I’ve installed all the open office garb and wine to experiment with some stuff we actually need here at work and it really runs smooth. It’s totally experimental for now but who knows… The chances of being able to replace all the MS Windows/office desktop operatings systems with X and open office is highly unlikely however I think I can replace at least a few of the special purpose PCs along the way. So far for the programs that I have to run on the laptop that aren’t linux ports, I’ve installed WinE and so far, it hasn’t ran across anything that throws a wrench in the machine. The next step is to find some good 5250 emulation software. That would be the icing on the cake for the basic functional PC in my company. More to come!

After the server’s untimely death last week, we’re getting everything put back together. Please be patient…

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