2006 Nov 07 - Tue

Over Abundance of Vehicles in Bermuda

According to Bermuda Online, Bermuda has almost 21 square miles of land-mass and as of 2005, 3301 permanent residents per square mile. And that figure, by it's very definition, excludes Expats living on the island. I think another 10% or 20% could be added on as a rough figure.

With more people there are more cars. Many in Bermuda believe that the number of cars on the island is getting out of control. Hamilton, Bermuda does indeed have it's rush hours, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. And due to it's unique geography, commuters into Hamilton from the West end get to suffer the bottleneck of one road into Hamilton. There are suggestions that Expats be denied the privilege of owning/driving a four wheeled vehicle.

There was another article quite recently regarding the interesting statistic that the Warrants Backlog Nears 10,000 and they indicated that many of those are automobile related.

So... when you put those two facts side by side, I think it is possible to come up with some easy to digest, even-handed solutions. For instance, if the outstanding warrants could be tracked, and the guilty parties assigned heavy penalties, such as, say, revocation of driver's license or vehicle license, might that not help alleviate some of the problems of vehicular congestion?

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Celeros XT816

I have a customer who is using the Celeros XT816 3U ExtremeSAN iSCSI based IP SAN appliance. They purchased it because it had an exceedingly good price/storage price point. They had original plans to use it as a primary storage unit for use with VMWare ESX server. As it turns out, after much testing, and a few chats with tech-support, it won't work in such an arrangement with the customer's version of software. They are in the process of gaining access to Celeros' Knowledge Portal to obtain some updates.

I was tasked to integrate the unit into the network. The unit has a management port with a default IP address of 192.168.1.1. Due to the regular boots and resets we've had to perform with the unit, we decided to just stay with that address, put the management port on its own VLAN, and add the subnet into the routing table.

The unit has 8 Gigabit ports for data transfer. They can be used individually with LUN's or the ports can be mixed and matched for singles and bundles. In bundle mode, they supposedly use LACP as bundling protocol. Technical support indicates that they do that with Dell PowerConnect 3424/5212/5425, Fujitsu XG800's, Raptor, D-Link (several models), Force10, HP, Brocade, 3Com, & Extreme Networks. You'll notice that Cisco is absent from that list. Once we can gain access to the knowledge portal, supposedly there is a work around for Cisco switches available. We are currently running in single port mode to get at the data.

One more caveat with the unit is in the user-interface. To keep one's settings synchronized with what shows on the screen, the application, a Java based application, needs to be closed out and restarted. Hopefully this is cleared up in a new release of the software.

We also noticed, that with certain operations in the GUI regarding networking or LUN configuration, the unit will reset. So be sure you have quiesced your data before changing configurations.

In the end, the customer has decided to keep the unit and use if for secondary, non-critical storage. Perhaps better use can obtained with the latest software releases.

The customer is probably going to go with EqualLogic as they are certified for use with VMWare ESX.

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OpenMoKo: Open Source Cellphone

As of this writing, you can't google for it, but the Inquirer has an article on a Open Source Linux based Cellphone with built-in GPS. There isn't much information there, but then I remembered that the key site for Linux based devices would be from the people at LinuxDevices.com who have an article with some real details in it regarding the OpenMoKo. They talk about the development platform being in pre-release, I'm wondering when hardware becomes available. After a bit more reading, I see that the development platform Funambol Mobile Open Source is more of a synchronization platform. I'll have to come back to that site and see how well they can connect up with Microsoft's Exchange server. Linux Journal gave the software two thumbs up in their editor's choice awards for 2006. Dig the chic chain loop so you can't loose the darn thing.

Linux Devices has a Second Article regarding the phone. The phone is making it's debut tomorrow/today in Amsterdam. They say the first run is due in December with general availability in January at a price of around $350 directly from FIC.

In the meantime, since my existing Imate PDA2K is falling apart from way too much usage, I'll go and pick up HTC's P3300 with Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 and Built-in GPS. In the US, I've heard that the unit is available from Smart Mobile Gadgets as well as Phone Source USA. I just wish they had more accessories. I guess one will have to head over to Mobile Planet for the add-on bits.

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