ben robison

Plaxo = Buyer’s Remorse

A while ago, I wrote about gSyncIt which syncs your Outlook Calendars to Google Calendar. After playing with the free/trial version, I ran into a few problems. I worked with it for 1 week or so, but when syncing (which was quite slow) constantly ran into problems with object references pointing to null objects.

It was the same calendar item each time and even though I had my settings to continue syncing on failure, that didn’t happen, so I couldn’t get my whole calendar to sync anymore. A friend at work has been using SyncMyCal quite successfully for awhile, so I finally went that route. Even thought it is $15 more than the $10 gSyncIt, I figured the price was still nice to get my calendars synched without having to deal with errors all the time. I want my technology to work and get out of my way.

Not 20 minutes after making my purchase and registering SyncMyCal, I talked to another friend here at work who has been using Plaxo to sync his contacts and calendars with Google. Plaxo is Free. Buyer’s Remorse sets in.

In addition to syncing your calendars and contacts between every conceivable operating system and program, Plaxo is also integrated with a number of web applications most notably for me, Last.fm, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc.

After waiting for 4 weeks to make my purchase, why couldn’t I have waited for another 30 minutes? Buyer’s Remorse.

Tags: plaxo, sync

Recent Life Events

For those who read my blog, you’ve noticed I haven’t written for awhile.  Now that things are starting to settle down a bit following graduation and beginning a new job, I thought I’d venture back into the world of blogging.

Now that I no longer have homework to do, my spare time has dramatically increased.  I spend more time at work than I ever spent at school, but the time is well spent and when I’m done working, I’m done for the day.  What will I do with all my leisure time?

There are a few plans, but at the top of the list will be the creation of a new domain.  I’m going to move all my web analytics related content to a new domain (still to be decided upon).  Since all my rails work is centered around web development, that will go along with the web analytics stuff to make a new Rails/Web Development/Web Analytics/SEO Dabbling blog.

This blog won’t be going anywhere, but it’s going to become more about me, my life, and my computer dabbling hobbies, wading into various *Nix distros and griping about software I don’t like.  So once I get the new site up and running, I’ll let you all know where my intelligent sounding posts are going, and this one will be for my rants and hobbies.

I’m working at Omniture now, just got all my benefits papers filled out and submitted and looking forward to the completion of training so I can actually get to work.  This is going to be fun.

MSN Messenger: Gotta love it

You know, regardless of your personal religious feelings and whether or not you believe in Microsoft, you’ve got to admit that they make a pretty good product.  I’m an Apple fanboy, but I do live in reality, and I can see that Windows helps make the world move along.  I can love my own operating system without hating all others.  There is room in my heart for those who choose to follow Satan’s Bill’s path.

That being said, every once in a while, I run across something that makes me wonder.  On my computer at work today, I was using Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) to talk to a friend when I saw this cleverly worded advertisement at the bottom of my Messenger window.

Is there really anything else to say?  Somebody in the marketing department had a bad day I guess.

Why I Don’t Like Outlook

Or, one reason that I don’t like Outlook.

So you know already, that when your computer boots up, there are lots of processes that have to start, programs that have to run etc. This process consumes a lot of processing power, so after typing in my password on my work computer, I usually find something else to do for the next couple minutes until my computer is actually useable (this is only a slight exxageration, the process takes well over 60 seconds).

Then since email has become a major form of communication where I work, I wait for all the processes to run and die down and then I open Outlook and log onto the Exchange server. Starting where the first spike hits halfway up, this picture shows what Outlook was doing to my computer while it checked my mail. Outlook was unresponsive the entire time (except that brief drop in the middle).

What on earth is going on? Is there any reason that Outlook should be maxing my CPU for that amount of time? A spike or two sure, but 100% for over a minute? “I must have a lot of work to do,” I thought to myself, “if there’s that much mail coming in.”

No. There wasn’t. Only 3.

And people wonder why I prefer Apple Mail.

RAID Options for Mac OS X

If you’re anything like me, you often daydream of the wonderful computer setup you’d like to have someday if you can ever afford it. All those computers & gadgets, working flawlessly together in absolute technological bliss.

Well, as I near graduation, my probably false perception, is that those dreams are a little closer. The first two items on that imaginary shopping list is some kind of RAID storage solution and some kind of device that plays all my content on my TV (and since my TV is old, analog, crt, and several hundred pounds, I better throw in a new one of those as well).

Plasma vs. LCD, AppleTV vs. Netgear’s Digital Entertainer vs. the upcoming SlingCatcher are debates that can wait. I’d like to express my dilemma regarding the various RAID options I’ve investigated.

Hardware vs. Software
For me, the obvious option is hardware RAID. For one, it’s faster. I’m a firm believer that if something can be handled at the hardware level, it can be done quicker and with less overhead than a similar function implemented as a software solution (assuming the respective developers know what they’re doing). I’ve read claims of software RAID solutions that are just as fast or faster than hardware solutions, but in my eyes, it simply doesn’t hold water.

Another reason is it’s movable (I was going to say mobile, but that just doesn’t fit). There’s only one Mac in my life at the moment, but I hope to see that number increase in the future. That being said, I still have Windows & Linux machines in my apartment. The idea of all my data being tied to a specific OS makes me shudder. Hardware solutions can be moved.

Internal vs. External
Given the choice, I’d like to stay internal, but I can be flexible on this. My computer space has enough cables and external enclosures lying around that one more little enclosure of some kind wouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac
Awhile ago, I specced a system for my father-in-law, building my own server from the ground up. I think I’ve learned a little since then, but the price for the pimped out almost 1TB RAID server (4 x 320 G drives & a 3Ware controller) was $2700. If I put Windows on it, then you can add the cost of Vista or Windows Server. So for cost of OS purposes, we’ll just round up to an even $3k.

What about the Linux option? That would keep the price at around $2.7k, but I’ve looked into a few different distros and I can’t say with any amount of confidence that I could even find a distro that could support the RAID controller. If you’re not doing software RAID on your Linux machine, it’s a complete tossup if you can get drivers to support your setup.

What about the Mac possibilities? Not encouraging. Until recently, the only solution I could find that I would call even close to reliable was the XServe RAID. If you’re thinking of going that route, your looking at $6k on the low-end, plus whatever you plan on plugging it into (XServe starts at $3k, Mac Pro starts at $2.5k). Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a gleaming XServe sitting just above my XServe RAID in a rack in the closet, but it seems a bit expensive.

Enter the 3Ware Sidecar. It’s external and still expensive, but it does have style and it’s coming much closer to the affordable mark. It retails for $1295 which does not include the cost of the SATA II drives you can put in it. 4 x 320 G drives in a RAID 5 array gives you close to 1TB of space tagging on another $360. The price includes the cost of the actual PCI-E hardware controller, but does not include the required G5 or Mac Pro. Again, the low-end Mac Pro tags another $2.5k, so we’re now looking at just over $4.5k for your Mac Solution.

So do the benefits of having a Mac Pro in your house outweigh the extra $1500? I know a lot of people who would say yes. Depending on the amount of my disposable income, I might be inclined to agree with them. There’s a lot you can do with that kind of power. Maybe the perfect solution would be to get the guys over at 3Ware to market the card separate from the SideCar, then you could just toss the drives into your Mac Pro and save all the extra cost of the enclosure and the required cabling.

*** Update: I dug a little further and discovered that the 3ware sidecar is also compatible with the Powermac G5. Those are selling on eBay in the $700-800 range. That would bring the Mac solution down into the $2.5k range making it the cheapest hardware option.

However, I then had to ask if a Powermac G5 would really be getting the benefits of hardware RAID and I think the obvious answer is no. Which begged the next question: if nearly every hit on this so-called media server is happening over a network through SMB or NFS, would any machine really see the speed benefits of hardware RAID? Again, the obvious answer is no.

Now the most important question of all: if you’re not going to see the speed benefit, is forking over all that extra cash really worth the benefit of having mobility? I’m not sure it is, which suddenly makes software RAID a viable option. Macs can do software RAID out of the box. For the cost of a Powermac G5 + Sidecar, I could buy a Mac Pro!

*** Update 2: After looking into transfer speeds of network file sharing protocols (9-30 MB/s for Samba and NFS) and the RAID speeds available in hardware RAID (600-700 MB/s for 3ware 9650), my arguments for speed are likely useless anyway.