Binaryfaith

Well, I installed Fedora 11 over my Ubuntu Jaunty install today and am so far very happy for it. Fedora appears to be quite a bit faster with X as well as things like the VPN client (VPNC) work VERY well. The upgrade was for the most part seamless and the only thing I can’t seem to get working well is the fglrx driver so, fo the time being no big monitor. (The T500 has 2 cards and the Discrete is the only one that appears to be able to drive an external display)

In any event, I’m happy with this new distro for the time being and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Yesterday I went to the apple store to inquire about the 8G ram upgrade for the new 2.66GHz Macbook Pro that I got. I was told by 2 of the apple store employees (a manager and a genius) that this laptop doesn’t support 8 gigs of RAM.
Well, I did a little poking around on Apple’s online store and found This .. $1200 but there. So, once again, all I ask from apple employees is that they are honest. If they don’t know say “I don’t know” there is no harm in it.. There is, however, harm in lying to people. Especially customers.

Email to SMS.. Pretty basic one would think.. At&t simply doesn’t get it..

Nor do they get basic concepts like customer service, troubleshooting, provisioning or systems management. Here is a case in point.

It appears that the pager that my company has been using maxes out at 500 messages a month. I’ve managed to severely get the company overcharged due to some system alerts. .. So I was asked to have my cell be used as a pager ($20 unlimited is way better.) This person said that he has had no problems sending email to his phone number @ txt.att.net.. When I tried it, I got a bounce.

So I called at&t and spoke to a standard rep. She had me reset my phone no less than 4 times before she was willing to escalate me to a higher support person. Once with that person, she had me reset my phone again. After I did that, we tried more attempts before she told me to go to the at&t store to exchange my SIM card.

While at the store, I replaced the SIM and tried the email again.. It failed (as expected)
At that point, the associate said “try # @ mycingular.net”, which worked! He said that he had done that years ago and happened to think of it.

Now, fast forward a couple of hours. I sent my phone the test, and it worked, but then I replied to the text and the “from” address was the txt.att.net! This means that should I respond through SMS, the recipient can’t respond back to me through that message… It gets bounced.

After figuring this out, I called AT&T after hours support and they basically told me that I’m attempting to use old tech and that they don’t know anything about it and they can’t support it. Looks like I get to make a phone call tomorrow. Oh the joy.

I’m sitting here at a BayCon meeting with a bunch of fans (in this instance, it is short for fanatics). Sitting next to a fellow geek I notice that his Mac has an altered login window. The tool Protector Suite is pretty slick. It also appears that it is sold through Apple even.

Hopefully I will get a chance to pick one up. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’ve been wanting for my work laptop for ages.

I’m sitting here at the nine inch nails concert at the Oakland arena. They are doing all of my favorite songs. F’ing awesome.

I’m testing out this new editor. Normally I try out software for the trial period, and wait to purchase.. But after watching the tutorials and running a few tests of my own, I have really come to appreciate this tool. I’m not sure if it would replace VI or VIM (Though it does give you an alias in /usr/local/bin or anywhere you want for that matter to open files from the command line).
The TextMate interface is definitely geared towards the hacker/coder/admin types with the ease of use and generally intuitive interface. I’m actually posting this blog entry directly from the app. Very Cool

As most know, I’ve been working at Splunk for nearly 3 years. Yesterday Splunk announced that Michael Baum will be stepping down as CEO, making way for Godfrey Sullivan. This is really an exciting time for Splunk. Michael did an amazing job leading the company to where it is now. Despite posts on ValleyWag.

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Ocean Beach, San Francisco, originally uploaded by Mark.Cohen.

Decided to take the N-Judah out to the end of the line. The weather was very warm for San Francisco but surprisingly there were very few people at the beach.

Took a walk home from work and ran into a wonderful friend. On the way, we had a nice impromptu photo shoot.

More to come later.

I went to SuperHappyDevHouse yesterday and it rocked. I spent most of the day in the back Robots/SunSPOTs room where we hacked on java based computers. At the end of the day, A very nice Sun person gave 5 of us a SunSPOT dev kit. OMFG it is awesome. If you like hacking on Java and hardware, I would highly recommend picking a set up.