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I think that Cherokee/Jiles Road in Kennesaw is a bad place to start an eating establishment. This is the same road where I had my moldy chip episode. My latest bad eating experience comes from Quizno’s just a 1/4 mile down the road. Three times I have eaten at this place. Twice my wife left very unhappy, between bad service, and things that she ordered not being available, I told her we weren’t going back.

Well about a week ago she really wanted Quizno’s and we didn’t have time to drive to one of the other locations before we had to be somewhere. So I made her promise we could only go there if she promised not to get all bent out of shape over the bad service and let it ruin her meal. She agreed, so we went.

This time once again they were out of meat for my sub of choice. What kind of sub shop runs out of Salami? If my wife hadn’t already ordered, I would have walked out. Not to mention the floors in the place looked like they hadn’t been washed in a week or more. They were so bad it was the first thing I noticed when I walked in.

Anyway, just like Chilitos, this one is permanently off the list.  If I’m gonna pay the kind of prices Quizno’s asks for a sub, I expect them to have the meat to make them, and for the place to be clean.

One of my instructors in college used to say “Never under estimate the bandwith of station wagon full of floppies travelling down the interstate”. While I haven’t ever had that experience, and really am not sure I ever care too, moving large amounts of data in a hurry is always somewhat interesting.

This week I was doing some upgrades on a server and had about 50GB of data I needed to move. The new server was equipped with SAS drives/controllers. I wanted to move this data quickly so my customers wouldn’t be cut off from the data for too long. Any type of network/share based transfer was just going to be way to slow. Ultimately I would have rather just put the drives from the old server into the new server, copy the data locally and remove the old drives. But since this server was setup for SAS it wasn’t an option.

The drives on the old server were IDE (yeah….OLD server is right). I asked a few people for ideas when Ron mentioned that they had some USB to IDE atapters they used for troublshooting, etc. He didn’t know if they would work on linux, but I figured it was worth a try. Sounded the the best option going, so I bought one from newegg.com.

This has turned out to be one of the best little gadgets I have ever purchased. I got it, and immediately hooked it up to the new server that was running Red Hat Enterprise 4 and immediately my test drive showed up….pretty much like a jump drive. I started doing some data copy speed tests and moved a 1.6GB file in one minute flat when connected to a USB 2.0 port!

So today I did the server upgrade. Removed the drives from the old server, used my USB to IDE adapter and within an hour had copied my 50GB of data to the new server. Thanks Ron!

No, not the kind “you get from kissin’”. The .NET platform project that allows you to run .NET apps on more platforms that just Windows. I heard about the mono project years ago, but until today really had no need to look at it. I have been avoiding .NET like the plague. However, when I started playing with the Amazon Simple Storage Service, I decided to use C# because XML deserialization was going to make the program a breeze.

I have gotten a nice little program going that I call S3Exploer that allows me to put files up and down with Amazon S3. But since I am a dual Mac/PC user, it has really been nagging at me that I would like the program to run on either platform. So I downloaded mono and began playing with it. I have to say, it is amazing, not flawless, but very good. So good it made me wonder why is it that an outside group can put something together that runs like this but microsoft hasn’t released a .NET VM for anything other that Windows?

With a little work, and a little cleanup of my code (mono actually uncovered a few areas I had overlooked) and a little playing with mono, I had my S3Explorer compiled in C# on Visual Studio 2003 on Windows running on my Mac in OSX! After about another hour or two of debugging/troubleshooting I had it fully functional on both platforms including a TreeView, a List View, XML Serialization/Deserialization, Cryptography (S3 requires hashes), WebRequest/Response, Input/Output Streams, Common Dialogs (Open/Save As), File IO….should I keep going?

As you can probably tell from this post I was quite impressed. If you want your .NET program to run on OSX or Linux take a serious look at the mono project.

Amazon is to blame for my recent lack of posts.  I ran across a story about Amazon Web Services a week or two, and since then most of my non-work tiime has been spent playing around with them.  There are two services that really interest me:

1. Simple Storage Service (also known at S3).  Basically it is a fault tolerant 99.999% available online storage system.  They sell a gig of storage for $.15/month.  Yeah you read that right.  You also have to pay for transfer at $.20 per month.  I looked at the price of a 150GB IDE hard drive online and it was $.13 per gig if you divided the cost of the drive across a year.  Then the thing will probably fail at some point.

2. Elastic Computing Cloud.  This is a virtual serving environment where you get a virtualized linux environment running equal to 1.7Ghz Xeon with over a GB of ram.  This is $.10 per hour of runtime and $.20 per GB of transfer.  So if you ran it for a month it would cost $72 plus bandwith used.  Oh…and it comes with a 250MB/s pipe to the Internet.

Now all of these services are definately for the tech minded.  The S3 service for instance in a set of http based API’s for managing files.  So you need to be a programmer type to use it.  Although there are some apps that have been written to allow you to use it as a disk drive from your PC.  I haven’t gotten to the Computing Cloud yet to see what you need to get up and running.

So most of my time has been consumed writing a program to interface with with S3.  You might be asking why?  Well my first program is just to get the hang of the API and develop some common classes I can use in the real program I am writing.  I’m keeping that under wraps for now until I figure it all out, but it is a really cool concept, something I have wanted personally for year.  It seems technology is finally starting to make it a reality.