As some of you recall I had an issue in the server room a few months ago when the AC went out and we nearly had a meltdown. I went scouring for a cheap solution to be alerted of the ambient temperture in the server room and quickly found out a good cheap solution didn’t really exist and thus was born the Temperature Scan product.
I was excited the other day to get a testimonial from Arizona from a customer who wrote in to let me know that my hard work developing the temperature scan saved him a lot of potential grief. In his words:
“I installed the Temperature Scan a few weeks ago.  Â
Late yesterday afternoon, I got an e-mail alert that the temperature was climbing. I checked it out and our air conditioning unit had failed. (We also happen to be in the midst of a record breaking heat wave. It is over 100 degrees here today.)
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Since everyone was gone for the day, I would have had a disaster on my hands if I had not received the alert. I am guessing my computers would have been fried in the morning.
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Just in case, I also set up another alert so it e-mails my cell phone with a text message.
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Thanks for a product that works!
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God bless you.”
Pretty cool seeing such a simple and stupid idea yielding fruit for others!
Over a year ago I started planning a vision for the next step in the evolution of the network and systems architecture at Tradewinds. The vision was to migrate from a physical to a virtualized infrastructure. One where servers are no longer tethered to physical machines. One where flexibility and disaster recovery options are abundant.
We worked crazy hours the past month preparing for the final stages of the migration and worked through this past weekend rolling out the new landscape and making the necessary systems changes. I had expected a massive issue list when everyone returned Monday, but to my surprise, the issues were relatively lightweight, I guess that means we did a thorough job executing the plan…or maybe we just got lucky! At any rate, I did walk away with a few key lessons that may yield value to others proceeding down the path of virtualizing their servers.
Well, I haven’t written a post in sometime because I was feverishly spending my spare time working on developing a solution to a problem I ran into. One Monday morning I walked into work, stepped in front of my server room door and noticed a strange noise coming from the room. It sounded like a high pitch jet engine sound. I proceeded to open the door and a blast of hot air came barreling out at me. The A/C had gone out overnight and the server room was approaching 100 degrees. Not a good way to start the week off.
After I put a fan in the room and started shutting down non essential equipment, I decided it was time to install a temperature monitoring system into the server room. This wasn’t the first time we had issues with the A/C unit, but it was the highest the temperature had ever gotten, and I know if it gets to hot, things start going south real quick. I did some googling, and came up with all kinds of results, but most of these systems were very expensive and did a lot more than what I really needed.Â
What I wanted was simple (or so I thought it was):
USB - Had to be a Plug and Play Sensor that works with any computer.
Un-tethered - I didn’t want something that was connected to any one machine, I wanted to be able to get readings away from machine exhaust so I could get the ambient temperature of the room.
Paging / Emailing - I wanted a solution that would alert my blackberry and treo of issues in addition to a number of my hundred email accounts.
Customizable - I wanted to be able to specify my threshold to monitor and how often to monitor it.
Temperature Only -Â I know there are technically a lot of other factors that sophisticated data centers monitor such as humidity, but I also know that it is temperature that I have the most control over and can do the most damage if it gets out of control.
Cheap - Most importantly, it had to be cheap. I’m at a small trucking company and the economic times right now don’t warrant me the luxury to throw a rack mounted sensor in that does all kinds of fancy stuff. I was looking for the <$100 solution!
After digging, I decided the solution I was looking for didn’t exist, so I decided to create one.
I am normally a moderately conservative implementer of new technology into production environments at work. There is one decision we made back in 2005 however that was a little before the mainstream, but has worked out rather well. I recently read this article from eweek regarding the cost savings and growing number of VOIP implementations.  Being a relatively early adopter of VOIP, I can attest that it is a worthwhile venture…and a little less risky now.
I get asked from time to time about our phone system and why I like it so much and why I’m so eagerly awaiting the next release of it in 2008 which we’ve got plans to upgrade to.
How many times have you come across a technical problem and have no idea where to even begin to start with it? My favorite is when you get an error that usually has some vague text and then a sentence that says “Please contact your System Administrator for further help.” I always chuckle since I am the System Administrator and I’m usually as perplexed as the typical end-user.
98% of the time, spending a few minutes applying deductive reasoning, googling or shooting an instant message out to my fellow nerds I usually get an answer or at least have come up with a few paths to explore. But what happens when the issue is very vague? Or if it is intermittent? Or worse yet, you’ve exhausted all leads and are still striking out?
As I mentioned in a previous post, we have standardized on SQL Reporting Services for our reporting needs. Coming from a Business Intelligence consulting background I had used a handful of powerful reporting solutions such as BusinessObjects, Spotfire, etc, so I was very leery when I first started experimenting with SQL Reporting Services.
After working with it for over two years, I can safely say that it is a very decent (and free) reporting solution for people running SQL Server.  For small to medium businesses who already own SQL, odds are with a little bit of experimentation, you can make reporting services work for you.
In my earlier post regarding the new release of the .NET 3.5 Framework and Visual Studio 2008, I mentioned a very exciting concept within the .NET framework called XBAP which stands for XAML Browser Application. XAML is basically a layer of abstraction that describes the presentation of a .NET app. So what is XBAP?
XBAP is simply taking a .NET application and making it run in the browser. In the olden days, you’d have to determine if you were going to write a desktop based application or a web application. Web applications are not as robust and feature rich in the UI and presentation in addition to having many constraints being a stateless model, hence why most complex applications end up on the desktop. That era is one step closer to being ushered out. With XBAP, the gap that exists between web applications and full client applications is closing. Read the rest of this entry »
When it first dawned on me that the deadline for analog cell service was coming to a closure in 2008, I didn’t think much about it. After all, it is reported that only 1% of the cell phone population use a cell phone that is analog only, so what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that there are millions of devices around the US that rely solely on analog, and many of them are not phones, they are devices like OnStar, GPS tracking systems, alarm system devices, etc. When the analog service is shutoff, these devices will be rendered useless. This could happen as early as February 18th, 2008 since this is the date the FCC says it is ok for cell companies to shutoff analog services.
This week Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Framework. While the 3.0 framework has been out for sometime now, the 3.5 framework builds on this and adds some additional features to the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). So why is this worthy of a blog entry?Â
The answer is simple! Microsoft’s latest strategy with the .NET platform is brilliant. At a recent MSDN event I attended, the presenter stated that they had basically concluded that the only thing developers should have to worry about are the elements that are unique to the business requirements they are programming. These fall into two simple categories, 1) the User Interface (UI) and 2) the business rules. All other code components are not unique across applications nor across businesses and industries.
At the last MSDN event I attended, there was some discussion of the new Microsoft Surface concept. If you are unfamiliar with this relatively new technology venture Microsoft is headed down I think you will be impressed with how neat the concept is. Basically it is bringing touch screen computing to a whole new level. Imagine a screen that is very large with software that is very interactive. You can start to explore and navigate in ways that a traditional mouse simply cannot.Â
Some say it is the future of computing, but I’m not sure. There is a great blog post here that actually discusses the technology behind it, it is pretty fascinating.
As you can see from the video below, the technology is amazing, but I’m not sure where it fits in my business. Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be sweet in my living room (so long as it could stand a few kids jumping, scribbling and spilling on it). I’ll be watching this technology, I’m sure it’ll be everywhere in the future as people start thinking of great ways to leverage it!
As some of you recall I had an issue in the server room a few months ago when the AC went out and we nearly had a meltdown. I went scouring for a cheap solution to be alerted of the ambient temperture in the server room and quickly found out a good cheap solution didn’t really exist and thus was born the Temperature Scan product.
Over a year ago I started planning a vision for the next step in the evolution of the network and systems architecture at Tradewinds. The vision was to migrate from a physical to a virtualized infrastructure. One where servers are no longer tethered to physical machines. One where flexibility and disaster recovery options are abundant.
I am normally a moderately conservative implementer of new technology into production environments at work. There is one decision we made back in 2005 however that was a little before the mainstream, but has worked out rather well. I recently read 
How many times have you come across a technical problem and have no idea where to even begin to start with it? My favorite is when you get an error that usually has some vague text and then a sentence that says “Please contact your System Administrator for further help.” I always chuckle since I am the System Administrator and I’m usually as perplexed as the typical end-user.
As I mentioned in 
In my 
When it first dawned on me that the 
This week Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Framework. While the 3.0 framework has been out for sometime now, the 3.5 framework builds on this and adds some additional features to the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). So why is this worthy of a blog entry? 
