EEFY!  

Wow!! This guy’s insane!! I’m not sure if he’s all Parkour crazy, but it’s damn impressive. Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour

Yesterday I went to the Apple Store to pick up a new toy. The Apple Magic Mouse. Surprisingly, they were sold out (outside of the one that I managed to find ungaurded on a table looking lonely… that now has a home). I read a few reviews before actually going ahead and buying the mouse, and most of them, if not all were favorable… except about the ergonomics…. which frankly, I don’t entirely agree with.

I use my computer pretty much 24/7 when I’m awake. The mouse is one of my most used things (as you can see if you ever look at my older track pad that has a few smooth spots in it where I’ve worn it down), so ergonomics are important to me, and if they were awful, I’d notice quickly, not?

I’ve been using the Apple Mighty Mouse (previous rendition of the Magic Mouse) for about a year and a half with little to no issues, and it’s got a similar form factor to the magic mouse. The big difference… I use a wrist guard protector thingie (Gel Pad) and honestly that makes a world of difference.

So far my experiences have been pretty good. I’ve added MagicPrefs and it’s given me a bit of funky functionality, but all in all it’s taken some getting used to, and now I’m really loving it. Swiping back and forth to go around in my browser is much more user friendly, and scrolling around the same way that I used to with the ‘ball’ on the magic mouse is also pretty damn awesome.

If i have any hiccups, I’ll blog about it, but for the time being, I doubt I’m going to. Oh, and something interesting that I discovered is that the mouse actually has a tactile service which covers more than 75% of the face (up till about the apple logo)… Wonder what they’ll add to this (gestures to unlock? gestures to reload a browser?)

UPDATE: I also forgot to mention Better Touch Tool, another great piece of software for multitouch

After a few weeks I’ve discovered that the better implementation of the two seems to be the PS3. Why? you may be asking yourself, but it seems to have implemented a better streaming method, as when my TWC Turbo (15Mbit burstable to 30Mbit) is playing up, or I’m downloading something for work, it seems to continue to chug along, where the TiVo doesn’t. Sadly, I’m also about to give up my TiVo for a shiny new DirecTV DVR (thanks to TWC’s ineptness. GO CUSTOMER SERVICE!).

So for work I’ve been investigating the use of a centralized unified configuration management tool for all *nix (and ESX) hosts throughout geo locations, the idea would be to actually ensure we had a unified configuration. Over time scope creep for things that you don’t actually log into, or as you move through a fast moving enviroment (like ours) things change, and there’s not the time to go back and fix this.

What I’ve been researching is essentially the way to define a role throughout our infrastructure for say RHEL5 Web Server, and then as soon as they deliver the server online, it checks in, and wham it’s got what it needs and then over time as we change things, it’s easily maintained. While investigating here’s an interesting video that’s come up, the people are:

• Igal Koshevoy of AutomateIt
• Brendan Strejcek of Cfengine
• Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs for Puppet
• Narayan Desai of bcfg2
• Adam Jacob from Opscode for Chef

While they don’t argue much, my honest opinions are that right now my favourite is Chef, their latest release removes the nasty openID requirement, which is GREAT. I’m not sure how well any of them scale at this time, but thus far my attempts with puppet have been little more than unfortunate failure, probably on my part, but nothing about it makes me want to rush forward. However while I’ve not given Chef a good and proper go, it’s got the most pleasant community, nicest site, and the fastest responses / releases I’ve seen of the lot!

I’ll update with things about my foray into Chef over the next few days.

Patrick