1000-miles-an-hour

I received an email that the score to Torchwood's season 3 mini-series "Children of Earth" was available for pre-order. Not only was the composer someone I was unfamiliar with, outside the Main Theme I don't vividly recollect the music used throughout the first two seasons.

All that changed yesterday.

We watched the first two episodes of the 5-episode mini-series (which encompasses the entirety of the third season) "Children of Earth" and all I can say is, "WOW!" Torchwood was initially unadulterated British cheese, billed as a "Dr. Who for adults" which eventually matured as the series progressed. And though I'd heard that they'd pulled out all the stops for this last 'season' I was doubtful it would rise to the occasion. I'm here to admit that I was mistaken.

When was the last time you came so hard, you forgot where you were?

While I don't suggest watching it standalone without having first seen the previous two seasons to set up the backstory, I do think the conclusion of the series is time well spent for watching the entire thing. And the score? Magnificent! Its very exciting - I ordered it today:





Which leads me to The Plan. Thanks to irulan_amy who was my eyes & ears at ComicCon this year and who attended Bear McCreary's "Battlestar Concert" where he played a piece from a yet-to-be-released direct-to-video TV movie I was entirely ignorant of, The Plan. You see, humans created the Cylons. They rebelled. There are many copies. And yes, you guessed it, they have a plan. Taking place after the events of the destruction of the 12 colonies, that plan will be unveiled, answering a lot of questions (I assume) behind the motivations of the cylon's actions in the series.

Of course another Bear McCreary score is never a bad thing either ;)

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Since I first mentioned my DL380 G3 I got rid of the ML380 which I accidentally irrevocably destroyed and replaced it with a DL380 G4 on which I installed ESXi v4.0 aka vSphere. vSphere will only load on 64-bit machines, and the G4 fit the bill.

G3 = 32-bit dual 3.20 GHz procs, 5GB memory, 3x15k 18GB drives in a RAID-0 configuration
G4 = 64-bit dual 3.60 Ghz procs, 4GB memory, 5x10k 72GB drives in a RAID-5 configuration

The ML370 took 35 minutes to load ESXi v3.5. But thanks to a boost in compute power, and a complete re-engineering of vSphere, the G4 was able to accomplish the task in about 8 minutes. Now we all know the heartburn I have with only being able to run the Virtual Infrastucture Client (now called vSphere client) on the Windows operating system, but moving my VMware Workstation hosts from my laptop to the G3 gives me the overhead I need so that its not such a drag.

The VMware leader dude showed me how to make a virtual switch on vSphere, allowing me to suck DHCP addresses for my hosts while keeping my server on my static IP. He later showed me the Windows equivalent of the resolv.conf. I manipulated that so I can access my hosts via DNS if the back-end IP addresses refresh their lease. The best part is - no more transferring of files; I can access the same box no matter where I am.

While we were building out the new server, we were simultaneously playing with features. For example, I put a lot of work into culling down my initial XP image for his SAN - 3.4GB with all my apps. Unfortunately, that backfired because I'm perpetually low on disk space. During the transfer of the host from his SAN to my new server, I was able to resize the c:\ drive, update the VMware Tools, and make configuration changes along the way. I have a gigabit connection under my desk on my static IP ethernet, and was able to copy and convert my entire host in about five minutes.

The VMware leader dude suggested that I create a separate datastore for the swap files, and I knew just the thing - a 72GB 15k drive I'd recently come into possession of, and I had one free slot.

And now a word about SCSI hot-swap. When I first plugged one of the 72GB 15k drives into an empty slot on my ubuntu workstation, it froze the server. Plugging it into the G4, it didn't - however, ESX wouldn't "see" the drive as a valid physical drive. Yes, I had to reboot the server and configure it as a logical drive first.

So yeah, its fast. I'm going to see how much more I can do with it. And while your average run-of-the-mill user will be able to use it immediately "out of the box" the bastardization of linux they've managed seriously inhibits my ability to exploit it, as its quite different than the v3 builds. Once I've completely set up all the nuances I want from it, however, I shouldn't have to touch it again. Unfortunately, I'm still accessing this technology with the same 1800s interface - the same interface which was around when steam engines crossed this nation. I really believe that should be updated next.

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Things at work are keeping me absolutely buried this week but in a good way. Lots of work, but lots of accomplishments as well. You cannot stop change, and none of us know the future, but if you're able to exceed your programming, you may just keep your head above the waterline.