Posts Tagged ‘Windows’

A Strange Way To Track Time…

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

I was digging through the system logs on the MS SQL server (SQL 2000 on a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine running inside VMWare ESXi on a monster Dell box; very cool. I’ll write about it sometime…) at work just now, trying to track down a goofy slowdown that happens on occasion, and came across this System Event…

system_uptime

The system uptime is 1339878 seconds.

That’s one million, three hundred thirty nine thousand, eight hundred seventy eight seconds, which translates into 22,331.3 minutes, or 372.1883 hours. Which, as everybody knows, is the same as 15.5079 days (rounded to four decimal points.) Or it could be expressed as 15 days, 12 hours, 11 minutes and 18 seconds (as calculated by a quick formula I threw together in Excel.)

Filtering through the System Events, I can see an eventlog entry for every day and every time that service had been stopped or started since November, 2007. The machine has been in operation for much longer than that (probably since 2004), counting the seconds that go by one. At. A. Time… Day in and day out. It’s useful information to be sure, but why display the time in seconds? Couldn’t the geeks in Redmond be bothered to modify that to show the time in days, hours & minutes instead? It’s a computer, for crying out loud, and most computers have plenty of extra capacity.

Seeing the time in seconds — especially in numbers that big — is absolutely meaningless to me. It’s not like running a calculation to make the time count easier to read would tax the system much… A holdover from an earlier time when every processor cycle was counted as precious? Or just an item very low on the priority list? Or maybe I just have too much time on my hands today?

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How About A Local Area Network RAID Array?

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I was in the process of setting up another new iMac for a user at work the other day, and got to looking at the hard drive — the ‘entry level’ 24″ iMac comes standard with a dual-core 2.66GHz processor, 4GB of memory and a 600GB hard drive. Much of that capacity (other than that memory) just won’t get used. There will be times when the processors will peak a bit, but most of the time they’ll be just barely above idle. And the hard drive… 600GB? On a desktop machine? If the computer were used in a home setting, that might get utilized, but here… Boy could I use some of that capacity for other stuff on the network! I guess I could just buy some cheap 100GB SATA drives and swap them out, but I’ve seen the gymnastics necessary to replace a drive in an iMac, and I don’t want to go through that any more than absolutely necessary.

I remember back when Apple was first rolling out OS X, there was talk of these super apps that would allow us to tap into some of that unused processing power by creating a distributed network computer by linking the computers on a network together; if one computer had a huge task of some sort to complete and other computers on the network had spare processor cycles available, there’d be some sharing going on, and you could get more done. At least that was the idea, but I haven’t heard much about distributed computer grid clusters since the big splash about using a host of Macs to create a monster grid computer. Xgrid sharing lives on, and even has a checkbox to enable it in the Sharing Preference Panel in Mac OS 10.5 (and maybe earlier.) Years ago when it might take a raster image processor (RIP) multiple hours to chew through an eight-page layout I would’ve have loved to put something like this to work, but today with the typical tasks done on the typical desktop computer in a print shop or an office environment, and without some monstrously processor-intensive task that needs to be done, I don’t really see much point in messing with it.

What I would like to see though is some kind of distributed disk sharing; that iMac I set up today starts out with a whopping big 600GB drive; after loading all the software on it there was still an easy 500GB… And that computer is one of three that I set up recently, and one of five of the same configuration. If I were to partition the disks in each of those machines to set aside half of the available space I’d have an easy terabyte and a half of disk space that could be used for other stuff.

What if there was some way of joining the disks on multiple computers over the network to create a disk array of sorts… A local area network RAID array. Think of a RAID array with the network acting as the interface card and some software on a server striping the bits & bytes across the disks. In all my digging through Google and other search engines, I haven’t found anything like what I’m thinking of; either I’m not asking the right questions or it hasn’t been done yet. If not, that’s too bad, because I think there’s a lot of potential there, but I can also understand some of the obstacles to making it work. The biggest issue is probably that the network can be a lot more fragile than the hardware & software that it takes to make a RAID array in a server or external box work. A mirrored drive in a RAID 1 arrangement would probably work best, as the other RAID levels with the data striped across multiple volumes would require a higher level of availability for the disks than might be possible.

But you know, since it doesn’t look like using that disk space for live files will work any time soon, maybe I can still put it to use for backups; set Retrospect up to use that space for backing stuff on the server up to disk, just for extra redundancy… Hmmm… Might have to play with that a bit…

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Windows Rant Of The Day — Finding A File Path

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Here’s one place where the Macintosh really, really shines compared to Windows…

Let’s say you have a document open in Word or Excel or PowerPoint, on either platform. Like many users, you just fired up the app and opened it through the handy-dandy Recent Documents list, just like you’ve done daily since you originated that document a month or so ago. And like many users you have no clue where on your hard drive you saved that particular file. But now, Gertrude in the next cubicle, or Hector in the Mexico City office, needs a copy of that file… How do you figure out where to find it?

On the Mac, just hold down the Command (Apple) key and click on the document title bar. A menu showing every step in the file path drops down. Pull down and click in any step in that menu, and you’re taken to that directory/folder. While it’s not exactly intuitive — you probably won’t find that trick in any of the Office apps’ menus — it’s easy as can be once you know it. Once you see the file, you can copy it to a flash drive, drag it to an email message, burn it to a CD, or whatever.

If you’re on a PC, well, it’s a different story. Emailing the file is pretty straightforward; click on the Office Button (in Office 2007) then pull down to Send — Email. That still doesn’t tell you where you can find the file, but Microsoft dumbs down that process enough to make it work. But what if you really need to burn that file to a CD or copy it to a thumb drive… how do you track down the location of the file?

Not sure if this is the best way, but after much digging around in the Office 2007 menus, what I found is that you can click on the Office Button (in Office 2007) then pull down to Prepare — Properties; that opens up a Document Properties bar just below The Ribbon, which includes a Location: field that shows the full file path for the file. From there you can select & copy the path, then paste it into an Explorer window. Yeah. That’s intuitive.

These examples refer to the Microsoft Office suite in both the Mac OS and in Windows; the same trick works in all apps on the Mac because it’s part of the OS. In Windows… the same trick will likely take different steps in different apps. That’s just the way it works in Winders.

And once again, the Mac OS smacks the snot out of Windows.

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