August 26th, 2011 | by matt | vmware
Aug
26
Ah yeah, its finally here! Next week is the infamous VMworld conference in Las Vegas. Couldn’t come at a better time as we’re knee deep in vCloud at work and very excited to get our hands on the new bits coming out of VMware. Looking forward to a great conference and hopefully I’ll have some time to post some content of things we’re seeing. If not a blog post, definitely some tweets (@usrlocal for those that don’t follow me).
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August 3rd, 2011 | by matt | apple, micro$oft, tips & tricks
Aug
03
Today marked the first time that I had to attend a live meeting after I recently upgraded my primary workstation to OSX Lion. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the smoothest experience.
Typically, Safari renders these meetings the best so it is my go to browser for meetings. Unfortunately, I would get the prompt for trusting the java app and a window would load with nothing happening. Same with Chrome. Firefox actually rendered the window with a Java loading icon spinning for all its worth, but never actually loading the meeting.
So, bail and go to my VDI. Now, I use my VDI for 2 things, powerCLI and VMware access. Its pretty bare bones. I found out that it didn’t even have java to join the web meeting that way. Live Meeting actually told me my version of Internet Explorer was not compatible even after installing java. Seriously Microsoft? I ended up installing the live meeting client and was into the meeting 15 minutes after the start. Yeah for productivity.
So surely I wasn’t the first one to trek down this path of Live Meeting plus OS X right? Correct! This post outlines the issue fully AND the solution. Here it is if you want to avoid a click:
All I did was go to Java Preferences (under Utilities) and on the Advanced Tab, ensure that the last option on the list “Verify mixed security code (sandbox vs. trusted)” is set to “Enable – run with protections, no warnings”. This is probably what was causing Java to hang before opening the session.
So there it is. I figured I ran into it, others surely would as well.
July 25th, 2011 | by matt | politics
Jul
25
I have a simple formula for how I vote. For each political call I get, that candidate gets a negative point added to their name. Before I go into the voting booth, I figure out who has the highest score. Most candidates are tied at zero. Unfortunately for Ron Paul, he’s sitting at -2 and its EARLY in the campaign.
I’m thinking about expanding my voting tally to include commercials and emails. But that might be too hard to track.
Which begs the question…is there an app for that?
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July 25th, 2011 | by matt | in the news
Jul
25
For those that might not be familiar with Dwolla, here is a brief run down.
Now, for some time I’ve been using the app for small transfers here and there. I think the service is great, easy to use, and their spots feature makes it really easy to find vendors that are accepting Dwolla. This was once a pain point but now I can easily pull up a map and find a local coffee shop and for my morning cup of joe. With all the ease of transferring money and extremely low transfer fees, it still has a few areas of improvement.
If I’m a vendor taking Dwolla and you being a customer think, “Wow, this is a great service, I’m going to setup an account quick and use it at check out”. Well, I’ve got news for you, come back in 2-3 business days. WTF? The appeal just went away for that user. They’re going to pay with credit card and the chances of them signing up are very very slim. Unless…I charge more for CC transactions to cover my cost and basically force my customers to become Dwolla customers as well. Not that I mind, but I might lose some customers by doing this. For me, this seems a pretty big issue of getting more users on the platform and the ease of signup is an issue Dwolla has yet to resolve. And I’m not sure they can solve it without some helps from the various banks out there. Supposedly its gotten better, but its still not a smooth process.
This is one where I’m going to pick on Dwolla the company a bit. They’re charging $0.25 per transaction which is freakishly low. It takes a lot of transactions to make $0.25 profitable. Not that they can’t do it, but there have been snippets of information coming out of the company that make me think, will they make it? Sure they have been sitting on a nice fat 1 million dollar round of investments. And I have no doubt that they can get another round with their recent announcement of 1 million dollars in transactions per week. But the business model underneath is what has me a little concerned.
A long time ago, Dwolla mentioned in a tweet that the average transaction was $500. Personally, I thought this seemed ridiculously high. But let’s run some numbers to see how the model looks. 1 million in transactions per week / $500 = 2000 transactions. Take that by $0.25 and you get $500 per week. Houston, we have a problem. Its hard to pay for your servers and put food on the table at that rate for a single person. They’re pushing 15 employees now.
So let’s assume that the average transaction has dropped to $100. That gives us 10,000 transactions or $2500 a week. Better, but can we really run a 15 person company on this revenue?
Now, where I think Dwolla really kicks ass is coffee shops, and mom and pop restaurants. And Des Moines has really caught the craze with this one. If we look at these being the typical Dwolla customers, you now have an average transaction in the $5-10 range for an average breakfast / lunch. At $5, NOW we’re talking a sustainable company. 200,000 transaction gets you into the $50,000 a week in revenue. Now that’s a number Dwolla can live with.
If you haven’t checked out Dwolla, I highly recommend it. Its a great service from a local Des Moines company. I really think that the average transaction has come down and these guys are making some major waves with their product announcements. Even if they don’t become the de facto online payment service, they’re proving that the market is out there for something other than credit cards and others will follow. Its going to be some exciting times for online payments in the next 12-24 months. I hope the best for Dwolla and will continue to promote them wherever I can.
UPDATE!!!!!
Since writing this original article, Dwolla has announced that they are now doing 1 million in transactions A DAY! If they have lowered their average transaction like I think they have, holy crap, they’re killing it!
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July 20th, 2011 | by matt | tips & tricks, vmware
Jul
20
A few months back I had a little bit of trouble with an upgrade in our corporate VMware cluster that I thought I would share. The details of this upgrade was to add a new host to the mix and bring everything up to vSphere 4.1 update 1. It seemed pretty straight forward at the time but there were a few unexpected issues that sucked up more time than expected.
Now, we have several clusters here in our company and often times we move a host from one cluster to the next. Several of the clusters were originally setup to work within the various active directory domains. This has been rather annoying when moving a host from one domain to another and having to do all the DNS update foo. Its much easier to have one private domain to rule them all so most of our hosts have been updated and moved to this new private domain that can be resolved by all domains.
This is where the fun actually comes in. The cluster that I’m moving a new host into is a hold out in the old naming space. Adding a new node shouldn’t be a big deal as the new name resolves in the virtual center.
Now, here comes the rub.
When upgrading a particular host, for some reason I could not enable the HA configuration. It just wouldn’t work. No particular reason other than it just failed to find the primary node. Now, you would think that this was failing on the new host that was added to the cluster. Nope, that added just fine, no worries there what so ever. The node that was failing was actually the 3rd host in the group to be upgraded.
Apparently what was happening actually had nothing to do with the primary node. It happened to deal with the new node with the name in the private domain. The issue, somewhere deep in the bowels of vSphere, it attempts to look up by the “short name” meaning esx123456 instead of esx123456.domain.com. While I was able to resolve esx123456.private.domain.com, I was unable to resolve esx123456 as the rest of the cluster was still looking for esx123456.domain.com which didn’t exist.
So my advice to you is, when changing the domains of hosts in a cluster, make sure you have all entries in both the new and old domains so you can avoid this short name lookup failure.
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