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I’m going to, periodically, do a tribute to old computers of mine. Today it is the Dell Optiplex GX-Pro

I had this machine from 1996 to 1998. My configuration was a Dual Pentium Pro 200mhz with 64 megs of RAM and a 720 megabyte Hard Drive. The OS that this machine ran was Windows NT 4.0 (aka Daytona).

This machine was a dream. The Pentium Pro 200mhz was a pretty substantial processor in terms of power, and coupled with the 32 bit only splendor of NT 4.0 ran more like a “modern” OS than Windows ’95, which I had prior. The only challenge was, drivers for Windows NT 4 were in scarce supply, and often flaky.

The internals of this machine were also really nice, especially for a home-tinkerer like me. The power supply flipped up and out, and the entire drive cage was removable to operate on, making adding hard drives (I eventually had three in there) easy.

The machine served me well until I upgraded to an Intergraph TDZ-2000 3d workstation (more on that in a later post).

The GXPro then went on to serve as the primary machine for my parents until it was retired in place of a Pentium IV and eventually their iMac.

The machine currently is buried in my parents garage.

The cuteness that is my baby:

Onsie is was a gift from the band for his birth. We have outfits (REM branded) up to 2 years old. Reminder: “Live at the Olympia” released next Tuesday!

Today is my normal day to do a long run in preparation for the Rock and Roll Marathon (donate!) which I am running on December 6. During the week, I run 3-5 miles every other day, and Sunday’s do a super long run. My “usual” non-training run is a 13 mile through Griffith Park. It’s a beautiful run, taking me through Burbank, to Glendale and into the park.

Today I was going to do a longer version of that run by going in the opposite direction for a few miles and looping up and around back toward the park. However when I got the place where I would go back east, I decided: what the hell, I’ll run west until I I reach half the total distance i want to run, then run back.

So I did.

I ran through the cities of Burbank, Toluca Lake, Valley Village, Studio City, Sherman Oaks and halfway through Encino. All told, I travelled three separate corridors through the Valley.

I usually only drive these routes, and Amy and I, sadly don’t get out to explore much (we stick around Toluca Lake). Some things I saw and noticed:

• I ran by the vacant hospital where they shoot Scrubs and any hospital scenes in the Office.
• The valley has some cute little cafe’s scattered through it, some of which have pitchers of water for runners outside, which is very nice.
• Sherman Oaks was having a whole street festival, which sucked because I had to run by and I was super hungry
• Burbank is comparatively empty compared to Studio City and Sherman Oaks on the weekend
• Running is fun way to see the variations, eras and booms/busts in real estate through the year. The booms are represented by tons of condo and apartment buildings with the same style. The busts by few in certain styles. A bust year? Archibald Quincy Jones style wood paneling. Boom year? Horrible late 80′s stucco vomit and early/mid-2000′s column/faux Venetian
• It’s a good idea to eat a good breakfast before a long run. I forgot to.
• The Clif goopy gel stuff is much better than Gu. The Clif Shot Blocks are awesome too for some electrolyte’s.
• Pay attention to the camber of the pavement and asphalt when you run. If your arches start hurting, move (as safely as possible) away from the curb or on to the sidewalk (harder on the soles, but easier on the arches)
• Riverside, Moorpark and Ventura Blvd would be perfect light-rail lines and alleviate a ton of traffic. Why hasn’t this been done? Oh wait
• It’s interesting to see how much certain cities value, or devalue human scale architecture. I think it’s also indicative of the era of urban planning. Newer areas (ie, Sherman Oaks toward the 405 and Encino) have no human scale architecture while more “forgotten” corridors, like Riverside in Valley Village or Moorpark in Studio City are all about small shops and long-standing businesses. Interestingly enough, the small shops and human scale retail had less vacancies than the relative ghost towns of the mirrored glass monstrosities

All in all, it was a great run. Not as scenic as the Griffith Park run, but ultimately scenic in a different way. Los Angeles is a weird place with a very fractal sense of community, history and locality. Each little area is a self-similar representation of the bigger city and county as a whole. Running through one city and a few municipalities (there are only three cities in the Valley, technically), you see, block to block, the short history of the area play out.

From stamps in cement with the date that the pavement was laid, to businesses proclaiming over a half century of existence residing next to a Starbucks. We are new and old, and celebrate neither.

Next weeks run needs to be over 18 miles, and my plan is to possibly head north, which is somewhat not altogether safe depending on where you do so, so I have to plan that accordingly.

I haven’t been able to update the blog nearly as much as I would like, mostly because my life has gotten slightly more busy due to this thing.

About four months ago he entered into our lives in a slimy heap. Life hasn’t really been the same since, nor would I want it to be. The last four months have been amazingly, tiring, enlightening and life changing. All the cliches are true, and all the truisms you hear from friends with kids are likewise true. Imagining life before Eli is incomprehensible. Possibly because of the lack of sleep. Actually likely because of that.

In the last four months I’ve also been navigating some interesting waters at work, things I can’t talk about yet. If things work out, it’ll be amazing. If things don’t, my job is still amazing besides.

The best thing about my job is that I enjoy it. If I was to go back in time to a 16 year old me and tell him that I was going to work at Warner Bros. Records, home to my favorite band, in an office that looks like this:

Well, I wouldn’t believe it. It’s a pleasure to go to work, even with the challenges the business I’m in is facing. However, challenges are met with talent and I’m surrounded by ample amounts of that.

I am really proud of the work we’ve done, from Digital Detail (more on that in a new post), to sites like Tom Petty’s. I think, and I hope others see, that we are trying to affect change through the elimination of formality and modality from the equation of product. Given that I believe data is our true asset base, it’s nice to be able to create content, products, and hopefully art in any given modality and formal framework without regard to medium.

So, lets run down some things happening:

• I am running a marathon to raise money for the Crohns/Colitis Foundation. My aunt is terminal with this disease, and my dad, sister and wife are in remission. I need to raise 2,800 dollars. Every bit helps. I’d love to come up with some sort of loyalty based incentive for high donations (dinner with me?), but can’t think of any. Donate here please, if you can! I have to run 26.2 miles, you get to fill in a form.
• As part of this, I’m running about 20-23 miles a week right now. I’m finding that running clears my head better than anything, and helps me keep balance.
• R.E.M. releases a new 39 track record on October 27. See the site for it at REMDublin.com. It is probably one of the best live records I’ve ever heard, up there with Stop Making Sense. The band is also going back into the studio soon. The Direct to Fan package for this record is also incredible, and the first digital D2F that we’ve done.
• I recently spoke to the Media Arts and Technology program at UCSB, a program which I was a part of but never finished. I kind of hope my speaking would count as my thesis presentation so I could get my second Masters. The presentation went well, and I’m starting to hone in on a thesis for a standard presentation at conferences. I got offered to keynote a conference in Toronto on December 1, but because of the variability of my schedule I have to pass I think.
• We met with Spotify at work the other day and it reminds me that smart innovation beats “gee whiz” technology obsession any day. Is it a wonder that Daniel and Martin are from ex-US, and especially ex-Silicon Valley?

That’s it for now. I’m due to write some longer posts about my Digital Life, Dell computers purchasing experience, the Mac Book Pro 17″, Digital Detail and more. Soon.

This whole “put the baby to bed early” thing is working out so far.

In the last post, I talked about the network infrastructure which powers my digital life. The gist of it is that I need to have persistent, always-on connectivity from all locations to all systems which encompass my world. To do so, my office, home and our data center are linked up with high speed connections and within the same class-B subnets.

Now, the computing devices which make up the usage of this network infrastructure is the subject of this post.

Inventory

The following is an inventory of the machines that I own and run.

Whew. That is a lot of machines.

Now the fun part, going through the machines one by one.

First though, you might wonder why it is I have so many computers, and if I actually use them. The answer to the first part is: because I can. The answer to the second: yes. I use computers to fill functional gaps, meaning where I see a need to apply a machine (and its constituent parts, ie OS, browser, etc) to a problem, I do. Machine’s are cheaper than time.

Mac Pro (8 Core)

This is my main work machine, which I estimate I use 8 to 10 hours per day, five days a week. The machine is a 2009 Mac Pro, with eight cores running at 3.0ghz. I have 16 gigabytes of RAM in the machine, and two Nividia 8600GT video cards. These cards drive four Samsung 2343BWX displays.

I love these displays for a few reasons. First off, they have the typical Samsung display, which is to say crisp, bright, high contrast and even gamma. And secondly, they are one of the only high density LCD’s on the market, running at 2048×1152 resolution. Four monitors might seem to be over-kill, but I use them fully. The left most monitor I used to have monitoring screens on, but this started driving me crazy. I now reserve it for “long running” programs such as Spotify, iTunes and some home made monitoring dashboard type components that are written in Flex.

The left screen is used for “information” streams, including Twitter, Yammer, NetNewsWire and other info sources. The middle screen is for “focus” and contains web browsers, programming, etc. And finally the right most screen is for “communication” and features e-mail (Apple Mail and Entourage), iChat and Skype.

The machine has four terabytes of hard drives (four 1TB drives). One drive is for “boot” and the other three are in a RAID configuration for storage of the Users folder from OSX and movies, music and other high bandwidth type files.

To this machine is attached a 2TB Lacie drive that I use for Time Machine, and only Time Machine.

The optical out of this machine is connected to an Onkyo receiver and from there to a pair of JBL studio monitors that are on my desk.

Mac Pro (4 Core)

This used to be my main machine, but is now sitting on a stand up desk on the other side of my office. It has two Acer 24″ monitors as displays and during the day primarily displays what we call the War Games Console. The WGC is a VNC connection to our management server which has a careful grid of top, iftop, mytop and ApacheTop on it from all our web-heads and database servers. I also have Cacti and a special Flex dashboard we made on there. I use this to monitor the health of our infrastructure.

The other use of this machine is to show people our systems when I have visitors. I do this instead of having people gather around my desk as used to occur.

I also use this machine with a SATA dock to test out OSX and other OS betas.

Mac Minis

I have a total of three Mac Mini’s that I use regularly. Two of them are applied as Home Theater PC’s, one at the office and one at home. On them I run a variety of software, mostly for testing out the concept of HTPC, as I have yet to see software which fulfills the promise of the 10 foot view of computing.

The software I am testing includes Hulu desktop, Boxee, Plex and Front Row. None of them are perfect, so I often resort to Finder and Quicktime.

The Mac Mini in the office is most often used for meetings and presentations. The home and work Mac Mini’s are hooked to a Samsung 55″ LCD television. The one at home is a slightly newer model.

The lone Core Solo Mac Mini I picked up at fire sale for about $300.00. It resides inside the main wall in our living room. hooked to a 15″ touch screen monitor. On this I have running Indigo from Perceptive Automation as well as some assorted other daemons. I have a custom Fluid full screen browser running a dashboard for our house which shows time, Flickr photos, lighting controls, weather and the security cameras.

iMac

Not much to say other than it’s a white iMac that my wife uses.

Mac Book Pro’s

My main remote machine is a unibody Mac Book Pro. Because of the brilliance of DropBox, my Mac Book Pro seamlessly transitions to my remote machine after working all day in my office, provided that I shut programs down on each machine between switching.

At the house we also have two Mac Book Pro’s from the two prior generations. These are used by my wife around the house, and by visitors.

Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh

The Dell Mini 9 is a “throw in the back of the car” computer, or a “I’m going to Starbucks” computer. It’s not very fast, the keyboard sucks and its prone to crashiness, but in a pinch it works to read e-mail, RSS and it too has DropBox sync, so it can pull in my work documents. I would love to get a new hackintosh (Dell Mini 10V), but will wait to see what Apple will be doing in this space.

iPod Touch

The iPod touch is used as a remote control for various systems in our house, including the Sonos, Indigo (the lighting system), the cameras (one for the front door, one for the baby) and the receiver. It is a first gen iPod Touch, with no need for us to upgrade.

iPhone 3GS

The iPhone 3GS, as I blogged, functions like a NetBook for me. I use it for work e-mail, calendars and addresses, as well as a phone, but it also functions as a remote blogging machine, news reader, remote control for the house, VNC, SSH, etc. I can do everything I can do from my house on this machine, and it fits in my pocket.

When I was in my teenage years and just getting into the Internet, I dreamed of a time when I could have persistent connectivity and ubiquitous computing. I was promised at one point that I’d be able to plug a computer into my phone and have a two megabit connection. That never materialized. Ricochet did, and at home I had ISDN (dual channel), with 128kbps of connectivity. Fast for those days.

The hallmark of my digital life has always been connectivity. I always considered myself living a bifurcated life: online and off, and having to maintain both at the same time.

To that point, I also don’t make distinction between work and home when it comes to connectivity. To suit me, I need to have network access on all devices that can blend seamlessly between all available systems that are in my purview: work, data-center and home.

So lets get to how I did my network architecture. First the diagram.

The network is fairly simplistic at my house, but the primary aim is to make my house a remote branch office for WBR and provide hard-line VPN access from my house to our datacenter. Because i have this, and my house has a dedicated class-C subnet on the same topology as the office network, all my machines at the office are available directly for AFP, VNC and other remote administration/access methods.

This also has the provided benefit that from the office, I can access all the devices at my house. Here are some run downs:

Connectivity

Because I use my home as an extension of the office, the quality of the connection is hugely important. I used to have DSL, but because of the distance from the central-office, I was limited as to the speed of the connection. About a year ago I switched to a Charter Cable Business connection, which is 20 mbps down, 2 mbps up. The difference between the business line and consumer, besides the cost is that I have multiple IP addresses that are static, an enforceable SLA, priority support and a relaxed terms of use for running things like web servers, VPN’s, etc.

I’ve found that 20 by 2 is pretty damned fast, although I am keeping an eye out on faster alternatives as they become available where I live. Right now we are looking at getting a new house, and we are certainly looking at available bandwidth as a prerequisite (how could you not?).

Termination Point and Devices

The cable connection terminates underneath my entertainment unit. This is good, as the largest concentration of ethernet ports in the house is in the entertainment unit. Off the cable modem I have a Netscreen 5GT, and off that an Airport Extreme (dual band) and a Netgear gigabit switch.

The devices that are hardline connected are:

• Receiver (Denon 3801CI)
• AppleTV
• Mac Mini HTPC
• DirectTV HR21
• Samsung Bluray player
• Sonos ZP80
• Slingbox
• Airport Extreme Dual Band

Wireless Network

The wireless network consists of all Airport Extreme base stations. I used to have Netgear N network devices, but they had a rather severe ramp effect when out of range. The MacBook Pro would show full bars, but no IP traffic would go across. I have the primary access point in the living room. Inside my desk in the dining area is a Airport Express N which acts as a bridge for the Cisco IP phone, which is synced to my office line. In the master bedroom we have another Airport Extreme N which acts as a relay/bridge for the room as well as the DirectTV HR20 upstairs.

We also have two 801.11G cameras in the house, one on the balcony for the front door and one that we use as a baby monitor.

Topology

My house has its own class C network which sits in the same class B as the Warner office. I assigned DNS entries to most of the devices in the house to ease me accessing them from the office. I use this for instance, to watch the webcams from my office (so I can see my baby) as well as grab files from my home drives from the office and vice-versa. I likewise assigned names to my work machines.

Changes

Like I said, we’re looking at moving in the next six months or so, as we’ve out grown the townhouse. When we move, one of the things I’d like to do is drop cat-6 cable through the house to ports i each bedroom, and terminate the points in a wire closet in the house. I’d prefer to get more robust gear in there, including a configurable layer-3 switch, a beefier Netscreen and spread the wireless access points through more of the house. A gigabit whole house network would also allow me to experiment with video distribution over cat-5 or IP, and put a whole house PBX in using Asterisk.

Coming up: computing devices, entertainment unit/AV, home automation and more!

About four years ago, when I first started at Warner Bros. Records I did a post about my digital life and how I maintained it. Four years on, I’m still at Warners, but my digital life, as it were, has evolved substantially with the movement of technology. So, I figured it was time, given recent events, to update My So Called Digital Life. I’ll call it the 2009, or “post-thirty” edition given that I turned 30 this year.

I’m going to do this series broken down into these parts:

1. An overview of the “life” part of the “digital life”

2. The requirements defined that needed addressing by the tools I have

3. Infrastructure of the tools I use

4. The tools I use and how I use them.

I’ll do Part 1 tonight.