Some mini updates and random thoughts

Ok, it's been a while since I've updated the blog. To my one reader, I apologize for my slacker tendencies. The family is about to embark on a vacation to Orlando for a couple nights then a 3 night Disney cruise with a baby and a really rambunctious toddler, should be entertaining. Which of course there's another week with out an article. I am planning on tweeting photos as I go (during the non-international roaming parts of the trip.) So if you're interested, play along on Twitter

In the mean time, I'm just going to throw out a few notes on the great TiVo crisis and a couple of articles I have bouncing around in my head.

TiVo crisis update: After a lot of troubleshooting which involved ripping apart the Western Digital TiVo extender (really an over glorified mybook eSATA drive) as well as the TiVo itself to run extensive hard drive tests from WD. Both tests came back clean which was odd. So that essentially left either the SATA cable, the CableCard (yikes!) or some actual hardware issue. Unfortunately the next option I had was to disconnect the extender and let the TiVo divorce it (therefore deleting all of my videos).

This test so far has proven successful, no issues, and my wife's American Idol episodes actually recorded. For some reason Idol was the first program that started showing signs of distress and it ALWAYS got screwed up after that. The unit has been crusing along for over a week with no signs of distress, so I am calling the issue as a bad SATA cable (or connector on one of the units, we'll soon find out when I order a new cable.

In the pipeline.
One the IT Pro font, I've gotten approval for the Drobo Pro to extend the Dell NAS server we use for our disk to disk backup system. Before I attach it there, I'd like to slap it on a workstation to play with it a little and get some peliminary performance numbers. Then I want to see if I can get it talking with a VMWare ESX host as an iSCSI device. If I can I'll then try to run some numbers on it vs. direct storage and our 2gbps fibre channel SAN. I don't expect a lot on the VMWare front as I think the unit will probably take a beating on I/O. But if it can actually work, it might be a good solution for guest machines that don't hit the disk system a lot or are low use type machines.

Finally, some iPhone love is in the works too. I went crazy and downloaded a ton of apps trying to win the billionth app contest (alas I lost). They were all free apps, and I've been culling the ones I deem crappy. When the reckoning is finally over, I'll write about what's left as I did find a couple of cool, or at least amusing (I'm talking about you, iPity (link opens to random review I found on Google)) apps.

That's it for now folks, time to find some sandals to pack!