Apr 12 2007

Leopard Later

So Apple has decided to delay the launch of Leopard until October and here I was all ready for a June Mac purchase. I guess I will save a few more pennies and wait until then. This is going to affect their second quarter mac sales figures, but I think it’s a wise choice especially since it was done so that the iPhone launch would not be delayed. The iPhone is much more anticipated and hyped, and considering most people who were waiting for a new OSX would have a reaction similar to mine anyway. An iPhone delay could mean a lot of other things,  including a big dip in the stock price, though in after hours trading AAPL has taken quite a dive since the Leopard delay announcement.

In other developments, I tried out VMWare for the first time the other day. Installed the latest version of Ubuntu and did a little server virtualization. I haven’t actually had time to measure performance but I’ll take wildbill’s & greenfly’s word for it, they use it very successfully with HP Blades at their work. So far I’m very impressed with the ease of use, install and setup. I need to investigate this more thoroughly and maybe have it talk to a few SANs and have it actually do some work, then I can measure performance and potential cost savings.

The other thing I’ve been tinkering with apart from my regular workload is Asterisk, no thanks to Samir, my long postponed interest in asterisk has been rekindled. So last weekend we got to work installing and configuring the sucker, but woe is us and we did not compile asterisk with the required zaptel modules(we didn’t know that then) and so we were stuck for a several hours trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work, all the time reading everything that was out there on asterisk. But clearly fatigue had gotten hold of us and we missed the part where it mentioned asterisk and zaptel together, we had them working fine individually though… Ah well, lesson learned. We also, in our quest for asterisk knowledge, came across Trixbox(formerly called Asterisk@Home), and we are going to give it a whirl tomorrow night, while the rest of our peers drink beer and party. Needless to say I will keep y’all posted. The other cool resource I must point to you is Asterisk Tutorials, they have great little screen-casts about what asterisk can do for you and how to setup the various features. Let me tell you, I’m very very impressed by what this piece of software can do, I’ve seen several thousand dollars being spent on proprietary hardware/software that do 50% of what this does. Anyway, a full description of our Trixbox saga coming up soon.