Rob and I are working on updating our standard environmnent in our data centers. As may be clear already, we're big proponents of SmartOS, which has been working really well for our needs. We've also big proponents of automation (and, in particular, Ansible). Due to a hardware failure this weekend …

I'm generally extremely happy with my 17-year old 2000 Boxster S that I bought new. However, running back and forth between Atlanta means that I've not been driving it as much as I have recently (although quite a bit more than I did in the 2008-2010 period). Last year, I …

For those of us old timers, here's an amusing shootout between a SparcStation 20 and a Raspberry Pi, including both the Pi and the Pi2 (but unfortunately not the Pi0). For those unfamiliar with the SS20, it was a workhorse desktop in the 1990's. Early pizza-box design and pricing out …

As part of completing our shut-down of 2007-vintage Xserves at the hosting center, we're moving a lot of servers to SmartOS (or at least SmartOS-hosted VMs). We've been really happy with the system so far. Here's a quick story of the power of this environment. As part of the transition …

Over Thanksgiving, one of the two drives in my "Big Disk" RAID (it was a mirror of 2 2TB drives that I used to store large things that aren't worth having on the SSD on my Mac Pro). Generally speaking, my response to failures with SMART (especially with cheap spinning …

Occasionally, in the vast expanse of the internet there are gems from people I know and respect. I'm not going to summarize, because the entire article, The Age of Deception , is worth reading by itself. Thanks, ssh.

Somehow in the midst of all of the craziness around here, I missed that, as the New York Times reports, Obama Won’t Seek Access to Encrypted User Data. For the time being, they appear to have agreed to the rationale that a back door provides as much entree to …

Wired had an article last week entitled Your Relative's DNA Could Turn You Into a Suspect, in which they describe a of using familial DNA searching to locate suspects. There are interesting implications here, especially with regard to public DNA search resources like Ancestry.com. Thanks to Bruce Schneier's Blog …

Over the past couple of weeks, I once again reacquainted myself with the joy of using TimeMachine as a backup system. (Please, use more than one, at least one off-site and one on-site would be a good idea, consider CrashPlan for the offsite version, we've used it for years and …

There's an excellent article, Keeping Secrets, on medium today (originally from the November/December 2014 issue of Stanford Magazine) about the conflict between academic work on cryptography and the NSA's role in national security. Most of the focus is on what happened and not on who was right or wrong …

If you have interest at all in 1980's "culture", the tech industry, and/or the movie Real Genius, you should check out the iMore Review program Review 16: Real Genius. Don Melton, Matt Drance, Guy English, and Rene Ritchie do a great job of running down the highs and lows …

When digging around for information about Apple's new Caching Server, I happened across this informative article about Caching Server for Mavericks by Dan Barrett. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in finding out how to make the most of your network connection with your Macs. However, from there, I …

Matt Gemmell penned a great piece on User Interface design and evolution as it relates to, well, a lot of things. It's definitely worth the time to read Tail Wagging.

I'd never heard of World Backup Day before seeing an article about it in Wired today, but it sounds like a good idea, especially for those whose friends may partake in a little bit of the April Foolery tomorrow. So, it's a good time for me to discuss backup software …

Launched just ahead of the first move by the US to switch from first-to-invent to first-to-file, a new site, FirsttoDisclose.org has launched, with the idea of putting your materials in the public view in order to limit other people from attempting to claim patent protection for ideas you are …

Hi folks. We're back on the air with a new server and a new design. Hopefully this less noisy design is a bit more palatable. Any links to the old site will cease to function today, but there weren't many anyway (according to Google Webmaster Tools), but we have preserved …

I received a question this afternoon from my cousin about the amount of free flash in her MacBook Air and figured that the answer would probably be useful to others as well. Note that none of this is officially from Apple, so it might be wrong, but I have had …

This is a note for those of us who might run into this problem. When working on some changes for Cartographica, I ran into some difficulty when using a verb-first command that could take either a list of one type of user-defined object or another type of user-defined object. The …

So with all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over Adobe Flash in the last few days, I just wanted to make sure I got this little tidbit in. When it comes to user experience, Adobe just doesn't understand. Their "platform" of flash brings a mediocrity born of …

Wow! Apple certainly wants more people to sign up as Mac developers, that's for sure. In changes made today, the ADC Premier and Select tiers have disappeared and they have been replaced with Mac Developer through the current developer portal (which has the iPhone developer sign-up as well). Mac and …