Last night’s big project was installing a new wireless AP in Origins Cafe.  The AP is a Proxim AP4000, which I’ve had in the box for a few weeks and never had a chance to install, mainly because there was other stuff that needed to get done.

The hardest thing about this project was getting the new cable pulled to the pillar that the AP is mounted on.  Fortunately, our A/V engineers spec’d the building with an abundance of extra conduit during the planning stages.  One of those conduits just happens to go from this pillar straight to one of the IDFs.  NICE!

The second project of the night was getting our backup server’s RAID chassis mounted into the server rack.  It’s been sitting on-end atop the server UPS for some time now, and with a tape library coming down the pipe, this needed to be done soon anyway.

Just for the sake of mention… that whitebox below the chassis is our backup server.  After wrestling with a rack-mounted shelf (which fell apart as soon as I removed it from the rack….grrr), I am most-likely going to be ordering a rack-mount case to transplant the backup server’s hardware into.

Aside from being exhausted this morning (I didn’t sleep good at all last night for some reason), it felt like a productive night, and I like those. ;-)  Hopefully the rest of the week turns out the same.

I was reading through my feeds this morning and came upon some sweetness over at the Geeks Are Sexy tech blog.

Mozilla has launched a project called Prism.  Prism is able to take a web application (Google Reader, Zoho, Facebook, whatever) and make it executable inside it’s own Windows screen.

Right now it’s only available for Windows, but it’s well-worth a look, especially if you’ve got web applications that you keep running all day.

Much thanks to Kiltac at [GAS] for posting this.  Good stuff!

It’s a great afternoon for resting, and I’ve been doing just that.  I thought I’d take some time and dump some stuff off my mind though.

We had a Mac crash during production today in our control room.  Yep, a Mac.  The service screeched to a halt for about 15 seconds while we brought it back online. 

Apparently I missed a DST patch on one of our servers.  I walked into the office after morning services to check things out.  One DC had changed time while the other one hadn’t.  I applied the DST patch to the offending server and things look like they’re back to normal.

I’ve eaten way too much pizza this weekend.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in Planning Center, and the more I use it, the more I like it.  I may even learn CSS and Liquid so that I can crank out some custom production plans.

I started using Meebo for instant messaging a few weeks ago, and I’m pretty much hooked.  I still have some of the apps on my PC just in case I need to do a file transfer, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to do that.

That’s all for now.

…and I’m not saying I know who “some” are, but I do know the above statement is true.

Last night I was looking for a couple of items to aid me in a conversation on email etiquette when I came across this web site.  There are many good articles in the blog (where I did most of my reading) that are well worth a read, especially if you spend a fair amount of time typing email.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend on the domain rebuild this week, but I did get it started as of Tuesday night.  Currently it’s in the form of a Server 2003 VM.  AD was installed, and the OU structure has been replicated from our existing domain.

I used the Group Policy Management Tool to make printouts of our active GPOs.  It would be nice if the tool also allowed you to print out a list of OUs that link to each object as well, but a little bit of handwriting never hurt anyone.  I also started a mind map of everything I can think of that will need to happen for this domain migration to go smoothly.

Next week I’ll concentrate on recreating the GPOs in the new domain, as well as moving over any login scripts.  I’m also going to continue mind mapping so I can get my mind around the magnitude of this project… I’m nowhere near done.

I’m just glad I’m not on a hard timeline.

…it’s just that I’m not a big fan of Facebook applications like Pirates vs. whatever, Movies, or stuff like that. It’s nothing personal, they just don’t hold much value to me at this point.

Just saying…I’m not a hater.

I’m waiting for file servers to defrag.. and it’s a little boring, so I thought I’d dump what’s floating around in my head.

I got word today that Gefen is now shipping a DVI-HDSDI scaler that will also do frame sync as well.  Plus it will scale and extract.  It’s great to see more manufacturers coming out with more HD gear….hopefully we’ll see some price drops soon.

Mike challenged me awhile back with finding a relatively inexpensive way to track phone activity on our phone system.  I’ve got a demo in the works right now that is looking pretty sweet.  I’ll blog more on it later.

I don’t watch a lot of baseball, but I’m genuinely excited that the Indians are going into tonight with 2 wins.  Does that make me a fair-weather fan?

As pumped as I am about about a domain rebuild on our network, I’m still nervous that I’m going to forget something critical.  Thank goodness for VMs and snapshots.

During the summer I got an overwhelming positive response from out staff about having the ability to access the network from home, so one of my projects tonight is setting up an SSL-VPN server to see how our work-from-home users like it.  It’s been a long time coming, for sure.

That’s about it for now… it’s time to start bringing VMs back up.

One of the projects I’ve been wanting to take on over the past year has been a rename/rebuild of our domain.  We’re still carrying our old domain name around from our previous name and location.  This hasn’t been a high-priority matter, but I do want to get it done.

After some research on how to go about it properly, I feel like I’m ready to take this on.  There’s a lot to think about and plan for, though.  The fact that I’m now able to to testing and pre-production building in VMware is a HUGE benefit, and since I’m not really on a time limit, I’m going to be able to work without being under the gun.

I’ll be posting on this more as the project take shape more.

We don’t support Macs officially at NewPointe as of yet, but I still want life to be as easy as possible for our Mac users.  One of the challenges I’ve been faced with over the past couple weeks is file syncing between iBooks and our file server.

While looking for a solution to this, I stumbled across ChronoSync.  It’s got a few nice options to it, like the ability to start a sync as soon as you log on…nice if you just need to sync before you head out of the office.  Another nice thing is that once you buy a license for ChronoSync, you’re entitled to upgrades for the life of the product.

Is this the best Mac file sync software out there?  I don’t know yet, but it seems to be working so far.  I’m going to be installing it on another iBook next week, and if it continues to work well, it will become standard issue for any new Mac user.  The biggest issue so far has been training the mac user to sync their files up…especially when said user has an iBook and a desktop PC.

When we installed our video system last year, we admittedly didn’t think of everything we should have.  As a result, we were left with a large gap in our functionality.  This gap was basically the ability to run Keynote presentations into our HDSDI system smoothly.  Now we were able to do this, but not as well as it needed to be done.  See, we were using an HD interface from Blackmagic Design, which was great, except it wouldn’t allow OS X to use Core Image to send graphics across the HDSDI channel.  As a result, we had a NASTY 4-5 second lag every time we changed slides.  Worse yet, we had no ability to to any smooth transitions or builds of any kind.

Fast-forward 9 months to this past September.  Things have calmed down, and it’s now time to try and resolve this issue without killing our budget.  Basically the solution is to convert the DVI signal from our Mac’s dual-head card to HDSDI, and add sync to it so that we can run it through our live switcher.  I’ve found only 2 products so far that can do this:  The Miranda DVI-RAMP, which we tested 2 weekends ago, and the Matrox MXO, which we tested this weekend.

Both systems did a great job of converting DVI to HDSDI.  The DVI-RAMP has some features on it that we don’t really need at this time, but everything it advertises it performs very well.  The Matrox isn’t as loaded up as the DVI-RAMP, but it also costs about 80% less and still is enough to do what we need.  Our Keynote operator was blown away by how responsive her computer was this morning during the first test.  To add to that, this morning’s message included a LOT of graphic elements that changed much quicker than normal.  It’s safe to say that having this component in place actually improved the morning from a presentation standpoint.

I’m hoping that the evaluation of the MXO comes back positive so that we might be able to hang on to the one we have.  Currently we have it strictly on a trial basis. 

There’s a few other places we could use equipment like this in the control room…

• On CG:  We could finally upgrade to the newest version of Pro Presenter and use their Extended Resolution plugin to output our lyrics over DVI at 1920×1080.
• On Playback:  We could quit using the Blackmagic Deck Control to play back our videos and again, use Pro Presenter with the ER plugin to give us one-click playback of our clips.
• Combined with some BTX/Gefen hardware:  We could put just about any signal we wanted to across our HDSDI framework and get it to wherever it needs to go.

So as you can imagine, I’m pretty stoked.  Being able to add a lot of functionality for a relatively low amount of cash is great, but when you can make life easier for your volunteers at the same time, it’s REALLY a win.  I’ll come back to this subject later as our evaluation continues.