Sony PRS-505 First Impressions

OK, so I've been looking to acquire an e-book reader for a while now. I've seen the Kindle, from Amazon - too pricey! I've seen the iRex Iliad - still too pricey!! So the only other real choice is Sony PRS-505.

At a little over $300 (with taxes and shipping) this is not a bad little device. The eink technology is beautiful! The letter seem to jump right off the screen, much the way a paperback book does. It's very easy on the eyes making for a comfortable read. The control are fairly intuitive, anyone one who's even mildly familiar with technology can figure it out pretty quickly without even reading the manual. The price isn't too bad either.

But the real meat of device like this is available content. I have a host of technical books on PDF that I was hoping to be able to use on the device. Afterall, lugging around the Windows 2003 Server bible in hard cover form, while being a very good work out, could get tiring after a while. But alas, my dream of having my technical library at my fingertips is still a couple of rung away...

In order to get a PDF file into the reader, you have to convert it to text or BBeB (Sony's proprietary format). While this may be OK for short stories and business management books (note to self, add some business management books to my e-library) it's cumbersome with technical books. This is due to the fact that technical books don't read like a story or philosophy book. It's technical details like "To change a user's access rights in AD use the CACLS tool in the following syntax...".

My hope is that someone, somewhere will come up with an easy way to convert PDF files to BBeB without losing the formatting or TOC.

All in all, however; I'd give it about 4.5 out of 5 stars. Now if I can just find a text copy of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People...

Well Take My Picture With It! - Eee PC Goodness

So our CEO recently asked for a small, light-weight, ultra-portable computer that he could throw in his briefcase and take along with him on trips. He needs email, web browsing, and the ability to open Word and Excel files. Basically, he needs an Asus Eee PC! So, we grabbed one for him. Here are some pictures of me with the Eee PC in all it's miniature glory!


What the hell is that? Well, take my picture with it!


Next to a Logitech MX Laser mouse, just for size comparison.

Hooked up with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The only way to do a lot of software installs!

My giant hand covers the whole keyboard!

Ugh, now I have to get one for myself. Great! Just what I needed, another gadget! Ooo, I could load Ubuntu on it...

Command Line SendMail Tool

So I'm a technology professional and, like all tech pros (aka "geeks"), I LOVE tech books and tools. This afternoon, I went to BnN (That's Barnes and Noble, for those in Rio Linda), and picked up Windows Administration at the Command Line by John Paul Mueller.

Now, I'm personally on a mission to kill Symantec Backup Exec, it's sort of a hobby of mine, so I'm using a number of F/OSS tools to get that done. A lot of those tools are command-line, such as Robocopy from the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit, or Linux-based such as RESTORE.

One thing I was looking for was a light-weight SendMail type of application, without all of the overhead of SendMail. I found it in SendEmail. This nifty little app allows you to quickly send a text-based email message. You simply drop into one of your Path folders in Windows, set it up with the necessary parameters in a batch file, and the SendEmail app takes over from there.

So how am I using this with my backups? Well, I have Robocopy doing backups of critical data to a backup server with a SAN connection. Each individual server runs a batch script on a schedule that robocopies data to the appropriate folder on the Backup server. In the batch file, I have a sendemail snippet that notifies when the job begins, then the robocopy does it's thing, then the another sendemail notice telling me it's done, and a pause so that the cmd window waits for input.

Why the pause at the end? This way I or one of my guys has to log into each server every morning to confirm that the backup job ran and is complete. The robocopy also writes a log file, telling me where the errors are located, if any, so we just resolve the errors and we're ready for the next day's backup.

Pretty cool, eh? Critial backups, performed every day, on a schedule, with notifications, and NO BACKUP EXEC! We also use RESTORE to make snapshots, for archival purposes, but I haven't quite gotten that tweaked completely out yet.

More on that next time...

Baby On The Way - Postponing PMP

While this isn't really a "personal" blog, per say, I do share a lot of thoughts and personal events and the latest event... My wife is pregnant with our second child!

So, given that there's so much happening right now, and that Matt, my loyal helpdesk guy is about the leave for his own child's birth, I've decided to postpone the PMP test until July 26th. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) I'm going to be pretty busy at work over the next 3 weeks, so I know I'm not going to have the time to study the way I want to.

2) I took a couple of practice tests and haven't quite passed them yet. I want to be able to take a prcatice test in each section every week and pass. Until I can do that, I'm not ready.

We're having another kid, and I'm not quite comfortable with the PMP test yet.

Mom and "Peanut" are doing well, BTW.

What's New In Techie Land?

Wow, it's been a couple of weeks since I've updated this thing. I've been a little pre-occupied with work and home life stuff the last couple of weeks, so I really haven't done a whole lot in ways of techie stuff.

A couple of things that have happened, however; we had a major hard drive corruption at work on the EMC SAN that we just set up. Turns out the file server had been throwing errors for a few days and nobody caught it, that is until I started recieving phone calls from people telling me they were getting "corrupt data" error messages.

The beautiful part was we backed up a lot of corrupt data for a couple of days, so we had to run a CHKDSK on a 350 GB SAN partition. It tooks about 6.5 hours, but all of the data was recovered. Whew! That was a close one.

On another note, I finally got our RESTORE backup server online (http://www.restore-backup.com). It's a very handy little backup solution that basically takes snapshots of windows shares and copies them to another location on the network, which you can then archive off to tape, DVD, Mega portable drive, whatever.

The cool thing? It's FREE! Of course, since it's open source, it's a little touchy getting support, but if you dig into the manual, read the FAQ, and check out the forums, it's not too bad for the price. I think I'm one step closer to killing Backup Exec, w00t!

On the home front I haven't really done much lately. I'm kind of head's down preparing for my PMP on the 7th of June. It's a pretty intense test, from what I've heard, and at $400 a pop, I really only want to take this thing once.

So that's about it. I'll write more as I get into another technology area. Until then "Geek out!"