PushingJelly

Another day, another Apple special announcement.
OK thats not really fair, the Nano is really rather good, I’m just bitter that I am “broke” at the moment and can’t afford to buy one, unlike two guys at work that bought one each on the first day they werre available. Oh to be a single contractor with disposable income. Never mind.
All this said, there is a (not so) small trinket that has caught my eye (our eyes actually – the Mrs is quite enthusiastic too).
Panasonic have a fine range of Plasma displays and there is one, the 42PV500 which is absolutley stunning.
So stunning in fact that we are considering its purchase, at the expense of our collective Christmas pressies this year (and possibly next as well – its not cheap).
Features? Well name them really. HD ready, integrated DVB-T, recording to SD card in MPEG4, picture playback from PC Card, integration with the Mac. Its the dogs.
All the reviews I have read rate it as the best in its class.

Hmmmm plaasmaa.

OK, I know its been over a month, I have been busy.
A two week holiday. A week of it in sunny Scarborough, an work picking up has conspired to by absence of bloggin in the last month. Probably why my hit rate for the site is in single figures but hey, thats not why we are here is it.

Just to make Ian (my only reader) happy I will give him a mention and also that the project has taken a futher turn. While away lounging by the sea, it was decided that we are going to use local home directories, somthing that Ian has been pushing to implement for some time.
The way it was done pissed me off more than the actual decision. Despite appearences, I try to keep the direction of the project running along mutually agreed lines. This decision was forced through before I came back of holiday and it felt very much like fuck you Brad, you are away so I am going to do it anyway.
Not very nice feeling.

I had been working on using a product called ExtremeZ-IP, an AFP/IP server software for Windows 2000 server. We had already purchased a cluster for SMB home directories (which caused application issues) and with a relatively small further investment, we could re-use the servers and have stable network homes. It was working well before I went away but the 30 day trial on the software expired while I was on holiday. This is now scrapped and the work pointless.

As I said, the fact we were now going to use local homes is not that much of a problem, the machines will run faster that network homes, it means however that we are having to write login and logout scripts to sync the users home directories (or bits of them) to the server volumes.
I am working on this with one of the unix veteran sysops and we should have something reasonably quickly I hope.