Geekwhore.net

I know it’s been a while since I last posted.  It’s been a busy few months.

1.  We went with Calix Networks and their C7 platform for our new FTTP buildouts.  We are also looking at their newer E7 platform for an Active Ethernet Platform.

2.  I was asked to sit on a User Panel at the Calix User Forum in November and present how Allo uses MEF Circuits to provide high speed data connections securely and reliably to our business customers in our FTTP Markets.  It was a great experience, made a lot of new friends and had a great time.  It was somewhat amazing as I was putting my notes together to see how far Allo had come, 6 years ago we were just starting out as a CLEC in Qwest Markets and today we have over 120 locations connected with MEF Circuits in markets that we provide FTTP.

3.  Just got back last week from a training trip at Calix to learn about the C7 Platform.  Overall the trainer was great, unfortunately it was a little too basic for my needs.  That being said, it was a great trip as I got a tour of the Calix facilities in Petaluma, got to pick a few engineers brains and came up with a few ways that we can utilize the Calix E7 Platform in our network.  10 Gig Ring’s baby!!!

4.  Started working on design of a new Headend that we are putting in and planning on moving network elements around so that we can put as much as possible in the new facility.  Planning on 4-post racks all the way!

Anyway, I am going to try and post more often, no guarantees however, I get lazy and then don’t…not like it matters nobody really reads this anyway(except me).

I recently was given the chance to run a Mac.  I’ve wanted to try one out for quite a while so I took the offer.  I have been on a Mac for a little over 2 weeks now.  Here’s a few findings/thoughts.

1. OmniGraffle is NOT a good replacement for Visio.  I make network diagrams or update old ones at least once a day, OmniGraffle makes much prettier diagrams but it’s tough to use, what takes 1 step in Visio takes 3-4 in OmniGraffle.
2. I haven’t been very impressed with the client/server setup that Apple has, it seems somewhat crude.  That being said, I’m from a windows background, Microsoft has come a long way in the last 10 years, Group Policies, remote installs, centralized software updates.  I think Apple will get there, it’s just not what I’m used to.
3. Having a native shell is great, in windows I would always have to SSH into my remote Linux machine and do shell scripting, having it right there is really handy!
4. Spotlight is better than Google desktop in some aspects but not having the ability to fire up spotlight and do a web search is annoying…why should I have to go to spotlight, open firefox,have an option to search the web like Google desktop.
5. I use Wireshark a LOT, getting wireshark all setup so that I could do packet captures still hasn’t happened, it’s a major PITA as far as I can tell.  I have it running and can open pcap files, I just can’t capture.
6. iPhoto is a great app, I publish photos to facebook & flickr a LOT more than I was on Windows.
7. Numbers is a good low end spreadsheet program but I do miss Excel a lot, just some features that aren’t in Numbers.
8. Apple geeks may say their OS doesn’t crash as much as Windows but I would disagree…sure Windows 98/ME was crash crazy but those days are long gone.  I have to this day only had my Vista desktop crash once, and it wasn’t a Microsoft issue, it was bad drivers from ATI after I put a new graphics card in.  I was doing nothing as exciting in OS X and it just randomly crapped out a few days ago.
9. Multi-touch is great….enough said
10. Going back/forth between OS X and Windows sucks, my fingers feel retarded going back to use my old Dell laptop touch pad(it’s way too small it seems) and the windows shortcuts are just weird to me now.
11. I have yet to find a good SSH/telnet manager, sure I have SSH at the CLI, but I login to WAY too many hosts to remember all of them.  I used Putty and SecureCRT on Windows, can’t find anything on OS X.
12. iWeb does some wacky shit….I tried using it on my blog but it doesn’t just put shit in the root folder.  I’m sure it’s great for first timers but it drove me nuts!
13. 2 Gig’s is not nearly enough RAM when you are virtualizing Vista in VMWare Fusion….it will run, it just makes the entire machine crawl balls!
14. The hardware really is nice, great LCD display on the laptop, nice camera, Unibody design….but I’m not sure how much of a premium it’s worth.  If I had to pay for this out of my own pocket it would be very hard to up sell me from an HP/Dell/IBM.

Overall, it’s been an interesting and fun experience and it’s not done yet, I’m going to keep using this for a while longer.  For now I’m trying to limit myself and not use the windows install that I have on here so that instead of just using windows I instead search for an OS X application to do the same thing(or similar).

Until next time.

Nick