Interesting day

It has been an interesting day.  I received a CR-48 laptop/netbook from Google today.  Apparently they have selected me to participate in their Chrome OS beta and testing.  So far I’m enjoying it and haven’t really encountered any significant problems (though I do miss some of the text editing features of vi… regular expression based find and replace would have made it more convenient to do some editing in my wiki… but that’s not really a “normal” user feature).  The right-clicking and scrolling features are certainly a little bit difficult, and I could potentially see everyday users who don’t spend as much time on a PC as I do having some issues with those.  It will definitely be a change in my work habits if I end up using it extensively.  I’ve found a utility to do some “cloud” photo editing at www.pixlr.com, which seemed to work well for the basic edit I did

It's not the steamrollers, but the backhoes!

(it’s not the steamrollers, Google, it’s the backhoes that worry us – especially when you’re depending on the cloud!).  The touch pad is very large indeed, and I find myself bumping it if I do any significant amount of typing.  Surprisingly, for as odd as the keyboard would seem, it’s really pretty comfortable (at least to this extent, because this is the most I’ve typed with it so far).

An interesting tie-in, I received an e-mail late this afternoon regarding doing a webinar – which should to an extent preclude me from the CR-48, even as apt as it is for such things.  Geeks and their toys, though.  I found an interesting open source product called WebHuddle that I plan to do some testing with on one of the new Core 2 Duo systems I’ve acquired.  I’ve also found a great interest in LXC (Linux containers) recently and have been playing with that for virtualization.  Haven’t actually got one booted yet, but I’m very much looking forward to testing out a Diaspora instance on one – especially since they have migrated from Mondo to MySQL!

Also doing some looking at Nagios again after a long separation.  The text file configuration got to be too much to manage, but my current monitoring solution is starting to look expensive again as I consider tripling (or more) the number of nodes I monitor with it.  Especially when you take into consideration that I really don’t take good advantage of all the features that are available, and some very simple monitors in Nagios should handle very adequately.  I still really, really want to do some things to automate host addition, and I think something along the lines of Puppet could work well for that, but there’s no way I’m going to have time to get into playing with Puppet along with everything else on the docket right now.  Anyway, got off on a tangent that I meant to finish on the Core 2’s, unfortunately haven’t found any of my new ones yet that will support the VT-x extensions I’d really like to use for some bare-metal hypervisor virtualization experimentation.  Worst case, I guess at some point in the future I’ll have to break down and purchase a C2D or C2Q that does support them.

Probably enough typing for tonight, but had to pop a quick entry with all the exciting stuff lately.