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Today we decided to visit the town of Puerto Moreles. We walked there in February from this resort but it seemed like a struggle, probably because I had terrible blistering from my sunburn. In any case, we didn’t feel much like walking around the town so we saw the leaning lighthouse and walked back.

We had another quick but pleasant breakfast at the Preferred Club (the bacon was far from crispy, unfortunately) then walked to the lobby to catch a cab to PM. We thought we’d walk around and shop, see the town, and then walk back along the beach. I took my new Samsung Captivate phone with the intention of using its GPS to track our walk.

We shopped at the limited stores. Pretty much the same stuff was available at every place: t-shirts, jewelery of questionable constitution, ponchos, hats, domino sets (!), and the like. We bought a few items including a cute little Corona cowgirl hat for Barb. Then we walked out on the pier to get a view of the town from the ocean. It’s a very nice little place and we quite enjoyed ourselves out there, until we saw a large fishing boat come back and dock. That’s when we noticed some poor sap making some horrible sounds as he sat on the boat puking his guts out! I felt bad for the others on the boat, including a couple ladies, who didn’t seem to have any trouble with the relatively calm sea. Put a bit of a damper on the pier walk.

As we made our way back to the resort by way of the beautiful sandy coastline, the waves were sometimes working their way up our legs to our shorts. That’s when I though I should move my cell phone to the bad so it’s protected from water. But I was unable to locate the phone anywhere! The thought of the cabbie or a subsequent passenger finding it and selling it on e-bay taunted me. Once we returned to the resort, which didn’t seem to take nearly as long as I’d remembered it would, I went to the front desk to report the loss and they said they would talk to the cab drivers. I was surprisingly optimistic, in (predictably) stark contrast to Barb, that it would be returned, and sure enough, after waiting 30-some minutes, the call came in that the driver had returned it to the resort. I claimed the phone and left a nice little reward for the concierge who orchestrated the search and the driver who was honest enough to return it.

By this time, it was early afternoon. The skies turned dark so we grabbed a quick lunch (pizza and a burger) then went to the on-site spa for a massage and facial. I had a 50-minute back and shoulders massage, and was astonished at the sort of pressure the tiny little Mexican woman was able to apply. Barb liked her facial too, and even fell asleep she found it so relaxing. Afterward we did the hydrotherapy circuit, had a hot tub and steam bath, relaxed in some lounge chairs, then had a nice outdoor shower. Extremely relaxing!

After a snack by the pool, we returned to the room to relax and read since the skies were quite menacing at sundown. Not sure if we’ll bother going for dinner tonight given that we ate our snack at around 5pm, but we’ll probably wander around and have a drink in the lobby before we retire.

Update: we ended up at the world cafe restaurant for a late-night dinner and returned with a DVD to watch in our room, but alas, I was unable to get the DVD to show up on the tv. It played sound but no picture, and yes, I checked the cables…

We are staying in the Preferred Club, which means we get such amenities as a close ocean view, free wi-fi, rapid check-in/check-out, and unlimited access to the Preferred Club lounge where they have private meals, premium drinks, and other benefits. Today we decided to try breakfast there and it was great. No hordes of people taking the last of whatever you are looking for at the buffet. No, here they have fresh food and lots of it, despite the place being empty when we arrived. Great pancakes, super-crisp bacon, hash browns, and fresh-squeezed orange juice, plus buns and my favourite, slices of swiss cheese. A great way to start the day.

Looking to avoid the sunburn debacle of Feb 2010, we caked on 30- and 45-block sunscreen and went top the beach where we stayed for the day. We intended to go for a medium walk up the beach toward Cancun, but spotted a dog just like our friends’ at the condos next door. I went to take a picture when a worker offered us a tour of the units that are for sale. Barb and I have often thought of buying a place in the sun so we thought, why not?

First up was a gorgeous and sprawling unit that overlooked the infinity pool and courtyard which in turn overlooked the ocean. It was huge at 3300 sq ft, and the price was a commensurate $1.3 million. Next up was an identical unit behind this one, but since it lacked the spectacular view, was “only” $800,000. The smallest unit was just over 2000 sq ft, and is going for $500,000. We met a neighbour from Calgary who was originally from St Vital, and he advised us that the other two 2000 sq ft units were also owned by Canadians. They were very friendly and showed us their unit which looked very cozy compared to the barren and under-construction unit that was for sale. The wife even offered us her phone number so we could talk to her if we have any questions. Maybe some day we’ll consider this, but certainly not today as it would require us to downsize our house, and we aren’t prepared to do that at this point. We returned to the resort to have lunch, then sat in the baking sun for a couple hours. When it started to get chilly as the sun crept close to the horizon, we went back to the room for a shower and siesta.

We had decided on eating at the Italian restaurant for dinner. Given my limited tastes, this is pretty much the only a la carte restaurant where I can walk away truly satisfied, so we were both looking forward to it. We badly missed our intended 6pm sitting, and instead arrived to receive an Olive Garden-style buzzer at 7:45pm. Estimated wait was 45 mins, so we wandered around buying some things for the kids and grandkids. We didn’t get seated until almost 9pm, by which point we were both yawning. The food and wine were good, and we left without dessert and fell asleep immediately once we returned to our room.

Travel day! We woke at 04:30 and showered, then finished packing. Left for the airport around 05:35, boarded an hour later, and departed on time at 07:00. Flight was very quick, almost a half hour faster than usual at just under 4 hours. Mass confusion at customs as West Jet had given out the wrong forms, so we had to go to the end of the line and fill them out again. Irritating, but we had to wait for luggage anyway so nbd. Got on our tour bus and checked in at the Preferred Club, which means you don’t have to wait with everyone else at the front desk. Room is nice, 4th floor ocean view. There is a jacuzzi on the balcony and in the room. Pretty neat. Lots of little bugs like fruit flies I guess.

Today was a lilt chilly for the locals at 24C but it felt pretty nice to us. We unpacked and noticed that my medication was destroyed by a bottle of hairspray that had discharged, so we called the doctor who wrote a script and yada yada in 15 mins we had replacement meeds delivered. Crisis averted.

Ate lupper at the Ocean restaurant. The Tex-Mex nachos were excellent, the BLT barely passable. Barb liked her steak. Walked around for a bit, then had a siesta.

Went for dinner at the Japanese restaurant, but there was nothing I was interested in so Barb insisted on going to the buffet. They had pizza and excellent salad, so I left happy. We went for a drink in the lobby, and walked around taking night pics with my Sony NEX-5 which takes excellent low-light shots due to its large sensor. Now we are both exhausted so we are resting before we turn out the lights.

Traditionally, we liked to go camping with Barb’s daughter Lisa and family. They would go to Birds Hill Park every chance they get (read: whenever Mike grows weary of saying “no”) and pitch their tents. Barb and I and sometimes our kids would go for dinner and campfire, then drive home to our warm beds for a comfy sleep while they braved the elements, at the mercy of rain (leaky tents), heat from the early morning sun, and noise from the early risers. It worked out pretty well but I always felt we were missing out on some of the fun, but Barb is just not a camping person.

Lisa has long dreamt of buying a camper, but two things were in her way: money and money. Specifically, money to buy a camper and money to buy a vehicle to haul a camper. This year we went with them to look at campers. We half-considered buying a small popup camper so they could move to the next stage. Over the course of the next several weeks, we looked at everything from little popups for $5,000 to $35,000 tent trailers. We looked at new and used ones, and back and forth we went. We just couldn’t see ourselves in a little popup, yet we were wary of dropping $30,000+ when we weren’t sure if we were really the camping type. At some point in the not-too-distant future though I could see us travelling in a fifth wheel. But we aren’t there yet.

Then one day we found TWO nearly-identical campers that seemed like a good fit. They are the Cadillac of popups, high-walled Starcraft 3610 with add-a-rooms. These offer dual king-sized beds, a roll-out sofabed, and a slide-out side with bench seating that converts to a large bed. It sleeps 8 easily. One had air conditioning, a power lift system, and wood-grained interior and had only been used 7 times, while the other had white interior with a bike rack and had suffered a punctured roof when a tree fell on it. Pretty easy choice, but the former cost a couple thousand new. We ended up getting it for $11,000 (it was bought a year previous for $20,000!) so it was a great deal given its low use, features, and condition. Plus the vendor delivered it to us. I had recently bought a 2000 Dodge Ram 1500 for $5,000 which was also in very good shape, and I installed a brake controller, so we were all set.

The first few trips were so-so. Because the campground’s electrical sites were long since booked, all that was left were the poor sites. The first two weekends we got low spots and the ground was always wet. It was pretty gross, especially with four dogs, but we learned each time how to set up and tear down more efficiently and bought tarps, carpets, patio lanterns, coolers, bug zappers, and other such things to help improve the experience. The next couple sites were better, and now it looks like we have nothing but primo spots for the rest of the year.

But the point of this post isn’t about how we got a camper. It’s about what I have set up in that camper this weekend.

This weekend we really have no business camping. I am feeling rather crappy with a sore throat that kept me away from work the last two days, plus it’s pouring rain as I type this. Also I have tons of work to do for the upcoming election, so I copied my election-work development virtual machine to a laptop and installed VMware. There, now I can work in the camper, mostly because my current work doesn’t require Internet connectivity. But even if it did, last weekend I got Internet tethering working through my iPhone onto a laptop, and it worked pretty well indeed. So this morning when I went home to get some more stuff, I brought along my MacBook and a netbook in addition to the dev laptop. I had previously used the Mac to test tethering, and the netbook should have worked too (but for Windows 7 Started edition, but that’s another story…) Yada yada right now we have seven devices in the camper with Internet access via my iPhone: my iPhone, my MacBook, my netbook, my dev laptop, my iPad, Barb’s phone, and Mike’s laptop. Camping has truly never been so hi-tech!

Time to get back to work. The rain has really picked up since I started writing this.

Unbelievably, at least to me, the Apple iPhone 3G is incapable of voice dialing on its own. Manitoba recently implemented a handsfree policy on electronic devices while driving, so I went out and bought a Motorola T215 bluetooth visor in an attempt to be compliant. Was I in for a disappointment!

Not only would this visor not voice dial my iPhone, subsequent research revealed that there were people aplenty who were mightly disappointed in this oversight. iPhone OS 3.X apparently introduced this feature to the iPhone 3GS, but it was disabled on the 3G models. To me this illustrates another example of Apple’s closed modus operandi. Not sure what their rationale for this, perhaps they want to drive sales of the 3GS/4? Regardless, this is the final nail in the coffin for me: my next phone will definitely be an Android. Despite the fact that Android devices largely suffer from the same problem/missing feature, their open platform at least suggests that this could be fixed at some point.

What really irks me is that my iPhone works great in my wife’s Toyota RAV4. This vehicle has bluetooth voice control built in, using the car’s electronics so all the phone has to do is dial and handle voice communications. It stores its own phone book and has its own menus and speech recognition. When my Lexus RX 400h is off lease in April, my next vehicle will definitely have this built in; candidate vehicles are the Dodge RAM 2500, Ford F250 Super Duty, and maybe even the GMC Denali HD, all of which are diesel.

After what seems like dozens of searches, not to mention trying a couple new devices that the salesmen swore would work with the 3G, I found an obscure post suggesting that the Parrot MiniKit Slim will work with the iPhone 3G since it downloads the phone’s contacts and uses its built-in speech recognition to prompt you. Indeed, it seems to work very well, and at $129 isn’t a terrrible price for a nine-month stopgap solution.

UPDATE: the Parrot sometimes irritates me. It seems to be British in origin, and sometimes ASR only works if I speak with a British accent. Blimey!!!

I was going to write and write about this myself at some point, but I happened upon this link http://www.techhead.co.uk/disk-based-de-duplicated-backup-for-your-test-lab-with-windows-home-server which just saved me lots of time and is more thorough than I was planning on being. Thanks dude!

I got home tonight and decided to watch the highlights from tonight’s NBA Finals game on my iPad. How disappointing that it can’t play nba.com’s videos because they require, you guessed it, Flash. Apple is taking a lot of heat over their decision to not allow Flash on their iDevices. It’s like they are the new Microsoft, possibly worse given their tyrannical AppStore control controversies. I left iPad product feedback but I doubt it will make any difference. Steve Jobs has said that they will listen to their customers regarding this issue; we’ll see about that.

A co-worker was making me jealous the other day about how he built an ESXi whitebox, and I got to thinking that I needed something like this myself to host my company’s servers. I have been an avid virtualization junkie ever since the original Virtual PC was made available to me in an old MSDN subscription, and this obsession continues to this day. Currently I use VMware Workstation 7 on my high-powered (Core i7, 9GB RAM) but wholly underutilized HTPC, and while it works well enough, it’s really not very “enterprisey”. Neither is a homebuilt ESXi server, but I can certainly make it pretty close, and it would be far superior to the HTPC which to my horror people often shut down when they are done watching something.

I have a Dell Inspiron 845 that was used by an employee for a past project. It’s a reasonably powerful machine with a quad-core, VT-enabled Intel processor and 8GB RAM, so I figured it would do the trick. According to http://vm-help.com, by simply adding an Intel 1000 GT or CT NIC, ESXi 4.0 will install without any modifications or funky drivers. I picked up a couple of these NICs for $45 each, installed one (the PCI-e CT version) in the 845, and within minutes I had my own ESXi server. Sweet! The only gotcha is that my Windows 7 host can’t run the vSphere management tool, so I need to run it under an XP VM. Oh, the irony!

Next up was to use some enterprisey storage. I have an OpenFiler server sitting in my wiring closet with a 400GB iSCSI volume that’s sitting idle, so after some frustration getting ESXi to see the iSCSI target, I now have what should be a very robust data store for my VMs. I’ll make a post later about exactly what you need to do to get this configured.

I installed the VMware standalone converter utility and migrated my VMware Workstation VMs, initially a development Oracle server and Redmine plus an (*ahem*) bittorrent server, to the new server in its iSCSI data store. Everything went exactly as I’d hoped it would, very smooth. I only needed to reset some static DHCP mappings due to MAC address changes.

I still needed a backup solution though, and last night I got one working. Briefly, it’s the ghettoVCB script which is highly regarded, and I can see why. There are some nice guides on how to get it set up, and I’ll post more on this later. Here’s hoping that tonight’s daily backup works!

I wanted to use the Transmission-Daemon bittorrent service on Ubuntu to download files directly to my new Windows Home Server. This was harder than I thought, but only because I didn’t understand all the nuances.

First, the WHS share. Simply called “Downloads”, I made it a non-duplicated share that allows the Guest account full access. There is no password on this account. That’s all that’s required on WHS.

Now to Ubuntu. I tried editing /etc/fstab to automatically mount //whs01/Downloads to /mnt/downloads. This worked using my userid and password hardcoded in the fstab file, but then only  root could write to the share. I tried using guest instead, but the same thing happened.

Turns out you can specify “dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777″ which sets up the mount to be updatable by everyone, including the transmission-daemon process. Too easy, once you know what the problem is, that is!

The final fstab entry looks like this:

//whs01/Downloads /mnt/downloads cifs noatime,rw,user=guest,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777 0 0

I awoke to an error message saying that a WHS installation script had failed. The “solution” apparently was to delete some registry keys, then on reboots that message would go away. But WHS didn’t have any shares created and certainly didn’t seem complete, so I dismissed this advice. Instead I turned to the log file.

Things made sense when I saw that it was trying to find the path X:\files (HAH HAH very funny guys!) Since I had to remove the installation USB key before reboot lest it stay in a neverending install loop, this caused problems because apparently the install needed to access files that were on there (the X: drive) after the first reboot to run the ill-fated script; normally Windows installs copy everything to the hard disk as the first step of their installs to avoid this sort of thing. In any case, I restarted the server and reinserted the USB drive once Windows had started to load in the hopes that it would be mounted and available when the script started, and indeed it was as installation resumed. Annoyingly, a few other reboots were required so I did this USB removal/insertion thing a few more times, but it seemed to work. Regardless, I did go out and get an external DVD drive for future use in cases like this, and netbooks, etc.

WHS still didn’t seem right though. Device Manager showed several devices were unknown or had no drivers. Since WHS is based on Windows Server 2003, I looked for the appropriate drivers at Asus but there were none to be found. It seems that I am not alone in this regard as others are pleading with Asus to release W2K3 Server drivers for the AT5NM10-I board.

I can live with a non-optimal VGA driver for a machine that will be headless, but it sort of needs a functional Ethernet controller to be of any use obviously! Fortunately, the XP driver on the Asus install CD worked. I also ran the system install which cleaned up at least one other unknown device. I tried some other drivers which left me with a very uncomfortable feeling due to their error messages, so I decided to use that new external DVD drive and reinstall one more time.

Of note is that the DVD install was a lot slower than the USB install due to the slower speed of the optical drive. This time it said it would take over 50 minutes, but it ran flawlessly and other then the W2K3 Server driver for the Promise card, it required no intervention whatsoever as it went about its reboots. I installed the Ethernet driver and ran the mainboard install but left it at that. Perhaps a Windows Update will eventually locate suitable drivers.

Now I have my pristine Windows Home Server. First order of business was copying over 10 years worth of photos, a little over 26GB in all. This took about 35 minutes, and after being complete, all drives still report 99.9% free. Yes, it’ll be nice having 12TB to play with…