AppInsight allows you to breakup your virtualized network into logical segments, or tiers. For example, you might have a load balancing tier, web server tier, app server tier and database tier. Superficially, the product is on par with other user-to-database monitoring solutions. My problem, however, is their approach.

Personally, I think the idea that organization would, or could, virtualize 100% of their infrastructure is far fetched. Not to mention the plethora of catch 22 situations you could find yourself in. For arguments sake, lets say that we virtualized our load balancers. And our load balancers front infrastructure services like DNS and NTP. What would happen if we had an outage where we had to reboot ESX? Well, the load balancer instances can’t be started until ESX is running, but ESX relies on DNS!

Without digressing too far, I think the point is clear. Virtualization makes sense, in certain places. Therefore, for products like AppInsight to really take off they’ll need to develop API’s that can call into physical infrastructure appliances and gather the necessary information.

THE BEST WAY AVAILABLE TO SEND AND RECEIVE SMS ON THE IPHONE.

JUST SAY “TELL JASON I’LL MEET YOU AT STARBUCKS IN 15MINUTES” OR REPLY TO JASON’S CONVERSATION BY SAYING “I’LL MEET YOU AT STARBUCK IN 15 MINUTES” AND YOUR VOICE WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE TRANSCRIBED TO TEXT AND SENT TO JASON! WHAT COULD BE MORE EASY WHEN YOU’RE ON THE GO?

VTEXT IS THE EASIEST TO USE VOICE TO TEXT SMS APPLICATION ON THE MARKET!

KEY FEATURES INCLUDE:

1. UNLIMITED VOICE TRANSCRIPTIONS
2. UNLIMITED SMS TO ALL YOUR CONTACTS (U.S., ONLY)
3. USES THE MOST ACCURATE FREE-FORM TRANSCRIPTION SERVICE AVAILABLE
4. RECIPIENTS ARE NOT REQUIRED TO HAVE VTEXT
5. USE CONTACT NICKNAME OR FULL NAME
6. TYPING ABILITY IF YOU’RE IN A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN’T SPEAK OUT LOUD
7. PRIVATE AND SECURE SINCE IT USES COMPUTERS TO CONVERT MESSAGES, NOT HUMANS
8. MESSAGES SENT FROM YOUR PHONE NUMBER @VTXT.MOBI SO RECIPIENTS KNOW WHO YOU ARE (OTHER SERVICES PROVIDE A RANDOM PHONE NUMBER FOR THIS)

Amazon Instance Type

• Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform

Table Structure

• 5 VarChar(50) columns
• ~2.1 Million Records
• Un-Indexed
• No Primary or Foreign Key Constraints

SQL Process

• Table data copy using: INSERT INTO myTable2 (SELECT * FROM myTable1)

Processing Time

• MySQL: Killed at +15 minutes
• MSSQL: Completed at 1 minute 33 seconds

For large data moving operations, the winner is clear — MSSQL outperforms MySQL by an enormous margin. In further testing I’ve also found simple select operations on MySQL to be lacking as well. Looks like Microsoft had a leg up on the database world finally.

First, you are going to need to get a database that maps zip codes to longitude & latitude.

Zip code databases:

1. Free from: http://www.populardata.com/downloads.html
2. 5$ from http://www.teamredline.com/zc/

Next, you need to create a MySQL function to calculate distances between two longitudes and latitudes:

DROP   FUNCTION  IF EXISTS `GetDistance`

CREATE   FUNCTION  `GetDistance`(
lat1  numeric (9,6),
lon1  numeric (9,6),
lat2  numeric (9,6),
lon2  numeric (9,6)
)  RETURNS   decimal (10,5)
BEGIN
DECLARE  x  decimal (20,10);
DECLARE  pi  decimal (21,20);
SET  pi = 3.14159265358979323846;
SET  x = sin( lat1 * pi/180 ) * sin( lat2 * pi/180  ) + cos(
lat1 *pi/180 ) * cos( lat2 * pi/180 ) * cos(  abs ( (lon2 * pi/180) -
(lon1 *pi/180) ) );
SET  x = atan( ( sqrt( 1- power( x, 2 ) ) ) / x );
RETURN  ( 1.852 * 60.0 * ((x/pi)*180) ) / 1.609344;
END

You will now need to create a MySQL stored procedure that accepts a zip code and a radius and returns a list of zip codes that fall within the given radius:

DROP   PROCEDURE  IF EXISTS `GetNearbyZipCodes`

CREATE   PROCEDURE  `GetNearbyZipCodes`(
zipbase  varchar (6),
range  numeric (15)
)
BEGIN
DECLARE  lat1  decimal (5,2);
DECLARE  long1  decimal (5,2);
DECLARE  rangeFactor  decimal (7,6);
SET  rangeFactor = 0.014457;
SELECT  latitude,longitude  into  lat1,long1  FROM  tbl_zipcodes  WHERE  zipcode = zipbase;
SELECT  B.zipcode
FROM  tbl_zipcodes  AS  B
WHERE
B.latitude  BETWEEN  lat1-(range*rangeFactor)  AND  lat1+(range*rangeFactor)
AND  B.longitude  BETWEEN  long1-(range*rangeFactor)  AND  long1+(range*rangeFactor)
AND  GetDistance(lat1,long1,B.latitude,B.longitude)  <= range;
END

Lastly you need to make a call to this stored procedure:

CALL GetNearbyZipCodes( '85254' , 30

So far, I’m fairly happy with the application. There are some rough spots with regards to performance, but I hope IM+ will have those ironed out shortly. For $0.99 a month, it’s not a bad deal.

To upgrade from beta you need to:

1. Extract the .iso contents to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the old build).
2. Browse to the sources directory.
3. Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
4. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000.
5. Save the file in place with the same name.
6. Run setup.exe like you would normally and the version check will be bypassed.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/04/14/patch-windows-7-tcpip-sys-for-faster-torrent-downloads/

Me, like most others, had decided against moving to Windows Vista because of speed and usability issues. With Windows 7, however, Microsoft it seems has finally finished what it started.

After the collapse of Windows Vista I was snared by the sexiness and speed of the Apple Macbook Pro. Having had some experience with Apple machines back in the mid-90′s I decided to go for it. For a while, I ran bootcamp so that I could use Windows XP and Leopard at the same time, which eventually turned into just Leopard. But Microsoft’s latest release, and the invariable need to run Windows applications, have corralled me back into the world of Windows.

Deciding it was time to run Windows nativity again, I started looking into Bootcamp. Reading several sites, I became aware that Windows 7 was going to be slowed down a little by the bios emulation required to run it. Relentlessly venting this fact my colleagues, and doing some digging, we found that Microsoft had quietly slipped in support for Apple bios replacement, EFI.

Hallelujah! Windows 7 can run native on a Macbook Pro!

So, if you’re like me and want the most performance out of your high end Apple machine and need to run Windows. Go ahead and throw a Windows 7 disk in and get started. Just like with any Windows install, you can delete the drive partitions, even the OSX partition, and format them as NTFS.

Several days of running this configuration have revealed EXCELLENT results. My Macbook Pro has an experience score of 5.0! Much higher than those running Windows 7 via Bootcamp.

Good luck! Please send me any feedback you have with the process as well.