http://www.r3ware.com devoted to building simple, reliable, and maintainable systems and ranting once is a while... Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:53:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm beginning to suspect that one of the reasons I'm loving my MacBook Pro is that VMware Fusion is such a great product.  I use a lot of virtual machines for cross platform work and for testing networking protocols.  My advise to VMware; make a version of Fusion for Windows ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/10/13/fusion-3-for-mac-is-lovely/ While the speed improvements and saved disk space are nice Apple sure missed the mark when it comes to coordinating with the rest of the commercial software world.  I'm having nothing but troubles with plugins for Safari and with running FireFox and plugins for it.  This really isn't that hard ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/10/01/snow-leopard-is-disappointing/ For those of you out there looking for a RAID stack for embedded applications there appears to be clear momentum behind using the Linux MD RAID stack with hardware acceleration. Both AMCC and Intel have I/O processors that support enhance the MD RAID stack with hardware assisted speed improvements using ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/09/22/linux-md-raid-goes-embedded/ I'm doing some work again with Intel XScale IOP (ARM) processors.  I have to give a shout out to Macraigor for updating their support tools to integrate with Eclipse.  The combination of the two make for a very useful integrated IDE for firmware development work.  Being able to step through ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/09/13/eclipse-jtag-goodness/ My 2007 vintage MacBook Pro was starting to feel a bit sluggish.  Running several virtual machines under Fusion and doing work at the same time caused just too much stress on the disk i/o and 4GB of RAM.  So I went and did some research and did some upgrades.  I ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/09/13/new-life-for-macbook-pro/ I'm an agnostic when it comes to operating systems.  I don't possess the religious ferment present in a lot of us geeks as to the 'best' OS nor do I believe in the 'free is always best' mantra of the open source zealots.  But this is starting to feel political ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/06/19/windows-7-is-a-good-thing/ Yikes, so here we go...  We need to give the least transparent and least accountable entity with the most control over our economy more power without restrictions or transparency.  That sounds like a great idea, doesn't it?  NO!  IT DOES NOT.  The Federal Reserve does not need more power and ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/06/18/another-addition-to-the-regulator-alphabet-soup/ Well I'm drooling a bit over the new MacBook Pro models.  I happen to love the design, support and build quality of the notebooks as well as the stability of the platform.  The new models that can hold 8GB of DDR3 along with an SSD for storage should be really ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/06/16/new-macbook-pro-models/ I've been spending a fair amount of time working with Microsoft's storage management enhancements.  These include the Virtual Disk Service (VDS), Multi-path I/O (MPIO), iSCSI, iSNS, and the Volume Shadow-copy Service (VSS).  If you're not familiar with these don't worry.  Use your favorite search engine or the Microsoft corporate site ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2009/01/22/microsoft-storage-goodies/ I've been spending some of my time implementing the storage vendor supplied widget that fits into Microsoft's MPIO solution.  MPIO is short for Multi-path I/O.  What is that?  It is the ability to have more than one physical connection to your storage device.  Why would you want that?  For redundancy ... http://www.r3ware.com/index.php/2008/12/16/microsofts-in-box-disk-multipathing-is-a-good-thing/