Sarah's place is dope

these three crummy pics don't even begin to say it - Sarah and Yotam's place is dope.

right next to what looks like a priceless childhood heirloom is a $1 usb charger. an alarmingly powerful computer sits on a cardboard box. in the hallway, an immensely capable soundroom has been constructed (right and left full-size studio monitors adorned with a sailor's and a roaring 20's hat, respectively); a player piano roll sits between modern speakers beneath an entire wall used to watch high-definition video streams projected from the ceiling. an impressionist photocopy of the nasa logo, and a statement that AN OCEAN OF PRODUCTS AWAITS YOU frame internal doorways, and a mezuzah the front.

and the minutia! art lines the walls, some of which i can only guess was made by one or the other for or with the other, with or without the other's knowledge and later presented or discovered, in any and all cases celebrated in some way.

the stove is spotless - it's new, or extremely carefully cooked upon, or very rarely. the fridge and freezer nearly empty. as if these two either live on their art or are perhaps so consumed by its atmospheric hunger there is no further space for a lower art, that of cooking.

this place is clean, and functional, and so full of character i can't believe i know these people, but i know i always have and will.

pachamama, the sun and weather

the other night we were privvy to a very interesting and engaging event here at my cousin Brian's place. it's called a Pachamama Alliance get-together and featured a wide array of people - all quite politically outspoken in favor of progressive environmental and social issues. we're not part of the Alliance but we were invited by Brian's girlfriend, a local leader in the Alliance, to participate and converse.

it was a super laid back gathering - felt almost like a mini block party really - an awesome potluck (lots of quiche, haha), then some more or less formal introductions and sharing, then conversation groups and a screening of a documentary about climate change and how we're all tied up together on this planet.

i enjoyed listening and participating - and came away wondering, is it enough to live my life minimally?

the pics are of sunset on that day and the day thereafter - we're trying to focus on seeing sunset or sunrise every day - an exercise that has helped to ground me even as things seem spiraling.

every single morning and every single night there are these incredible atmospheric phenomena we call simply, sunrise and sunset. as the boiling energy of the exploding sun streaks by us, it ignites the sky in fiery brilliance and grants everything in sight the cool cloak of utter peace - the calm before the storm, the drop before the refrain, the indrawn breath before the outpouring of song. and we almost always miss it. And that's very sad...we should try to enjoy this daily magic.

~Micah

Jam-packing our little car

the black trash bags crammed into our little car are filled with things we don't need.

this was a really remarkable exercise for me and Wyatt - the third or fourth time we've done this in as many years - mostly because it's always *always* surprising how much stuff you have accumulated.

i like to think we don't live "heavily", and i'm utterly confident we'll be able to put everything we need (and most of what we want) into two suitcases apiece before hauling off to new zealand.

but in both of the last two places we've lived we happen to have had a ton of closet space. and what happens when you have more space? you almost inevitably find things to fill it up with.

it's not depressing to rediscover this fact every 12-18 months, but it does start to make me wonder if simply having a smaller space will eliminate the need for exercises like this. maybe spring cleaning while living in a van or a tiny house would benefit from an annual "move" - take it all out, minimize it, and put it all back in again.

in other news, the little car is also going to need some work we're barely going to have time to do. it's incredible how much parts for this vehicle cost from local providers - probably because of the small volume. ordering from rockauto, though, i got both front axles and rush delivery for less than $170 - it's probably going to be about that per side to get them installed, which is not an insignificant sum but still less than flying and renting cars would cost, assuming nothing breaks (:

but our little Pearl is doing just great. i love this car, seriously.

A New Chapter

Yesterday was my last day at Unidesk, where I'd worked since July 2014 - about 2.5 years. When I gave notice a few weeks ago it was very touching how people reacted, mostly with initial dismay and disbelief about what I said was next for me, and then with repeated and warm well-wishes.

As you can probably tell from the cake they got me, I'm moving to New Zealand and planning to live The Van Life a bit.

I've been planning this for quite a while - I have a small mini-ITX rig set up that I can fit pretty easily in a suitcase and some wireless peripherals (well and a wired gaming mouse lol), and just finally bought a really nice Dell Chromebook 13 (typing this on) which is going to be my primary "endpoint". I'll get a cheap LCD monitor locally to do proper work on my desktop.

What am I going to be doing there? I'm not sure yet! Some fun and exciting and scary things, pretty sure - like living as a technologist in a van.

The van thing isn't 100% for sure - but it's all I'm thinking about. I've always wanted to live like that, very lightly and efficiently - and many think the same way. I'd rather the outdoors be my living room. I've come to realize that for me, forn now, little physical space is required and in fact I prefer it that way.

And then there's the discussion of what I'm going to be doing when I'm not jammed in a van! I'm going to be speaking with my alumni network (lean though that it is in NZ) and trying to set up interviews with IT VARs...but in any case I'm going to really focus on going down a more technical path, whether it's in operations or support or engineering - but not 100% in sales.

Or so I say for now, ha. I really do enjoy the challenges of business development, but I feel the call for moving back towards a more technical direction.

Watch this space - probably going to be talking about my technical choices, what classes if any that I participate in, etc.

PS4 saves gone

So a buddy of mine had a problem with his PS4, and had to send it in for warranty repair. Prior to sending it he was on the line with their normal tech support people who nonchalantly mentioned that, when he sent it in, he'd lose all his files (e.g. months and months worth of saves), which he thought was crazy. He was informed that if he didn't want his saves to be deleted, he'd have to take the harddrive out. No problem - he's handy with a screwdriver, took it out, sent it in for repair. It showed back up at his house faster than expected, and he popped his drive back in...no workie.

Well, turns out that Sony does some weird shit with disks newly inserted - doesn't recognize them at the least, and very well may automatically format them.

All the instructions online indicated he needed to do a software re-initialization which would clearly reformat the system.

This is months and months of gameplay he'd lose! All because he didn't want, in principle, to be forced to pay for that damn cloud service PS+ or whatever, which I totally get. 

Anyway now I've got the drive and I'm working to figure out if his saves can be recovered somehow..which I'd be surprised if they can't. However there are lots of problems:

1. The PS4 drive is in a format and/or partitioned in a way that isn't easily mountable - can't mount it in any way in Windows (tried Win7 Pro and Server 2012r2), Mac OSX just quietly giggles at the silliness of doing something so technical, and as it turns out the filesystem may be in exfat, which Linux doesn't particularly like.

2. The partition scheme of the damned disk is nutso - 15 partitions

3. It seems that the game saves are also encrypted. I'm hoping they're encrypted against a public key available from the user's account, so simply moving the encrypted files and their keyfiles to a working system with the same user logged in will just work. However the research I've done online is not encouraging on this topic.

So, I don't have a modern system that has a Linux distro running on it (have an old Thinkpad running an old version of Mint, but I only use that for watching DVDs on my equally-old projector, ha). 

I'm installing Lubuntu 14.04 in a Hyper-V virtual machine on my Server 2012R2 host, passing through the USB cradle that the PS4 harddrive is enclosed in, and going to try to mount the correct partition, find the files, pull them off into a Fat32-formatted USB drive with the right filestructure to re-import, take the drive back to my friend's place to reformat and reinstall it in his PS4, and hopefully re-import the saves into his PS4....

Lots and lots of if's here...wish me luck (:

What's easy and what's hard

It's really amazing what ends up taking more time and effort, isn't it...

So the other day a prospect who's been running Horizon View for several years now and been unsuccessful at virtualizing a lot of their apps told our partner that they flatly did not believe we could layer their difficult apps. Four they pointed out as examples and requested to see layered in real time were Visual Studio, Photoshop, Quark Express, and Microsoft Navision. This is completely understandable as these are very difficult apps that are rather infamously difficult to virtualize and are almost always crammed into a special gold image for a specific subset of users in the Horizon View world. They've been struggling with these four in particular for years.

I responded to the partner by offering to layer those apps in real time, although a huge chunk of that time would literally be watching progress bars move along (these installers take a long time).

 To layer the apps, provision them each to a desktop, and launch the apps to show they work (well 3 of the 4 as I couldn't find an installer for Navision) took me just over an hour.

An hour of a sales guy's time to layer 3 apps that have been pains for years. Unidesk is some powerful stuff, man.

Here's the video. I'm *not* a professional vlogger so it's pretty bad, ha. But you get the idea - it's easy and powerful.

https://vimeo.com/140055906

~Micah

wait...wait...what? tow a Prius with a DeLorean?

Weird title, I know. But today I finally spoke with a Microsoft licensing expert about this and if I understand it, there seriously aren't any other moving parts to this for private-cloud end user virtualizatoin...

Seems to me that buying a connection broker like Citrix, VMware, vWorkspace, whatever - is more than a little bit like buying a Prius to ferry your groceries back and forth, and then buying a Delorean to tow it with.. (For the record, I think Deloreans are really friggin cool...but the Prius does grocery ferrying pretty damn well...and apaprently can haul some ass too http://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/videos/a26134/v8-prius-race-car/ )

There are two things from Microsoft you need in order to run VDI. First is a "guest" OS license (these are the virtual machines which users connect to). Second is an access license.

Both of these factors go from extremely simple to hideously complex in about two seconds. So walk with me carefully.

On the simple side, let's look at Server 2012R2. With Server 2012R2, this is what you need:

1. A Server 2012R2 Datacenter license per 2 sockets.
2. A RDS Per-User CAL per physical user

The Datacenter license covers both the hypervisor, management VMs, RDS brokers, and unlimited OS instances which will be your users' desktops. These desktops will run as a Server OS and can be fairly easily modified to behave almost exactly like their consumer counterparts. MSRP for a Datacenter license is about USD 6000. Following VMware's recommendations for host density, you can get between 50 and 100 VDI users on a single dual-socket host, which gives you the guest OS license for a maximum of about $120 (assuming the conservative 50 users per host). Do note that I've spoken with many schools who have a campus agreement in place which gives them Datacenter licenses for about USD 250...so I don't think many people actually pay $6k for a Datacenter license.

The RDS Per-User CAL is where it gets really simple. In this model, each VDI instance is basically a single-session RDSH from a licensing perspective. RDSH access is not limited by the enduser's client OS; you can use any OS/endpoint to access the session. That's it...just buy an RDS license and your users can access their VDI from any OS, and as many devices as they want. This is the Prius in the weird metaphor, because while the CAL is for client access, RDS itself is also an actual connection broker...and includes a pretty damn good transmission protocol with it, plus a security server function...meaning that buying another connection broker is just that: another connection broker that you still need Microsoft access rights for. I'll get back to the metaphor later.

But this is pretty simple, right? Why does Microsoft get such a bad rep for having hideously complex licensing, and why did I use that exact word to describe it myself just a scant few sentences ago?

Well, licensing for the consumer OSes is radically different. Seems Microsoft were (are?) keen to promote the use of Windows-based endpoint devices instead of Chromebooks, Macs, and Linux-based clients. They are also looking to get an annual payment out of businesses who do remote access/VDI. Which makes sense, of course, from a business perspective - maximize profits, resistance is futile.

So, your choices for virtualizing the Windows consumer OSes are pretty complex in practice. If you buy Software Assurance (SA) on your endpoints, you get a copy of the OS that you can virtualize. Some SA agreements also allow the user of that endpoint to use a personal computer (as long as it's a Windows-based personal computer). That is, they *must* be the primary user of an SA-licensed physical work computer in order to have home access as well. If that user wants to use a system with a different OS like an Android or iOS device, or a Chromebook, or literally anything that isn't running a Windows OS, you must purchase a VDA (Virtual Desktop Access) CAL, which in the consumer OS model serves as the access license.

So...to clarify with an example...Steve is in inside management consulting. He comes in every day to the office and sits down in front of a physical machine running Windows 7 under Software Assurance. Steve happens to like using his VDI because it's specced higher than his low-end endpoint device, so he uses his VDI as his daily driver. For a week every other month, Steve works from home where he uses his Mac to access his VDI instead. Plus, when he travels, he uses his Android convertible to access his VDI.

Under the consumer VDI model, you'd basically need to have a per-user VDA license on top of SA for this user, and all users like him.

What if you don't have or want SA? No problem - in that case you just need to buy VDA. But you have to decide, basically on a per-user basis, whether it makes more sense to buy a per-device VDA license or a per-user VDA license (which is more expensive). If your user only ever uses the physical machine they sit in front of, might make sense to bite the bullet and buy SA. If your user only ever uses a single personal Windows machine (e.g BYOD), might make sense to buy per-device VDA.

So the conversation is pretty damn complex when you want to use a consumer OS for your VDI. Why bother? I personally use a 2012R2 instance on my home machine for gaming, web surfing, document creation, etc...it's extremely capable and seems even snappier because a lot of the silly services that start with a consumer OS are disabled by default.

Now back to the analogy...towing a Prius with a DeLorean.

If you go with the server model outlined above, none of the headaches and questions of the consumer model come up. It's an extremely simple conversation. You need to know how many users you'll have, and how many hosts you'll need to support those servers. That's it. You buy a Datacenter SKU for each 2 sockets in your hosts, and a per-user RDS CAL for each user. Users can fire up the Microsoft Remote Desktop Services client on as many of their personal devices as they want, or access it from corporate systems or thin or zero clients, or any mix. You can provision VDI or RDSH sessions per user with impunity, whichever model makes more sense (you get better user density per host with session based computing, so simple users should do this). It just works and it's affordable - like a Prius.

But the crazy thing about this model is that it also includes the connection broker. RDS (Remote Desktop Services) is the name of Microsoft's connection brokering platform for both VDI and RDSH, which includes RemoteFX (RDP advanced). RDS is a perfectly capable system, with some of the world's largest end user virtualization projects running on it. The management tools are minimal (MS doesn't even recommend more than a maximum of about 200 VDI users under management with the off-the-shelf tools), but the broker and protocol are very performant. It's cheap, it's capable, and it does grocery ferrying really damn well. Prius.

So when you buy Horizon View or XenDesktop or vWorkspace, you still have to pay for RDS...which means you're buying a connection broker in order to use a different connection broker. Now, those other brokers have some neat bells and whistles which could be really important! Gull-wing doors, stainless steel construction...those might be really important to your business. But in this case you're hitching up your Prius behind the DeLorean and towing it - the groceries are still being stored in the Prius (Windows is still from Microsoft). However DeLoreans are not cheap, they have their own set of limits and challenges, and they're super expensive to maintain because it's a very specialized knowledge set.

And you _already own_ a damn Prius...just drive it.