New Audio Equipment

Our church got a whole new sound and lighting kit over the last couple weeks. We were borrowing the kit from another one of our member churches and had to haul all the stuff from a school about 9 blocks away, then when service was done, pack it up and haul it all back again. Lots of work and extra cost to rent a van each week. Of course the price of a new kit would take about 5000 years to recoup the cost compared to the rental van. Anyhow, the kit includes a new (still partially wrapped) LS9-16 digital mixing console, Roland digital snake, new monitor wedges, house speakers, stands, microphones, cords, lighting stands, lights and light board. Pictured below is the sound board, easily the flagship piece of the kit. Also pictured on top is the small light board.
I've worked with a digital board before (Roland's RSS) so most of the concepts are similar but getting used to this board will take a little bit of time still. To me the function is "mute" not on/off, and "aux send" not "mix", but again similar concept. Unfortunately I have not had the pleasure of working with the board for more than 10 minutes due to scheduling and time restraints. But over the next few months I've been told that I'll be taking on the role of audio captain and the ship will be mine. Not sure if I'm really excited about it yet or not. It's a lot of responsibility to be put in that kind of role and I've done it before, for several years actually. Having a family to get out the door really early on Sunday and trek across the city can be tough sometimes but now that my son is older and can walk the whole way on his own, that will make things easier. I've been out of the role for over a year now and I know it's time to tune my ears in again and let God do His thing through me.

I did get to look through the manual some and I see this board is a good competitor to the Roland system. The biggest cool advantage I see is over remote control. The LS9 can hop right on your network and can be controlled over Ethernet to a computer running their editor software or their iPad/iPhone app. Yes, you can control a good chunk of settings (mostly mix related, not things like patching and really tweaky things) using a native IOS app. You could do this with the Roland but you had to use some remote desktop or VNC software to view the screen of the USB-connected PC, not ideal. It looks like most other features of the two systems are pretty comparable. I think Roland actually has a head start with the native support for the digital snake where we will be doing digital, back to analog, then to digital again. Technically From Mic to speaker, there will be 4 conversions going on - another thing I don't like too much but it wasn't my decision and I think the Roland board is much more money.

Streetside Gear

Interesting arrays of equipment scattered on the streets of downtown Manhattan in the last couple weeks. Seems some movie making folks want that Gotham-like look when filming buildings at night. I saw probably 5 or 6 buildings withe these lights and security guards lurking everywhere.

vCloud Director

Earlier this week I found out that VMware is discontinuing Lab Manager and pushing people to their cloud management product called vCloud Director. I won't go into specifics about what these are, but just venting that they told us when we bought it mid 2010 that they didn't think it would be replaced by this product. Now I've got yet another project on my plate to migrate this to the new tool - not a simple task I might add. If you've ever looked at the docs for it, you will know that it involves a small army of planning teams to get the storage, networking and database resources setup in most organizations, and we're only planning to put it on our Corp network, I can't imagine how much it would take to put out it in a production network where all the firewalls and subnets need to be setup.

Good thing I'm a true nerd and I'm actually looking forward to this since it's technology I've never touched before. I always jump at the chance to learn something new.

Wow, i never thought

... I'd be posting a blog from a small tablet device. A year ago, the world didn't even know what a tablet really was until Apple defined the space with the iPad. Again they are leading the pack and becoming the measuring rod everyone else uses.

PowerShell

Ok, so I know I'm not a huge proponent of Micro$oft products, but I'd have to say this one is pretty good. I just started learning powershell about a month ago for my job and I already have some pretty sweet scripts written that save me tons of time.

What is it exactly? It's the latest scripting environment from Microsoft that includes a shell (basically a command console like a DOS window on steroids) and a new scripting / command language. It's M$'s way of catching up with the UNIX world and shell scripting.

The neatest feature of the scripting language I think is the fact that everything is an object and that you can pipe objects to other object's methods to produce results. For instance, the following script shows how to write your own ping function.

$ping = new-object System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping
$result = [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostByName("$strComputer")
$result.AddressList (PIPE) ForEach-Object {

        $Reply = $ping.send($_.IPAddressToString)
        if($Reply.status -eq "Success")
        {
  $Reply (PIPE) Select-Object Status,Address,RoundTripTime (PIPE) Format-Table
        }else{
            write-host "Host $strComputer ($_) ping FAILED with response:" $Reply.status
        }
}

Produces the following:

 yahoo.com

Status   Address        RoundtripTime
------   -------        -------------
Success  72.30.2.43                84

Status   Address        RoundtripTime
------   -------        -------------
Success  98.137.149.56             88

Status   Address        RoundtripTime
------   -------        -------------
Success  209.191.122.70            40

Status   Address        RoundtripTime
------   -------        -------------
Success  67.195.160.76             32

Status   Address        RoundtripTime
------   -------        -------------
Success  69.147.125.65             33

As you can see from this, you can also create and use objects that belong to the .Net framework. If you're any kind of developer, you can see the power in this. You can even go as far as using the Windows.Forms objects to create a GUI for your scripts and interact with the user with text boxes, lists, labels, buttons, etc. Crazy stuff!

For some reason my code above won't show the pipe character, so in it's place, I'll use "(PIPE)".

VMware

Ok, so if I haven't sold you on VMware by reading my last post, maybe after this post you will know more why I'm such an advocate.

First of all, the company I work for was willing to send me to VMware training this past August. If VMware training won't make you an advocate, not sure what will. Besides that, I really do think they have the most mature product out there. So anyhow, yeah, I went to the VMware v3.5 FastTrack training and a month after the class I took the VCP exam and passed!! WOOT! I think that's the first test I've had to take in like 8 years! I'd have to say that it was a pretty big challenge and if you weren't interested in the product to begin with, it'd be tough to pass the exam. I studied for about 6 hours every week for a month after the class - going over the material from the class and I got 85% on the test. I'd have to say that I definitely think the class and certification has benefited me in my job already - there a bunch of things I was able to fix in our environment because of it.

If you ever take the class and have hopes to become a VCP, I think the best tip I had was to just go over the class manual every night and each night take the mock exam off their website, then copy the answers you get wrong into a document and study them out. They give you 100 tries on the mock exam, I probably took it 10 or 15 times and I think it helped me a lot. I wouldn't take the exam any later than a month after the class so that the material is still fresh. If you have more time than I did, you may want to take the exam only one or two weeks after the class.

I feel really blessed to have such a job that they were willing to train me in times that are a bit tough to even find a job. The class was not cheap either! A couple weeks after my class, I found out that any and all training for the remainder of the year was cut from the budget for our whole division, so a double blessing!

VMware Fusion for the Mac

Lots has happened since last post - probably why I haven't posed in a while eh? (No, I'm not Canadian - not that I don't like Canadians, I know some really nice ones.)

First, I'm still lovin' my Mac! I've learned a bunch of tips and tricks to make it my own and work great for me. I just can't say enough about it, get one - NOW! I was a bit reluctant at first, but I saw the need to run a Windows VM on top of my Mac, so I purchased a copy of VMware Fusion for Mac and am running a copy of Windows XP on my Mac. The only real need I had was to run Quicken. Apparently Intuit decided that it wasn't going to continue development of Quicken past 2007 for the Mac. And I wasn't about to downgrade so that I could run it natively on my Mac. The only other choice was to keep my Windows machine (which had been hacked by some kind of virus running around on our network) or to go virtual. Virtual proved to be the best choice since I can power off the VM as soon as I'm done with it and use it just for Quicken - takes up little space.

One of the coolest things about Fusion is that it can run in a mode called "Unity" which allows applications within the VM to run outside the VM window and appear as of they are running natively. This is a totally bizarre thing but so cool! So when I run Quicken, it looks as if it's running as a normal Mac application with the exception that it does not have the normal Mac title bar and buttons, but rather the Windows ones.

Another great thing that Fusion has going for it is 3D support. One day last week I decided to try this out, I couldn't hardly believe that it would really work that well. I dusted off my copy of Rise of Nations (it's a game for the PC) and inserted the CD. The Autorun menu popped right up and I began installing. During the install there is a part that does a hardware check, it zipped past so fast I hardly even saw it! The installation got done and I launched the game. It loaded faster than I remember it loading on my PC! I began a game and I was really amazed, it performed way better than I imagined and I might even suffice to say that it was better than my PC. Now granted that my new Macbook is a lot faster than my PC is, a virtualized Windows instance seemed to hold enough water to keep the game running great! I'll also note that I took a snapshot of my VM before I installed Rise of Nations so when I was done testing, ZIP! - I reverted back to the original state of my Windows VM and it was like it never happened! What I think I'll do is build a VM for each PC game I might want to play and burn the VM image to a DVD, then just copy the DVD over and fire it up to play - no dinking around with installs and entering codes and hacking stuff to get it to work and then just to have to do it again later - keeps things clean!

Well, I've rambled on for quite some time now - I need to write up some more stuff about VMware as it pertains to my recent history. In conclusion, buy a Mac and a copy of VMware Fusion - all you'll ever need.