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My beloved 17 year old cat named KITTY II has been with me since I was in middle school and I'm now approaching 30. That's actually more than half of my life. As old as she is, she still looks young, a trait that runs in my family ;). Here's Kitty starring in a poorly Photoshopped (her right eye was too bright) picture:

Kitty is still energetic and vocal -- super vocal. I now keep a pair of ear plugs by the bed because she likes waking up at odd hours to yowl like she's dying. If I yell her name, she suddenly goes from Death Meow to innocent kitten meow; it's really unnerving. Kitty lives with me now but she didn't last year when I had a high school friend, Mel, take care of her for a while. Kitty enjoyed the stylings of a large family home in Oceanside, complete with a backyard and koi pond while I worked things out with my apartment.

One day when Mel was taking care of Kitty, I received a call from her saying that she thought Kitty was dying. Apparently, Kitty did this weird thing where she fell on her side, "ran in place, feet in the air" and peed everywhere for about 30 seconds. When she stopped doing that, she woke up dazed, cried out when went eat tuna like nothing happened. My heart sank, I really thought Kitty was gonna go soon and did what I could to visit more even though I lived in San Francisco. I learned at some point that Kitty was having a classic seizures and that elderly cats could live for years with them.

A few months later, I was able to take Kitty back and I immediately took her to the vet to see what could be done. They ran a good $1100 worth of tests and found nothing that could be causing the seizures. That likely meant it was adult-onset epilepsy or a brain tumor. If it was a brain tumor, I wasn't going to try to artificially extend her life so I figured it didn't matter what was causing it, as long as it wasn't something that was preventable.

The first time I saw Kitty have a seizure, it had such a bad impact on me that I called in sick to work; I was a mess. It was about the most awful thing ever. She was sleeping on my pillow and the alarm went off, apparently, loud repetitive noises trigger her seizures, and she started going crazy on the bed. I could see every muscle tense and pee was flying everywhere. I tried to cover my eyes so not see it but I could still feel her shaking the bed. My poor friend, I felt so bad.

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I work for a large company that uses Postini for Enterprise spam filtering and it does a fantastic job. It's actually famous for being one of the very few spam filter capable of blocking UCEs from the "Cajun Spam King" (No, Scelson doesn't sound very Cajun to me...). And in researching for this article, I even found out that Postini will provide spam and anti-virus filtering for Gmail.

To use Postini, you pay them a good amount of money, change your company's MX record to point to their servers and then they filter your email, removing nearly all the spam. From there, the Postini servers forward the scrubbed emails to your own mail gateway, presumably a sendmail or Exchange machine. They may also keep archives of it if you pay them extra. The whole process looks something like the visual seen below:

Last week, I realized that Google Apps can actually do something similar, free of charge. The service, formerly called Google Apps For Your Domain, offers an unlimited amount of email accounts for your domain, each with 2GB of space each, mobile access (including Blackberry access) all for free with the Standard account. The Premier Edition ($50/year per mailbox) offers 10GB of disk space, API stuff, guaranteed uptime, phone support, and e-mail migration tools coming soon.

So I saw that Google was offering e-mail hosting, but didn't really know how it could apply to me. I like having control over my mail - I've been hosting my own for about a decade and it never really crossed my mind to point my MX records to anywhere but my own machines. Exchange's NS-IMF (Not-so-Intelligent Mail Filtering) spam filtering is really weak and inaccurate, however, and overwhelming false positives were becoming a pain. After thinking it out, I realized that I could outsource my spam filtering to Google/Gmail Apps by taking an approach similar to the way that Postini sets up their own customers.

I signed up netnerds.net for an Application account on Google Apps and started the process. I deleted my MX record and in its place, added the 7 or so MX records that Google gave me. Now my records look something like this:

netnerds.net MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = alt2.aspmx.l.google.com
netnerds.net MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = aspmx2.googlemail.com
netnerds.net MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = aspmx3.googlemail.com
netnerds.net MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = aspmx4.googlemail.com
netnerds.net MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = aspmx5.googlemail.com
netnerds.net MX preference = 1, mail exchanger = aspmx.l.google.com
netnerds.net MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = alt1.aspmx.l.google.com

Then I logged in to Google Apps e-Mail (which I've addressed as "Gmail For Your Domain" in the illustration below) and created the two whole user accounts/mailboxes that are valid on netnerds.net. Next, I went and added a new A record for a supersecret subdomain and (one by one), told Gmail to forward all the email to user@supersecrethost.netnerds.net. I then setup Exchange's recipient policy to accept e-mails for supersecrethost.netnerds.net and then ensured each of the two user accounts and their aliases were set as valid recipients. I also disabled IMF at the host level (SMTP -> Default SMTP -> Properties -> General -> Advanced -> Edit -> Uncheck Apply Intellingent Mail Filter) and instructed my other user to disable it at the Outlook level (Actions -> Junk E-mail -> Junk E-mail Options -> Poke around). So here's sorta what it looks like:

Using Google's Admin interface, I also added a subdomain http://gmail.netnerds.net that automatically directs to the Gmail Apps e-mail login page. Now we can use one of three interfaces to check our mail: Outlook Web Access, Exchange/Outlook, or Google. I decided to use Office 2007 as my primary e-mail client but I login to gmail.netnerds.net every couple days to check my spam box for false positives.

    

Because of the manual creation of the email accounts and the subsequent forwarding, this doesn't scale without a huge time investment. Using the Google API's that come with the Premier Edition, however, it would probably be easy to setup something similar on a mass scale. I also considered wildcards forwarding at Google's end (which is supported) then filtering again at my end using Exchange Sinks but my setup is too small to justiy the kind of time I'd spend doing that.

Two final notes: first, by selecting the forwarding option "Forward then Delete" and thus preventing Google Apps from being a Store and Forward, the 2GB storage limit wouldn't pose any sort of restriction for those needing super large mailboxes. The drawback, of course, is if you choose that option, you can no longer use the Gmail interface to check your mail. Second, Google Apps does provide support for additional domains -- I'm currently using it for RealCajunRecipes.com.

Last week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo at Mascone Center in San Francisco where I watched Steve Souders of Yahoo speak. His workshop was titled High Performance Webpages and has a yet-to-be published O'reilly book by the same name (though the Rough Cuts version is currently available for download). The basis of his presentation is as follows:

These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. We focus on the front-end because that's where 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent. This "80-90% front-end" phenomenon is not isolated to just Yahoo!. It holds true for most web sites, including the ten most-visited U.S. web sites. In any optimization effort it’s critical to profile current performance to identify where the greatest improvement can be made. It’s clear that the place to focus for fast web pages is the front-end:

1.	There is more potential for improvement by focusing on the front-end. Making the back-end twice as fast reduces response times by 5-10%, whereas making the front-end twice as fast saves 40-45%.
2.	Front-end improvements typically require less time and resources than back-end performance projects.
3.	Focusing on front-end improvements has proven to work. Over fifty teams at Yahoo! have reduced their end-user response times by following these 14 Rules for High Performance Websites.

Souders' presentation was especially useful for me because it made me realize that I was spending too much time on speeding up the back-end and not enough time speeding up the front-end. I passed this URL on to my developer-in-crime, Brandon, and we'll be using it as a guideline during the redevelopment of RealCajunRecipes.com.

I apologize for the duplicate posts that appeared in "all y'all's" RSS readers; I signed up with Feedburner a few days ago and it slightly changed the content of the feeds.

I'm surprised I signed up with FeedBurner, honestly. As someone who's hosted my own mail/dns/web/database/everything since 1998, I've always been a proponent of "do it yourself" when it came to technical feats. Now, however, I find myself starting to outsource services more and more. I think this is because not only do I have less time, but because the services are more useful and reasonably priced (or free).

A couple years ago, I saw people flock to FeedBurner but thought I'd be happier just keeping the stats myself and dishing out a few SQL queries when I wanted to find out more about my visitors. That takes time, though, and I never actually took the time to look. Up until today, I had no idea how many readers actually subscribe to this blog's feed. I was pleased to see I had 90! Well, 90 minus one since I subscribe to my own feed to ensure the formatting looks proper. It's a modest number but it's my number.. and I appreciate your interest in my blog.

So, other outsourced services I now use are: Google Analytics, Gmail as an anti-spam ASP (I'll blog about that next), flickr pro and soon enough, mozy pro. I also use Wordpress instead of building my own blog engine. Oh, oh and recently, I decided to hire a real graphics designer to redesign RealCajunRecipes.com ("RCR"). It won't be cheap but thankfully, Google Adsense and our cookbook sales are going to pay for most of it. Out with tables and images and in with CSS! Out with that 2002 design too. That will give Brandon (my best friend and co-creator of RCR) and I time to focus on backend development instead of stressing over something we're mediocre at like graphics design.

Speaking of development, I have a couple questions for you, my #1 reader.

Also, a bit off topic but I'd like to write about more personal things (dealing with a 17 year old seizuric cat, general stuff about living in San Francisco) sometimes, but I often don't. The posts about D-Pie and my cold, blue legs were exceptions and I ended up removing one (and pondering the other). There's something about netnerds.net that often prevents me from talking about non-tech stuff. I noticed that a lot of people have personal blogs and technical blogs. Do you think I should create a new blog or should I just talk about non-tech here?

And finally, I have a poll on the blog that I'd like you to answer if you haven't already. I'd put it in the post itself but I don't think that the AJAX will work in the RSS readers. The question is What's Your Job Title? So far, the top 3 answers (of 151 total) are: Sys/Net Admin (23%), App/Web/DB Dev (15%) and Douchebag (12%). Just as I suspected!

I recently attended a Longhorn Roadshow in Santa Clara and learned quite a bit about Microsoft's emphasis on virtualization in Longhorn. A lot of companies are going towards virutalizing servers, even those still running NT or Exchange 5.5. The main reasons seem to be saving rackspace and saving electricity (fewer machines, less A/C) which both translate to saving money. Fortunately, my employer now has the infrastructure setup and virtualization on a mass scale seems like a possiblity. After a quick evaluation, I don't have much faith in Microsoft's current Virtual Server product but an evaluation of ESX Server 3.0 has proven impressive. VMWare has it together and it is likely the solution I'll be recommending in '08 when we're ready to move forward.

That said, it's been tough installing Longhorn x64 on VMWare ESX server. It should be expected, though; the support for Longhorn x64 isn't even experimental yet -- it's non-existent. I had to select Vista 64-bit Experimental as my base VM and hope for the best. What I've experienced is almost as painful as installing Windows 2003 R2 on a Macbook  Most of the frustration revolves around the CD-ROM drivers. The initial install of Longhorn on ESX is so promising but then a message pops up that says: "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing." At first, I thought this was because I was using an external USB DVD-R drive but that turned out not to be the case. I figured that gem out only after going through all these steps:

• I installed some dumb .flp that never loaded the CD-ROM drivers as promised
• I asked a friend to bring me an internal CDROM only to find out it's EIDE and my server doesn't support it
• I took my work workstation's IDE CD-ROM and hooked it half-up to my server (the IDE cable) and half-up to a workstation (the power cable because my server didn't have any free power cables left).
• Enabled IDE in the BIOS and finally had ESX recognize the drive
• Still had the same problem

So then I got creative and decided to create the Longhorn image on another workstation. Doh! The workstation's CPU was not 64-bit enabled. So then I tried it on my laptop.. doh! It's 64-bit enabled but doesn't have some special VT chip that's often times not found in laptops. This is why I hate hardware.

So I gave in and ..

• Wiped ESX and reinstalled Longhorn 64-bit.
• Installed the free VMware server, created a Longhorn Virtual Machine and installed Longhorn
• Once the install was complete, I backed up the vmdk to another machine
• I then wiped Longhorn on the server, resinstalled ESX and copied the vmdk to /vmfs/volumes/storage1/longhorn
• Next, I ran vmkfstools -i longhorn-64ws.vmdk longhorn-64esx.vmdk
• Once that was done, I created a new Virtual Machine within ESX and selected Custom then used the new image longhorn-64esx.vmdk

Ahhh, that worked! But now VMWare tools was giving me trouble. The CD-ROM still didn't work (the CD-ROM, listed as NECVMWar VMWare IDE CDR00 ATA Device, gives the status of "The Device Cannot Start" (Code 10)) so I had to figure out another way around the problem. I copied the windows.iso from /vmimages/tools-isoimages to my workstation using Veeam FastSCP, mounted the ISO, saved the files as a zip under my web root then used IE on the Longhorn server to fetch the zip. Installed and voila, it works!

The Google Dev Team writes: "Due to the huge amount of interest, we've added spots at the event and opened registration back up." Seats are super limited so sign up while you still can.

(Living in the Bay Area rocks)

After reading at bink.nu that the Longhorn April CTP was available, I logged in to my sweet MSDN account and searched for it. Strangely, I could only find "Longhorn Beta 3 Escrow" which became available on April 9th. I'm guessing that this version is newer than the April CTP but I'm not sure. Anyone know what escrow means in this sense?

Finally, I'l be able to put my awesome x64 servers to use, sorta Since Longhorn won't be final for awhile, I figure I will use these machines to beta test Longhorn and Exchange 2k7 until Longhorn is RTM'd.

The above photo was taken late one night as I installed the February CTP onto one of the servers. I used my 32 inch flat screen LCD HDTV as the monitor.. cuz I could. It was cool but ultimately, the install was worthless. The February CTP of Longhorn isn't compatible with Powershell and thus can't run Exchange 2007. Ahh well, now I've got Beta 3 Escrow. So now to decide which I'll do Friday night: go to NASA's World Space Party near Mountain View or install Longhorn & Exchange and play.

Last night, my computer fell asleep and I decided not to wake it. Experience taught me that Hibernate was much more reliable but I decided, eh, it's already Sleeping and I should be too.

This morning, after a public transit meltdown in San Francisco, I made it into work a mere 3 minutes before the managing partner was scheduled to call me for an important meeting. Still in a sweat from running, I arrived at my desk and attempted to wake my laptop from its sleep. I'm in IT after all, and I'll need it for this meeting. Well, my laptop didn't want to wake up. It sat there for a bit doing something.. not sure what, but it was powered on and the screen was blank. So I started poking around; I tried to eject the CD.. that's helped in the past to kick it into gear but it wasn't working this time. After about 30 seconds of waiting, I decided to it was time for a cold boot.

So now, I'm spending my last two minutes before 9:00 AM hoping that the managing partner won't decide to call a few minutes early. Microsoft, I'm sorry but resuming from sleep still doesn't work. And when it does, it tends to sit there for awhile, making me wonder what it will decide to do.

A few days before installing Vista, I came upon a PowerPoint created by one of the Microsoft Program Managers for the WinHEC (hardware) conference. In the presentation titled "Power Management in Windows Vista", Pat Stemen wrote the following::

Reliable Sleep Transitions

• Windows Vista promotes the use of sleep as the default off state
  • Requires reliable, fast and deterministic sleep transitions
• Failed transitions were the primary sleep adoption blocker in previous versions of Windows
  • Lead to great user frustration and distrust of power management
  • Investigations inlicate component vetoes are the primary cause
    • Appcication, service or driver willingly prevents the sleep transition
• Sleep transitions will succeed
  • Vista will not query user mode components when entering sleep
  • Drivers may not veto sleep transitions
  • User-mode notification (PBT_APMSUSPEND) will continue to be sent
    • Timeout to process event has been reduced from 20 seconds to 2 seconds
• Applications, services, and drivers must be prepared for this change
  • Proper design and test is imperative

I don't know where the development in Vista's Sleep went wrong but, it's still not reliable for me. Same goes for my friend Zach..he's the one that actually clued me into using Hibernate instead of Sleep. Even with writing up to 2gb of data to the hard drive, going into Hibernation is just as fast as sleep and coming back is much more dependable. Now there's a 9 in 10 chance that resuming will work instead of a 5 in 10 chance (if that.) 99.999% reliability would be best of course but I'll take what I can get for now. I really hope Sleep's issues are finally resolved in Vista SP1.

Update: They finally released this patch publicly (without you having to call/email). It's helped me a great deal. Note that VPN is also considered "PPP" so this patch isn't only for dial-up users. Also, visitor "wchp" said that this patch helped him with sleep issues. So far, about 250 people have found my blog while searching for a fix. Ya'll holler and let me know if you have an nVidia card too.

Yesterday, while eating and drinking in North Beach SF, I stumbled upon an event put on byJon Brumit called "Bring Your Own Big Wheel." What a trip Imagine adults, dressed up as super heros and other oddities, racing big wheels down a very steep, very windey road. There were a ton of wipe-outs and scrapes but everyone laughed it off and was proud to show their bruises. This event was non-stop fun.

   
Photos by "Scott Beale / Laughing Squid"

I'd post the video I made but my laughter is out of control so instead, here's someone else's:

My collection of photos can be found on flickr.

Edit: Originally I thought the event was put on by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid but as it turns out, the organizer is Jon Brumit. Oops .. but the title stays, Laughing Squid is still awesome

Just as I was heading off to bed, I decided to check the TrueCrypt website to see if they added Vista support. I've checked it a few times since March 19th, so I don't know why I didn't notice but version 4.3 now supports Vista. For a moment there, I thought Vista support was going to be vaporwear - they've been promising it since February, 2006.

I donated to the TrueCrypt Foundation back in January because it's some of the greatest software I've used in a long time. The software provides a sense of security -- knowing that my documents/pictures/music are protected in the event that my laptop were to be stolen. To me, knowing someone could be looking at my documents or pictures is an even scarier thought than even having my laptop stolen. So after installing Vista, I was really bummed when I read that the current version would not work.

If you are looking to encrypt an entire disk or portions of a disk, you just may love TrueCrypt too. It works on both Windows and Linux, it's free and it has a ton of functions. ScriptingLife.com has some great suggestions on running a drive with Pstart and mobile versions of applications. DailyCupOfTech.com has good info and quick tutorials on getting started.