I’ve got a pile of certifications that I’ve accumulated over the years.

Below are my Redhat Linux, Microsoft, Sun Solaris, Nortel Networking and ITIL cert logos. I think the RHCE and Sun Solaris certs were probably the hardest of this bunch.

Here are my SAS certifications that took me six months to complete on my own time. The Clinical Trials Programmer exam was by far the hardest of this set of tests. I mostly use my SAS experience now to port software to R.

I’m interested in the security CISSP and VMware VCP5 certification but have not had the inclination to spend the money or time yet.

Bought a Sony Blu-ray player with DLNA support. Added MediaTomb with a static binary on the Blackarmor. Tested it an it wasn’t very happy. It did run but the performance just wasn’t there.

The default Sony Blu-ray with my new BA NAS 400 series works just fine. A solution to my long standing problem with playing my digital content on my TV and sound system. DLNA support in the Sony equipment just seems to work.

New job and learning AWS in support of distributed computing. I’ve done a good bit of research to understand the ecology of web services. They can be expensive but when you count total costs, they come out pretty close to break-even. You can lease computational power for relatively short periods to do quick work, then give the hardware back and stop paying for it. That is a powerful shift in technology.

OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and a couple others where in the running while doing the evaluations. Each had their advantages which I’ll probably write about later.

I settled on implementing a Eucalyptus system using spare hardware. So far I’ve got a working and running system built from the source code. It provides a subset of the AWS services on local hardware for testing. The S3 support isn’t quite there as of version 3.3.0 but it might improve in the next couple of months. S3 is simple storage interface allowing for storing information by a key value. Their EC2 support appears to be much better and allows for quickly building virtual machines with pre-configured operating systems.

In the background, I’m writing Java code to implement AWS tools and services. I forgot how much fun Java can be.

Binary Files

I wanted to do some work on an undocumented binary file format. The free HexEdit tool for Windows from Catch22 Software is a pretty good for mapping data structures to the raw binary/hex data in a file. It uses the C format struct to format the data structures into a human readable format. It could use some additional docs on how to use the typedef format but was relatively easy to figure out.

What was frustrating was finding a tool that would allow for doing binary diffs with a decent interface. There are several methods for doing binary diffs on files. The unix ‘od’ command, ‘bvi’ and others presented themselves but were not as interactive as I would like when looking at large numbers of files visually for iterative small changes. Editors and Binary Editors fall into an area of preferences. I could be entering a flame-war picking a tool but would love to hear some feedback on tools people have used.

What I found that seemed to fit the bill for me was Chris’ excellent tool called vBinDiff found at his website. Since I wanted to use UNIX tools for scripted automation but still be on a Windows system, I installed Cygwin. Getting vbindiff to work on Cygwin was a testament to Chris’ excellent code base. After finishing up and getting it working, I thought it might be nice to package it for the Cygwin project.

Cygports

Thus started my journey into Cygport. I found myself frustrated with the documentation for the assumption that I knew a lot about the Cygwin packaging which is what I was trying to avoid by using the tool. This is not a bashing session for cygport which does an amazing job of wrapping up lots of the trivia that is Cygwin packaging. What was missing is a basic “HowTo Package ABC” for Cygwin. The cygport documents while good are written for someone who had done the manual process of packaging at some point. The documentation failed to meet my expectations as a competent developer who has done lots of porting work to quickly introduce me to this new means of packaging for their platform. There is not quick guide on the simple cases with a couple of interesting example. The other lack was how to get these example applications of varied type out of Cygwin easily. I figured it out and afterwards felt silly for not having seen it. All that said, I have come the realization that I have to put some time aside and try to write an HowTo guide on packaging for Cygwin.

I’ve got two packages done so far. vBinDiff is the first and I am still polishing that install as I learn more along the way. vbindiff is currently working great as a package on my local system. Wy60 is another tool from years back when I worked on UniData/Universe systems and needed access to their Wyse 60 PICK interfaces. This makes for two packages and I have used several features to make these work. I’ll have to learn how to submit a request for inclusion into the main Cygwin package group. There is a mailing list and a set of questions to answer. I’ll just need to put some time aside for it. :)

Interests

So those are my current interests in the world of technology. I keep playing around with the BlackArmor NAS devices occasionally and would like to find the time to get the USB to serial interface setup on my second unit. The ARM gcc tool-chain languishes for lack of time as well. The DLNA server ended up being too much of a pain without a decent tool-chain so I knuckled under and installed Microsoft Media Center on an old laptop to feed my digital media to my xbox360. I really want to revisit that particular issue and get a low-power digital media server working. Maybe I’ll find the time and pick those back up.