New Google Nexus 7 Hands On (2013 edition)

Yesterday while stopping into Best Buy I was surprised to see a new Nexus 7 in the tablet section. After playing with the device for a while I came away unimpressed. It is a solid device 🙂 but the screen was not as overwhelmingly good as I expected 🙁 Perhaps the biggest problem for me was that my Samsung Galaxy Note 2’s display actually seemed brighter and it was also not that much smaller than the Nexus7: Google Nexus 7 (2013) 2013

Evaluating a RAM disk as a MySQL data store

DDR3 Memory

I have a situation with a relatively small set of MySQL data (5GB) and a decently large set of available ECC DDR2 memory (32GB). Therefore, I am evaluating storing the entire MySQL data directory on a ramdisk. Along those lines, here are some initial resources: 12 RAM Disk Software Benchmarked for Fastest Read and Write Speed • Raymond.CChttp://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-ram-disk-software-benchmarked-for-fastest-read-and-write-speed/Memory or RAM is much faster speed than a traditional hard drive. If you require to run a software that is database intensive,

Dell PowerEdge 1950 & 2950 CMOS/RAID battery

The Dell PowerEdge 1950 3rd generation server uses a standard CR2032 battery for CMOS/BIOS purposes. If your server is showing an orange warning on the front panel about low battery, you can buy a replacement battery here for less than $5 USD: 3 Volts, 2032, 2 batteries (Lithium Button Cell) CR2032http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002DSVS8/This pair of three-volt lithium coin batteries is perfect for servers. 20mm diameter and 3.2mm height. Likewise, if the RAID controller’s battery is low you can find replacements starting at

Dell PowerEdge 1950 III Drivers and Firmware Updates (2013)

I recently set up two new Dell PowerEdge 1950 III servers. One for Weblogs.us (free blog hosting) and one for Branson’s Nantucket (a lakefront resort in Branson). Dell makes very nice servers but their support pages can be a bit confusing. Therefore, here are the latest updates/drivers for the PowerEdge 1950 III, as of July 2013: Latest Dell PERC 6/i Integrated Update, v.6.3.1-0003, A14http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/04/driverdetails?driverid=W83M2Fixes: 1. Fixes an issue where the Perc battery does not always charge up properly, causing Virtual Disks

New video card for 4K UHD and Starcraft 2 SC2 HotS

Every four years or so I invest in a new video card. The latest edition, ordered today, is the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 650 Ti OC 2GB card. I actually meant to order a BOOST edition but somewhat mistakenly ordered the ‘OC’ edition. 🙁 However, I like the overall features of the card and if it performs well enough I will keep it. 🙂 Otherwise, I may return it and look at a GTX 760. My general usage scenarios will be

WordPress comment pagination and 301 redirects

I recently enabled paginated comments on my WordPress blog. Later I decided to disable pagination and just go for the regular ol’ a single comments listing on each post (regardless of how many comments there are). After the chance I was a bit worried about duplicate content, but thankfully when I unchecked the ‘break comments into pages with…’ option from wp-admin -> settings -> discussion WordPress automatically took care of redirecting! Here is the example: http://www.jdhodges.com/blog/dreamweaver-document-too-large-copy-past/comment-page-2/ auto redirects to http://www.jdhodges.com/blog/dreamweaver-document-too-large-copy-past/

Download the latest version of ESXi for Dell

Today I needed to download the latest Dell customized ISO of VMWare ESXi. It took me a moment to find the latest version, so here is a link to help you find it faster: http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/19/driverdetails?driverid=RD5JN This is VMware ESXi 5.1 Update 1 and it was released on April 29th 2013. You can burn it to a CD or mount it via an IPMI/DRAC interface if you so desire. Also, you will need a USB thumbdrive to install ESXi to as you

Determine if TRIM is supported and enabled on an SSD!

Today I was installing a Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD in a new server. Everything went smoothly, but I wanted to make sure that TRIM was actually working. This turned out to be slightly trickier than one might imagine! 😉 First Samsung’s SSD Magician Tool was of no use. CrystalDiskInfo reported that my SSD supported TRIM (which I already knew) but really gave no indication that Windows 7 and the SSD were working in concert to accomplish TRIMming. Nothing really