April 6th, 2009
I have a few external USB drives and needed a new one and was looking either to upgrade the capacity of one of the drives or buy a new unit. I wanted at least a 500GB drive whose sole purpose would be a Time Machine backup drive hanging off my Mac. I have an existing 500GB unit, at the time the cheapest I could find, but it recently died (you get what you pay for!). So, temporarily, I started using an older 250GB drive. But that was filling up; considering I need 200+ MB for backup and Time Machine was starting to delete the older weekly backups.
Was considering one of the Drobo units, to take advantage of increasingly cheaper HDD, but didn’t really need the ultimate flexibility, and didn’t want the price either. To not make that decision, I was going to settle for a cheap enclosure/ATA drive. But, while doing my normal surf habit, I saw a reference to Thermaltake BlacX Docking Station and did some research on it. Basically a toaster like unit to swap SATA drives, both 3.5 and 2.5 units. Everything looked good and I started shopping. Found it on Newegg for $37 and picked out a nice (well-reviewed) 750GB SATA drive for $59. Great solution for < $100!
Now, I’ll continue to look for SATA deals and I’m all set to roll over to a new Time Machine backup, or swap in a drive temporarily to copy to/from archives, etc..
Up and running in no time. Flawless.
BTW… Time Machine is a great app… I know, I know, it is just a backup and lots of other solutions out there, but the fact that it comes as part of Max OS X, and extremely simple to plug in a drive and go is tremendous.. Already saved my bacon after my main drive failed. After the drive was replaced, I was up and running after a simple restore from Time Machine — didn’t lose a thing. Actually, in this case, the drive was not completely shot — it wouldn’t boot but I was able to inspect via DiskWarrior (another great tool) and actually made emergency backup from there before I took in for repairs, but ultimately used the restore from Time Machine
Tags: DiskWarrior, hard drive swapping, HDD, SATA, Time Machine
Posted in technobabble | 1 Comment »
March 26th, 2009
One of the features touted by Magento is the api exposed via both XML-RPC and SOAP. I quickly (and successfully) tested the SOAP interface using the amazingly complete (and free) soapUI. I wanted to use XML-RPC, and decided to build a test client in Java. While trying to build a client, using the apache ws-xmlrpc library, I ran into a roadblock. The initial login and some other calls would work just fine, but some calls such as product.info would always cause an exception, similar to:
Exception in thread "main" org.apache.xmlrpc.client.XmlRpcClientException:
Failed to parse servers response: Unknown type: nil
I posted on the magento forum to no success (except to find a few others with the same problem). So I was on my own..
After some research, I determined that the problem (IMHO) is that the Magento api is incorrectly using the nil type in responses. According to the XML-RPC spec, nil is an extended type, and can only be used with a namespace (e.g. ex:nil) — see the data types section on the apache site. But, luckily, the ws-xmlrpc library can be easily extended to provide a work around, and the following solution worked for me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: java, magento, XML-RPC, xmlrpc
Posted in ecommerce, technobabble | 2 Comments »
March 26th, 2009
One of my side interests is eCommerce, primarily for building stores, and even more so from the programming side… I’m not really sure why, but it is an area that has always intrigued me… And recently, lucky enough to have the chance to “play” with it while working on some side projects. We were looking at osCommerce for a while, but eventually decided to focus on Magento. Both freeware, php-based platforms, but in the end, Magento had fewer warts.
Tags: ecommerce, magento, oscommerce
Posted in ecommerce | No Comments »
March 26th, 2009
Ok, so I have not been active lately… hoping to change that… just upgraded WP to 2.7.1, upgraded several plugins, got to get back to managing …
Tags: wordpress
Posted in technobabble | No Comments »
May 14th, 2008
I should add “on the Mac” to that title, but I’ll avoid any born again references for now. By virtual, I’m referring to the ever so wonderful virtualization, the ability to run a guest OS within another (see wikipedia entry on virtualization for more). For me, on my iMac, I’m using VirtualBox. It’s opensource, from a company which was recently purchased by Sun. My primary use will be quick access to an OS to test configurations or run (windows-only) software. I currently have debian and ubuntu versions, will get a Windows (Vista probably) as soon as I am willing to shell out the $$. Right now, for the few windows-only apps I have, I VNC to my seldom used windows boxes (Vista, Win2k).
VirutalBox has guest edition software for Windows and Linux which adds nice features such as mouse pointer integration and integrated windows. Plus, sharing host directories is very easy. These features are available in the other commercial virtual host solutions I’ve looked at.
OS installation was a breeze for the Linux distributions, as I simply downloaded the iso images and mounted it as cdrom for the guest installer to use.
Tags: debian, ubuntu, VirtualBox, virtualization
Posted in Mac | No Comments »