A New Chapter In My Professional Life

For the last 5 years, I’ve basically worked for the same company. My group was part of a sale about 5 months ago and I went along for the ride. Unfortunately all good things must come to an end and this chapter in my professional life has closed.

This time has been quite good to me and I’ve worked with some amazing people. I’ve worked on a variety of projects and learned all about technologies that I never imagined I’d ever encounter. I’ve also met some people that will remain good friends; in some ways I’m sad to be moving on, but in other ways, this is an opportunity for me to start anew.

I am quite nervous as I’ve only sent out résumés a few times in my 20 year career and never landed a job that I had applied through an ad. All my jobs have been a result of knowing someone or doing something (several were because of the software I’ve written).

Wherever I land, I’ll have to learn about new projects, new development styles, become more versed in a new language (Swift) and work with a new team. Transitions are always difficult, but like all transitions in my career, I’ll make it through this one just fine.

People have told me to take some time and enjoy my new freedom. That, of course, is much easier said than done. For now, I’m working through my ever growing todo list while actively pursuing job leads. Finding the right job is going to be a job in itself!

Review: UniFi Switch 8

Three years ago when we bought our house, I decided I wanted to put in surveillance cameras. When selecting the cameras, I decided that the cameras had to be powered by PoE (Power over Ethernet) so that I could change out the cameras later on if I wanted to and didn't have to worry about dragging a separate wire for power which could be different for different cameras. At the time I was looking, the number of small, fanless switches that did PoE was quite small. I decided on a Cisco SG300-10P which is a 10 port managed switch with 8 of the ports being PoE.

The managed switch was definitely overkill for what I wanted, but an unmanaged gigabit PoE switch without a fan was nowhere to be found. The switch has worked fine for my needs. Since then, I've experimented with other unmanaged PoE switches (a 16 port one with 8 PoE ports) as I needed more ports. The Cisco switch works fine, but I really didn't do much with it.

Last year after I tried out Ubiquiti's UniFi AC Access Points, they asked if I wanted to test their new UniFi Switch 8 port switch that was coming out. Of course, I said yes! The switch, like other products in the UniFi line is controlled by the UniFi controller software. As I've mentioned before, the software is quite utilitarian, but works well. The switch easily integrates with my access points and is simple to setup.

One of the things I dinged the UniFi access points for (not the Pro) was the lack of 802.3af PoE requiring the use of a power injector. Well, like other switches in Ubiquiti's line of switches, the 8 port switch provides passive PoE to individual ports if configured which will power the UniFi access points. So now that I had a UniFi switch, that negative point of having to use a power injector no longer applied.

My needs of a switch are pretty minor; I just need PoE provided to cameras and I need it to pass VLAN traffic for my guest WiFi network. The UniFi Switch 8 easily does that and a whole lot more. The controller interface works and I love being able to see statistics and have control over much of my network from one screen.

I really would like 10 ports and the switch has 2 SFP ports. Normally SFP ports are used for fiber connections, but they also support copper modules. I'm in the process of trying to get working copper modules from Fiberstore which is proving to be difficult; of the 6 I ordered, only 1 worked. Their support is good, but being in China, it takes a long time to get replacements. I would rather have had a combo RJ-45/SFP port like the Cisco switch has, but the SFP modules will eventually work.

One of the things I've overlooked until recently in a managed switch is the ability to use SNMP and monitor traffic. There is no real use for watching the traffic, but I find it interesting. I have monitoring for my access points and my Cisco switch as well.

With a retail price of $199, who should buy this switch? For most home users, there is no reason to purchase this switch. However, if you've bought into the UniFi line of products (which I'm quickly doing as unified management is excellent and gives me lots of control), then getting a UniFi switch should be a no brainer. To me, multiple 8 port switches beat out the 24 port switch due to the lack of fans. Yes, it would cost more, but in my setup, I try to keep noise at a minimum.

Pros

• Integrates well into the UniFi line
• Silent operation
• Powers all the UniFi access points (802.3af or passive PoE)
• Controller software is easy to use (but utilitarian)

Cons

• Not rack mountable; the Cisco switch I have has really long ears to mount it which Ubiquiti could have done. In my case, I put it on a Raxxess RAX Rack Tray
• No combo RJ-45/SFP Ports
• A little pricey

Summary

While the UniFi Switch 8 isn't for everyone, I've been quite happy with the Ubiquiti products and plan to purchase one of the 8 port switches to replace my Cisco switch (I'm waiting until the SFP modules work properly as I actually need 19 ports between my 2 main switches). The unified controller makes things very easy to manage. The Cisco switch has lots more options exposed, the UniFi switch can do a bunch with the command line; however, I haven't had to touch it.

Standardizing on UniFi switches will also allow me to possibly use their UniFi Video cameras including their new 1080p as those are powered by 24V passive PoE which the switch will provide (if you're listening, Ubiquiti, I have 7 cameras and would need an NVR to go with it :-)).

If you're going all in on Ubiquiti products, getting one of their switches should be a no-brainer.

Note:The UniFi Switch 8 was provided to me by Ubiquiti at no cost for testing and review. It should be clear that my review is not biased by this as I plan on purchasing another switch with my own money.

Plateau for Mac processors?

Recently my dad asked me what he could do to make his 2007 iMac faster. The machine is running a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor which by today's standards is woefully outdated. We had already maxed out the RAM at 6 GB (specs say it can handle 4 GB, but 6 GB are recognized) and it had a 500 GB 3.5" spinning hard drive (7200 RPM, I believe).

As we were looking for the most cost effective solution, I said that we should try an SSD drive in it. I told him to purchase the Samsung 850 EVO and a Newer Technology AdaptaDrive Bracket. The items arrived and then I was tasked with installing it (I actually had my dad get a different bracket which was wrong, so it was extra work, but let's just pretend he got the right bracket). Since the iMac didn't recognize my USB 3 docks to copy the data from his iMac to the new drive, I had to put the iMac in target disk mode, hook it to my Thunderbolt display via FireWire 800 and then copy the data to the new SSD hanging off my MacBook Pro. This process was long, but required no effort.

Opening up an iMac of this vintage was relatively straight forward, and I installed the new drive. After putting the machine back together, I booted it up to test it and was surprised at how well the machine performed. Before the drive replacement, the machine was far too slow for me to use. Boot time was long and opening up applications took too long. Now, the machine booted up a lot faster and applications opened quickly which seemed similar to my 2012 Retina MacBook Pro with a Quad Core Intel i7 processor.

So now I was comparing a nine year old computer to my 3.5 year old computer. My computer has a significantly faster processor and lots more RAM (16 GB), but the performance in opening apps (startup is still faster) and day to day operations seems reasonably close. Of course, I didn't do any benchmarks on the 2 machines, but here you have about 6 years separating 2 computers and in everyday tasks, the performance seemed acceptable on both.

My dad runs VMWare Fusion on his iMac (for his accounting) and that is a pig; for that (Windows 10 running on 1 core of a 9 year old iMac is a recipe for pain). Other than that, my dad has been quite happy with his upgrade.

So the question I have to ask is if the processor speed in Macs matters much anymore for everyday tasks. It seems that the limiting factor may be drive speed. I'm not talking about compiling, running virtual machines, or transcoding video, but for web browsing, email, etc., how much speed do we really need? I'm not giving up my machine any time soon and if I can get my hands on a faster machine, I'll definitely do that.

The end of DST?

Twice a year we go through the process of changing clocks either forward or back when daylight saving time rolls around or comes to a crashing end. Yesterday I had to change the time on 5 devices and luckily a bunch more automatically changed. While this process is a little bit of a pain and losing the hour of sleep wreaks havoc on our schedules for awhile, I like daylight saving time as the extra hour of daylight is most welcome.

Recently, a member of the California Legislature has introduced a bill (AB-2496) to eliminate DST. While this sounds like it would simplify things and not subject us to schedule adjustment, generally everything I've read indicates that people want DST all year long and not have PST. Unfortunately, this bill doesn't address that.

If people really wanted DST all year long and still get that extra "hour" of daylight, then we, as a society, have to shift our schedules and notions of when things start. So instead of having a normal workday be 9-5 (OK, I know that 9-5 is a cliché, but bear with me), we'd make it 8-4. Everything would have to shift so that we would have the perception that we have an extra hour of daylight; we wouldn't gain an hour of daylight, we'd just start and end the routine activities (like work) early so that we can have free time when it is daylight. This, of course, is never going to happen.

Given that we're stuck with either our current system of DST or ditching DST and not shifting our schedules, ditching DST is not easy. While yes we wouldn't have to change our clocks, think about all the computers that automatically change their clocks. So now instead of Pacific Standard Time which assumes that DST is followed, we'd have another option like "California time" which doesn't handle DST. This means that computers and IoT devices have to be updated to support this. It isn't technically difficult, but rolling this out could be harder than the daylight saving time switch in 2007 (based on the Energy Policy Act of 2005) as consumers would have to explicitly choose this new time zone (with the last change, the rules which specify the DST rules just had to change with no user interaction).

If you take a look at an iCalendar entry, you can see that most modern calendaring programs already take into account DST rules.

    BEGIN:VCALENDAR
    VERSION:2.0
    PRODID:-//Apple Inc.//Mac OS X 10.11.3//EN
    CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
    BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
    TZID:America/Los_Angeles
    BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
    TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
    RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU
    DTSTART:20070311T020000
    TZNAME:PDT
    TZOFFSETTO:-0700
    END:DAYLIGHT
    BEGIN:STANDARD
    TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
    RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU
    DTSTART:20071104T020000
    TZNAME:PST
    TZOFFSETTO:-0800
    END:STANDARD
    END:VTIMEZONE
    BEGIN:VEVENT
    CREATED:20160304T043923Z
    UID:AAAAAA
    DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20160311T220000
    TRANSP:OPAQUE
    X-APPLE-TRAVEL-ADVISORY-BEHAVIOR:AUTOMATIC
    SUMMARY:Some Event
    DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20160311T180000
    DTSTAMP:20160304T043925Z
    LAST-MODIFIED:20160304T043923Z
    SEQUENCE:0
    END:VEVENT
    END:VCALENDAR

Yes, EVERY calendar entry you have has DST rules in it because they are a mess worldwide. So while calendaring programs are already ready to handle a DST change, are we ready for it? Can you imagine someone in California scheduling a meeting for people in New York and Portland? People in Phoenix already do this, so it should be easy, right?

As much as I don't like changing clocks and having to wake up the Monday after the change to DST to get ready for my day, I'm OK with the current system. I know that a recent study shows a link between the switch to DST and stroke, but there are also links between the Super Bowl and violence. Should we get rid of the Super Bowl as well just because of that? (There are other reasons to get rid of a sport that almost encourages head injuries, but that is a different story.)