Preston Lee's Blog

Tag: opinion

  • Review: Why Army of Two (360) Sucks

    The overall aiming mechanic is *very* poor. I don’t expect PC-level ease, but at least something on par with the Tom Clancy games is necessary to make a console shooter fun. Both me and my buddy commented on this suckage right from the start. AoT also suffers from poor pacing. Remember how in Serious Sam…

  • Mac Users: Buy This Now

    https://www.macheist.com/buy/invite/94211 The latest MacHeist bundle: $50 for 12 apps, the most notable being Pixelmator, CSSEdit and Snapz Pro X. I picked up the 3-pack bundle for $100 and a total of 36 license key. 4 days left. w00ties!

  • Small Office VoIP: Skype Pros/Cons

    Before the 2007 tax year ended, OpenRain decided to finally solidify a telephony strategy for the next year or so. Key requirements were.. Easy ad-hoc and scheduled conferences. Mobile flexibility and continuity across physical locations. Scalability for the next couple years. Voice mail Call forwarding. Little to no management overhead. (I don’t want to run…

  • Xserve w/Leopard Server (Mac OS X 10.5), First Impressions

    We just picked up a refurbished 2.66GHz quad-core Xeon from Apple, which we’ll be using for internal infrastructure. (We’re in the process of migrating from a mix of Solaris and Linux). After about 8 hours of learning the ins and outs of Leopard Server over the weekend, we had the box running Open Directory (Kerberos…

  • 6 Things I'm Thankful For

    An awesome first business year for OpenRain. The constant stress of context switching between software projects has become more managable, making weekend relaxation slightly more frequent. Marc has been a geeky Asian version of Superman, and our part-time office manager Gracie has been a godsend. Business has been great, and 2008 should be an exciting…

  • OpenSolaris ZFS vs. Linux ext3 RAID5

    Preston Says: I asked Dan McClary for a big favor recently: use his general UNIX knowledge and graduate-level statistics voodoo to produce a report highlighting performance characteristic differencess between OpenSolaris ZFS and Linux RAID5 on a common, COTS hardware platform. The following analysis is his work, reformatted to fit your screen. You may download the…

  • Software Engineering Curse Words

    Here lie terms frequently used in software development which I don’t particularly care for. Programmer Commercial software is as much about programming as building bridges is about installing steel I-beams. Writing actual code is only part of the engineering effort. When I see a job posting entitled “Java Programmer” I usually suspect that this is…

  • Parallels Desktop Coherence Mode Rocks: OS X/Windows XP Screenshot

    I tried Parallels Desktop‘s Coherence mode today, and was so blown away I had to blog about it immediately. The above image has not been doctored. It’s my normal OS X desktop with Windows XP running in coherence mode. When activated, the window around the XP virtualization session vanishes, the XP taskbar integrates into your…

  • 5 Roadblocks To Enterprise Rails Acceptance

    I love Rails for its pragmatic design and agile culture: two qualities not usually associated with the large, enterprisey systems of Fortune 500 companies. In my last formal position I was part of a small internal movement to drive the Rails train upward through the IT ranks, but the effort was met with limited success.…

  • JXTA: Not The Solution To Java Peer Discovery

    Only developers with hair should use JXTA, because those with bald or shaven heads won’t have anything to violently rip from their skulls while they develop with it. I have been, and continue to be excited by, JXTA’s potential, but have been very disappointed at the pace at which a project progresses when using it.…