Geekiness Xtreme

Work has been continuously meh this week, although something called Nessus has proved interesting, which is a vulnerability scanner.

Last night was good - we went out in a group and ran the upcoming 5k route to practice. Fortunately the weather remained OK and we got round fine. I had to walk about a minute after the first hill because I think I was a little optimistic and went too fast, but after that I got around fine. Em and I did it in about 37 minutes while the others were about 31-33. Not exactly world shaking times but a good basis for improvement.

It was supposed to be running class tonight, but it rained continuously all day long, and my legs were still feeling it from last night, so I wimped out and came home and had a nice geeky evening. I was experimenting with sharing disks from a Windows Server 2012 machine to both the Windows 8 Alienware and the MacBook Pro. I really wanted to play with iSCSI since it sounds interesting and should work well over gigabit. This worked well with Windows 8 which connected straight up to a shared disk, and performance was surprisingly good.

Annoyingly though Apple doesn't include an iSCSI initiator with Mac OS X, and while there are third party ones, they aren't free. Oh well. NFS was a pain due to Windows being a bit shit at supporting it but eventually I got the Mac talking to a standard Windows share. While this works though, it isn't as fast as iSCSI or NFS. Oh well. All good fun. I also found the rather childish way that Apple represents Windows PCs in Mac OS X - as an old fashioned CRT showing a blue screen of death. It seems fairly typical of the arrogant attitude that Apple has developed over the last decade or so though.

It's interesting to compare Mountain Lion to Windows 8 though. It basically feels the same that OS X always has done, ever since the original version, which I had running on an old iMac. Windows has changed several times since then, although Windows 8 is clearly the most different. I'm still a little ambivalent about it - it's been improved a lot underneath but the new interface is just a little odd if you aren't using a touchscreen.