photo by rapidgamer03.
Well as I mentioned in my earlier post Boxee Beta and apple TV I have not had cable or Satellite service since moving back to Canada which will be almost a year now. The only stumbling block I have found as well as many others is when it comes to live sports there is a bit of snag depending on the sport you follow. how do I get around this for the world cup? Well there is a great article over at lifehacker that list where you can find all the streaming online for the world cup.

Well luckily CBC in Canada is streaming all the games live online, and the quality is great, the only issue I have is doesn’t quite work with my apple TV unfortunately. But as always there is a solution.

I use my Laptop which has an HDMI out port and I hook it up to my flat screen with an HDMI cable, and problem solved.

This solution works great, and I used the same setup during the Olympics which were broadcast by CTV in a similar fashion.

And if you have a problem with the sound of the vuvuzela’s you can follow this link to an engineer who created a filter for it, I have not had a chance to try it out.

As Many North American’s it can be hard to travel and not bring along your cell phone, or Mobile phone, regardless of what you call it most people have become attached to their cell phones and it is a center for all their communication needs.

And as a result if you bring it with you anywhere outside of your home country it may end of being very expensive to use it. We have all heard the stories of the poor tourist who brought along his/her phone only to find out when they got home they had a huge bill with roaming charges and long distance fees, that sometimes can easily get into the hundreds and/or thousands of  dollars if you are not careful.

• Now the first thing you need to do is get a GSM phone that has at least 3 bands but preferably 4 bands that would be labeled as a “world phone”, this is key as most of the rest of the world works with the GSM standard and only now is North America starting to move over more to it. In Canada GSM providers would be mainly Rogers, Fido, and Telus, Bell is starting to switch over and there are some other local carriers, and in the US it is mainly AT&T and T-Mobile that offer you GSM.
• The next thing is to get it unlocked, depending on your phone and carrier you can either do this for free or very cheap, but depending on the Brand and Model some can’t be unlocked. It also depends on what you will be doing with your phone, if your just making calls, you don’t need anything fancy, but if you are a die hard techie with a smart phone things can get more difficult. \
• Now This is the most important thing, unless you absolutely need a number active before you arrive in your destination, Buy your SIM Card when you get there, usually you can find a shop in the airport as soon as you walk out or they might even have a vending machine, if not most providers have shops in most towns and in Europe many of the grocery stores even have their own brand of pay as you go SIM cards. And Whatever you do don’t buy the one’s offered in the travel Magazines or on the plane’s duty free in flight catalog, usually they are overpriced and bad service quality.

From my experience usually you can get the SIM card for free when you purchase airtime at the same time from the provider in the country your visiting, otherwise you can get it very cheap. the alternative is you can usually find a package on e-bay where you can get a SIM card in advance sometimes with airtime but usually without, you still need to call to set up an account once you are in the destination country. So save yourself the time, money and hassle as if you buy it once you arrive you still have to provide some information but usually minimal and they usually charge you on e-bay for a card you could get for free.

I have done this myself in Italy, UK, as well as Canada and the USA, and works like a charm every time.

amazon wireless

My first introduction to Nagios was about 5 years ago while working on a large deployment project in Phoenix for the airport. We had initially been using what’s up gold to monitor devices. But this had been set up by our predecessors and no one from their group who was working on site had the expertise to configure or up date the system. So as most things we let it be until we found out from a contractor working for the airport as a network admin was using this tool called Nagios to monitor all the devices on the network, including our own.

He graciously offered to build us our own for a fee. And at the time the division I was working for had a limited budget and several other factors hindered the acquisition via this means. But I was asked to look into and see what options I could come up with.

I quickly found several documents, websites and forums related to this until then unheard of product. I managed to pick up a few books and download some packages.

I built the first Nagios “server” using an old Dell SX270 small form factor PC. With that first attempt we tried out a few configurations. And the results were great we managed to monitor equipment that with the previous was not possible. And the biggest selling point was we were getting notified of failures before the client or anyone else was even aware there was a problem.

So with that initial system I set up 400+ devices and over 4000 services to be monitored for the Phoenix sky harbor airport (PHX).

Because of the great success we had. The division I was working for wanted to try and implement it at other airports that we serviced as a value added service. So the next pilot site was BWI Baltimore airport. This site was one of the smaller installations but it was frequently used as a demo site given it’s proximity to the main office in Maryland.

I also found this tool being used by the on site staff in Milan and Linate airports in Italy While I was working on site there supporting them.

I left the division shortly after to work in the UK. Last I heard this model did not pan out as the budgets for most projects were so tight they could not bear the additional cost, even though the could benefit from the service.

I became the subject matter expert and provided training to the staff responsible for supporting it as well created specific documentation for each site.

It turns out to be a very popular product and I have been involved with many top level organizations that use it and value staff that has the skills to work with it, as it does take some special understanding to optimize it uses and bring value to the organizations that use it.

I am Currently working on a project to implement a new server at my current employer to focus only on Production systems monitoring and alerting. I will keep you updated on the progress or if you have an interest in using it in your organization whatever size please feel free to contact me at info@rickymartinblog.com.

Well as you may have read in my other post boxee-beta-and-the-apple-tv, I am an avid user of torrents and appleTV to watch them using Boxee. and recently I switched from Vuze to Utorrent as my bit torrent client as a result of the functionality enhancements. it is great given the fact that unlike many of the US ISP’s in Canada as is the same in most of Europe from my experience you are capped on bandwidth and if you go over your allotted amount you are charged. this is where I really like Utorrent in the fact you can schedule times to restrict for downloads as well as limit uploads and stop traffic altogether. There is even an option to track bandwidth and limit uTorrent if you exceed the threshold you configure.

All these great goodies that come with this simple to use tool. and now there is an article that shows that the download speed has been tested and is 16% faster overall than Vuze. you can read the post here at torrentfreak .

The Post gives the details about the study that was performed, and a link to the actual paper produced by the researchers.

you can download Utorrent from here.

and Vuze from here.

if you would like to compare for yourself.

Well I was an early adopter of the apple TV and tweaking it with Boxee. Now there is no official release of Boxee beta for the apple TV as of yet but some creative people out on the net have taken what is available and tweaked it to work with the apple TV.

I have to say I liked the alpha version but really love the interface of the beta version. I find it a lot more polished and user friendly. The UI really takes advantage of the resources available you get access to online content for TV shows if they are available or local content as well if you have it mapped out.

Now From the alpha to the Beta there was not an easy way to get it installed. For the initial install of Beta on the Apple TV you had to follow these instructions which involved using SSH to log into the apple TV and run several commands to install various components or with the script linked above managed to automate most of it. Which is how I got it working at first, but now the great people that work on the ATV patchstick and Launcher have managed to get it working from the launcher,  so if you have the Alpha installed on your apple TV you can upgrade the launcher and then you can update Boxee from the launcher as was done in the alpha versions.

Now this install method does not install some of the additional features such as flash or Firefox which run in the background and allow you to use some of the Apps that are designed for the Mac version that this is ported from.  you can get the additional instructions by clicking on the link if you use the Launcher method to upgrade to Beta on the apple TV.

Well As I had mentioned Previously as part of my goals I have scheduled my Exam for this Friday. From the report from my last attempt on this exam I missed it only by a few points so I am brushing up on the points that were a bit weaker according to the report. Right now I am going through all the documentation I have on those topics and reviewing them and any scenarios where they may be used in the exam.

Will post an update this weekend after I complete the exam. Wish me Luck!