The answer is "yes and no".

I ended my recent trek in to the Grand Canyon with a few days rest and relaxation in Las Vegas.

The iPad and the iPad 3G were already on sale in the USA and Las Vegas has three Apple Stores. So I expected to turn up at one of the stores and simply buy an iPad over the counter. However, it turns out that Apple are unable to keep up with initial demand, or possibly they are purposefully drip feeding product to keep their fans excited.

The best I could do was pre-order one. I was told that my order would be met when stock came in. Given that I only had 4 days there, the natural question I attempted to ask the staff was, how long I would have to wait? Would it be next day, next week or next month? They were obviously trained to deflect this question as, to a man and woman, the answer was "we simply don't know".

It was only when I befriended a particular geeky staff member on my second visit that I found out that stock usually comes in daily and the wait for pre-orders is approximately 2 to 4 days. He also suggested that I order one of all 6 models to stand a better chance of getting hold of one before I left.

I found that you could only order from the intranet in-store and then found that you are restricted to one device per Apple ID. So over a space of 30 minutes I wondered around the store creating six different Apple IDs and ordering one of each model (3 different capacity iPads and 3 different capacity iPad 3Gs).

Two days later two emails popped up to inform me that my iPad 64GB and 32GB were ready for collection. I opted to get the larger of these two models. Four days later, once I was back in the UK, I received the remaining emails to say my 3G models were ready for collection.

What's wrong with the iPad

Sat Nav - only if you splash out. First and foremost the iPad potentially makes a fantastic Satellite Navigation device. However, Apple have decided that the GPS chip is only to be included in the 3G models. I have no idea why this should be. It means that you have to buy the more expensive 3G models if you want to use GPS even if you have no intention of taking out a 3G data contract for your iPad.

It's too nice and too delicate to carry around. There is no doubt that the device, which is essentially a large iTouch, is beautiful to hold and use. But I wouldn't want to walk down the street with it. It's simply too fragile, too awkward and too flash to cruise the streets of NW London carrying.

Where is the camera? You have a tablet that you hold a couple of feet from your face or prop up on a stand on your desk. The obvious application is full screen video conferencing via Skype or any one of the other applications available. Likewise, with potentially such a large bright viewfinder, taking quick snaps is another obvious application. So the iPad desperately needs two inbuilt cameras - one rear facing and one forward facing. Or one that rotates 180 degrees.

No Flash. Due to Apple's on-going argument with Adobe, the 'full featured' Safari browser in the iPad, like the iPhone, will not display flash content on web sites. Whatever your opinion on the use of Flash, there is no getting away from the fact that it is everywhere. And thus while Apple remain intransigent, you certainly do not get the full web experience on an iPad.

Not a laptop replacement. The iPad is neither a laptop nor mobile phone replacement. It is a device in its own class. Although one could travel with just an iPad and a few additional "Apps" it would not be a nice experience. Not least because of the touch-screen keyboard and lack of full office type applications. In addition, getting content on to the iPad is complicated, and, in fact, impossible for some content, without a separate workstation or laptop running iTunes, to pair it with.

What's right with the iPad

It is wonderful to play with. It is a gorgeous gadget with a highly polished and well thought out interface. Email, music, video and photos all work as expected and the web browser is fast and easy to use, other than the Flash issue mentioned above.

Battery life is great. Before the 11 hour flight back from Vegas I converted a number of DivX movies and TV shows I had on my laptop to a format compatible with the iPad (It must be said that this is not something a less technical user would be able to do) and loaded them to the iPad using iTunes. I figured, during the journey, I would start watching on the iPad until it ran out of juice and then continue on the laptop. I reduced the screen brightness and turned off both Bluetooth and WiFi and, to my surprise, the iPad ran video content for over six hours and still had charge to spare.

Video is superb. Watching a movie on the iPad is great. Especially sitting in a cramped space like an airline seat. Unlike a laptop there is no keyboard to get in the way and changing the angle of the screen position causes no issues. The quality of the display and the smoothness of the video is very good indeed.

Conclusion

If you can afford an additional bit of kit on a whim, love gadgets and are not looking to replace a current device, get an iPad, you will love it!
If cash flow is tight and you need to justify a purchase, then the iPad is an unnecessary expense.


Jason Ozin is a well-known IT professional, technical architect and joint owner of Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk. Jason consults leading UK and international enterprises on real world technical and IT issues. Jason specialises in business infrastructure and IT security matters.

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As we roll out more and more virtualized environments, including our own (all of the in-house servers at Technica are virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V), we come across tweaks that make an engineer's job easier.

We started to virtualize some of the servers in one of our hosting centres and found that BlueOnyx, a CentOS Linux hosting platform that we use for hosting some clients' sites, gained hours per day, due to the way that the guest OS responds to the virtualized clock.

The official Microsoft solution is to add

clock=pit

to the kernel lines in the grub start-up file called menu.lst
As you might have guessed, this made no difference at all to the time drift.

We found eventually that the proper solution is as follows:

Add to the end of each kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst
(remember to including the kernel line you will find in the comments at the top, so that new kernels inherit the argument)
this string:

processor.max_cstate=1 clock=pmtmr divider=10

You may also want to update the Linux OS's clock with a trusted time source weekly.
We do this by editing root's crontab:

crontab -e (allows you to edit crontab in vi)

# update clock every Sun at 13:00
0 13 * * 0 /usr/sbin/ntpdate -s -b -u pool.ntp.org
# sync hardware clock 5 mins later
5 13 * * 0 /sbin/hwclock –-systohc

We hope this little snippet from our in-house knowledge-base helps a few of you who find yourself stuck in the same position.

If you have need for Virtualization consultancy or advice, please feel free to get in touch.

Jason Ozin is a well-known IT professional, technical architect and joint owner of Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk. Jason consults leading UK and international enterprises on real world technical and IT issues. Jason specialises in business infrastructure and IT security matters.

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We are pleased to report that we have moved our servers out of Global Switch in London Docklands and in to a state-of-the-art new facility in Hemel Hempstead.

We also continue to host servers in data centres in Telford, Manchester and Cambridge so that we can benefit from geographical and data redundancy.

Docklands was proving to be very difficult to arrange access and, like most of London was seriously short of Power. We also had concerns about the older cooling systems in Docklands as well as the risk of flooding.

With the move to Hemel we have no shortage of power and wonderfully easy and yet secure access, 24 hours a day 365 days per week. We also have the ability to expand easily. This means that we can continue to offer remote server hosting facilities to clients, but now lead time to implementation can be as short as six hours if needed.

Our Rack:



Our Initial Servers:





Jason Ozin is a well-known IT professional, technical architect and joint owner of Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk. Jason consults leading UK and international enterprises on real world technical and IT issues. Jason specialises in business infrastructure and IT security matters.

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We were looking for an easy way to produce quotes from our web site.
Ideally the quote would be a PDF document automatically emailed to the applicant and tailored according to certain criteria input from a simple form.

We were pleased to discover how easy it proved to be to create PDF documents.

Here is some sample code. The comments should be self explanatory.

In this case PHP is running with Apache on a Windows server.


<?php

# file path to pdf document
# return the actual path to the script and append to it the
# subfolder where the quotes are to be stored
$mypath = getcwd();
$mypath = str_replace("\\","/",$mypath);
$mypath = $mypath."/quotes/";
#So $mypath will be something like "D:/WEBS/mysite/pdf/quotes/";

# create unique filename based on date and time
$myfile = $mypath."quote-".strftime("%y%m%d-%H%M%S").".pdf";

# create handle for new PDF document
$mypdf = pdf_new();

# open a file for the new document
pdf_open_file($mypdf, $myfile);

# start a new page (A4) - dimensions in points (1/72 of an inch)
pdf_begin_page($mypdf, 595, 842);

# add an image top right. jpg in same folder as script
# coords are bottom left of image and 3rd argument is scaling
# coords are again in 1/72 of an inch
$myimage = pdf_open_image_file($mypdf, "jpeg", "logo.jpg");
pdf_place_image($mypdf, $myimage, 420, 760, 0.5);

# get and use a font object
# to add our address below our logo
$tahoma = pdf_findfont($mypdf, "Tahoma", "host", 1);
pdf_setfont($mypdf, $tahoma, 9);
pdf_show_xy($mypdf, "4 Hamilton Business Park WD6 2FR",430, 750);
pdf_show_xy($mypdf, "T 020 8236 9160 F 020 8236 9161",430, 738);
pdf_show_xy($mypdf, "www.technicasolutions.co.uk",430, 726);

# set font to verdana 10 points now
$verdana = pdf_findfont($mypdf, "Verdana", "host", 1);
pdf_setfont($mypdf, $verdana, 10);

# LETTERHEAD DONE

# print text coords in points (1/72 of an inch) with origin at bottom left
# 20 points between lines is about right
pdf_show_xy($mypdf, "This is a test print.",50, 750);
pdf_show_xy($mypdf, "This is line 2 of the test print", 50,730);

# set a colour for the drawing
# colours are set as 0 to 1 so 0,0,1 is pure blue (0,0,255)
pdf_setcolor($mypdf, "stroke", "rgb", 0, 0, 1);

# draw a blue line around middle of page
pdf_moveto($mypdf, 20, 400);
pdf_lineto($mypdf, 575, 400);
pdf_stroke($mypdf);

# note you can also set fills:
# pdf_setcolor($mypdf, "stroke", "rgb", 0, 0, 1);
# pdf_setcolor($mypdf, "fill", "rgb", 1, 1, 0);
# draw and fill a rectangle
# pdf_rect($mypdf, 50, 500, 200, 300);
# pdf_fill_stroke($mypdf);
# or draw a circle
# pdf_circle($mypdf, 400, 600, 100);
# pdf_fill_stroke($mypdf);

# end page
pdf_end_page($mypdf);

# close and save file
pdf_close($mypdf);

# file is now sitting there saved on your server ready for your script to send it

?>



Jason Ozin is a well-known IT professional, technical architect and joint owner of Technica Solutions - www.technicasolutions.co.uk. Jason consults leading UK and international enterprises on real world technical and IT issues. Jason specialises in business infrastructure and IT security matters.

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