3G for 10Mb: We have come a long way!

I sure am glad it's changed.  Thanks go out to Jeremy Dobson at GovConnection for sending me this ad.

CCM Launches New Worship Player

We just launched our new Worship Player. This is a FMS backed Flash player that includes lyrics so the congregation can learn new songs. This player was built for me a consultant I found on Guru.com. Thanks so much Andrew Pankov for building this for our church. We are launching this player today with three songs, and will be continually expanding this as we move forward.

http://resources.calvaryccm.com/files/WorshipPlayer/index.html

Check out the Worship Player and let me know what you think!

The Worship Player is based on XML files that our Worship Team puts together. It is a pretty basic format that time stamps a line of lyrics. The player reads the XML file and displays the proper lyric at the specified time.

Lookout SAN - 2TB Hard Drive

Western Digital announced today a 2TB Hard Drive.  Read More over at ZDNet http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39603775,00.htm

Or on engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/27/western-digitals-2tb-caviar-green-hard-drive-launches-gets-pre/

Testing HaiVision System Right Now

We are preparing to open our 3rd campus and are evaluating some new technology to use.  Our first multi-site we used Streambox to accomplish the live video feed.  This time and 2 years later there are other options.  One of those options is HaiVision. 

They have graciously loaned a pair of thier 1060 6 slot chassis with 2 SDI blades each.

Here is the 1060 Box in my House.  We have been using my house as the test campus.  It has been equipped with the same network connection as the multi-site will have, and it is a good test of being outside our firewall.

For the test we have 2 different video signals being transmitted in sync over 3mbit each... So about 6.4Mbit of bandwidth and we are getting pretty close to broadcast quality video with two feeds.  Here you can see the test setup in my living room.  The two feeds are split on the screen.  Audio is pretty good too!

Next test:  Watch these video signals on some Huge Screens at the church.   The network is working, so let's blow up the image and check the quality. 

Ahh more testing to do!

ESX 3.5 Thin Provisioned VMDK

I have been working with ESX Server for a long time.  My current server has been upgraded several times and apparently at some point in history, my vmfs was provisioned or converted in "Thick" mode.  This means that all my VMDK's consume all the space they "think" they have.  Anyway I was reading about how you can actually "thin" provision the VM's so you can oversubsribe the data volume.  This is exactly what I want to do.

After some googling around, and at least 3 bad commands, I stumbled across the right command.

vmkfstools - this handly command line tool allows from some really fun stuff on the server.  Turns out is supported exactly what I needed to do.  The command would migrate or copy the current vmdk into a new one that is thin provisioned.  The exact command is as follows:

vmkfstools -i mydiskfile.vmdk -d thin newdiskfile.vmdk

After the disk copy is complete, you can delete the old "fat" or "thick" disk and then use the VMWare console to delete the old disk and re-attach the new "thin" disk.  Was able to free 50% of the space on ESX Server using this method.  It is a little time consuming, but if you are crunched for space, you can't beat it.

Theoretically, there is a way to convert the VMFS volume so that all new disks created are created in "thin" format.  I have been unable to get that working so far.  Additionally, if I had an awesome SAN that sported thin provisioning I wouldn't even have to care about this, but for now, this is about as thin as I can get!

Fall CITRT

Listening in to the first Round Table talk at Fall CITRT.  Talking a lot right now about Macs and how the Church should and could support them.

Great ideas about centralizing the support of Macs, and bringing them into the fold of the centralized IT Support.

More to come!

My First Adobe Air Application

I just finished my first Adobe Air Application. It is a simple bitrate calculator. It can be downloaded and installed and will allow you to compute the size of a video file given a specific bitrate and duration (minutes, seconds, hours). You can download a copy of my Bitrate Calculator here:

Download CK's Bitrate Calculator

You will also need the Adobe Air Runtime for this to run.

Since I haven' t been able to buy a Digital Signing Certificate yet, this application will come up with a bunch of "issues", but it is a valid working program.