EEFY!  

So it’s coming, Netflix streaming on the PS3. For those of you who don’t have Netflix, or don’t know what it is:

Netflix was originally a DVD to your door rental service with no late fee’s and no shipping charges (simply your monthly charge and a website to queue things up). Over time they’ve started to move towards being more of a streaming service. After partnering with companies like Microsoft (for the Xbox360, and now the MediaCenter Edition of Windows 7) and TiVo, their streaming service has become hot news!

There were quite a lot of rumours as to why Sony didn’t want Netflix streaming on the PS3 (such as they have their own movie / series store, which is actually pretty awesome quality overall, just expensive). With the big jump that the Xbox360 had (Netflix, Last.FM, etc…) on the media centre role, and the recent price drop of the PS3 making it more accessible, this was only a logical step for the companies gaming console to start to make money (as the Ps2 did).

Interestingly there are two things to take away from this, Netflix is going to roll out streaming directly to the PS3 using BD-Live (Blu-Ray Interactive Internet Enabled Stuff), and then later there’ll be a software update to enable this (and possibly other things??). What’s interesting is that there are a LOT of internet enabled Blu-Ray players on the market that don’t support Netflix right now… also opening the market for other movie streaming services (Amazon, Blockbuster, etc…) which don’t have the same kind of penetration in the home as Netflix does. The real question is, did Sony drive the BD-Live delivery (they own Blu-Ray after all) or did Netflix drive it?

Here’s a few of the sites that have covered it:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/26/netflix-coming-to-playstation-3/
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/26/netflix-for-playstation-3-requires-a-disc-software-solution-com/
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/28/netflix-details-ps3-disc-distribution-for-november-confident/
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/26/netflix-ps3-disc-must-remain-in-system-until-2010-update/
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/26/netflix-is-coming-to-the-ps3/
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/10/netflix-streaming-coming-to-ps3-but-via-blu-ray-disc.ars
http://gigaom.com/2009/10/25/playstation-hooks-up-with-netflix-streams-follow/

P

So for work I’ve been investigating the use of a centralized unified configuration management tool for all *nix (and ESX) hosts throughout geo locations, the idea would be to actually ensure we had a unified configuration. Over time scope creep for things that you don’t actually log into, or as you move through a fast moving enviroment (like ours) things change, and there’s not the time to go back and fix this.

What I’ve been researching is essentially the way to define a role throughout our infrastructure for say RHEL5 Web Server, and then as soon as they deliver the server online, it checks in, and wham it’s got what it needs and then over time as we change things, it’s easily maintained. While investigating here’s an interesting video that’s come up, the people are:

• Igal Koshevoy of AutomateIt
• Brendan Strejcek of Cfengine
• Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs for Puppet
• Narayan Desai of bcfg2
• Adam Jacob from Opscode for Chef

While they don’t argue much, my honest opinions are that right now my favourite is Chef, their latest release removes the nasty openID requirement, which is GREAT. I’m not sure how well any of them scale at this time, but thus far my attempts with puppet have been little more than unfortunate failure, probably on my part, but nothing about it makes me want to rush forward. However while I’ve not given Chef a good and proper go, it’s got the most pleasant community, nicest site, and the fastest responses / releases I’ve seen of the lot!

I’ll update with things about my foray into Chef over the next few days.

Patrick

So, I’m going to be putting up two new blogs to detail my exploits in specific areas. One will be a round my exploits in learning to be a good cook, and the other will be around my exploits in all things virtual. The general format will be similar to Cody’s blog for the Virtualization blog, while the cooking/food related blog will generally simply be an exploit (or ‘meal’) per week, detailing issues I came up against, and how I got around them, as well as a final result (and judging from sometimes guest judges). We’ll see how it turns out

Patrick

Today starts the first day of the rest of my  life it’s my plan to go ahead and start changing some stuff that I’ve been planning on changing for a while. I’ve recently gotten married, and I’m happier than can be, but it’s time for me to fix some other things Fun time ahead…