The Anti-Blog Blog: Everyday Engineering and Architecture

Good post over on Slashdot related to Blackboard's patent trials and tribulations. Hopefully this is the final word on this.

[Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Blackboard Patent Invalidated By Appellate Court]

I mentioned earlier about two good examples of graphic design. Here's the 2nd set... all I can say is wow!

[From Artists Create Stunning Works Of Art From Mounds Of Data]

Today I came across two superb examples of graphic design... here's the first one:

[From This Is Where Each of Your 1.421 Trillion Dollars Is Going In 2010 - Death and taxes 2010 - Gizmodo]

Seems to me that there's still a lot of pork and slop in the US Federal Budget.

Lots of things bug me these days about it... the fact that Congress exempts themselves from living just like everyone else is perhaps the biggest one.

If the rest of the US is suffering economically, why does Congress continue to get increases in salary? Maybe they should take a nice pay cut like many people have experienced.

If the proposed healthcare plan is such a good one, why is Congress exempt and get to continue their personalized healthcare? Why don't they get the same wages, healthcare, and retirement benefits that are Armed Forces and Civil Service workers get?

Hmmm, sounds elitist to me.

Sad to see Becta back slide... one step forward, two steps back... I had such hope too. Shame.

[Becta snuggles up to MS on UK schools licensing shake-up • Channel Register]

... that some States are expanding investment in Education.

As a Mac user and devotee, this peaked my interest today and added a little bit of warmth to my soul:

[Maine expands MacBook program to high schools by Macworld.com: Yahoo! Tech ]

Too often these days I see internet "journalists" publishing stories without even the simplest fact checking.

Some are simply innocent mistakes while others are intentional slights. Many are simply lack of good journalistic practices.

The sign of good writers and journalists that simply made innocent mistakes is a retraction and follow-up article.

The symptoms of hacks are either more negative articles or ignoring the blatant errors.

A recent article in the Register by Timothy Prickett Morgan titled "Germans fire up 200 teraflop Juropa2 super" is a good example.

Within the first couple of sentences he uses the phrase, "but beleaguered server maker Sun Microsystems wants everyone to know that the box that was turned on last Friday is comprised of its InfiniBand switches and its Xeon blade servers" setting a specific tone for the rest of the article.

Mr Morgan goes on to say "The Sun gear at FZJ is the second big deal that Sun has closed for its "Constellation" HPC clusters, which are comprised of Sun's own InfiniBand switches (nicknamed "Magnum") and its x64-based "Galaxy" blade servers." further in the article.

Here's where things unwind a bit. Mr Morgan then immediately contradicts himself straight-away by writing that "Sun's first big HPC deal for the Constellation machines was the "Tsubame" cluster in Japan, where NEC was the prime contractor." and "Sun's second big Constellation deal was the 433.2 teraflops "Ranger" cluster at the University of Texas (with 62,976 cores using quad-core Opterons)."

If the Tsubame cluster in Japan was first and the Ranger cluster in Texas was second, how could the Juropa2 cluster also be 2nd?!?

That would make it at least 3rd if my math and logic skills are correct.

In reality, Sun has significantly more Constellation sales than the 3 mentioned in the article. Even limiting it to the "large" scale Constellation sales, a quick search of the Internet provides me with at least 5:

• Tsubame in Japan
• Ranger in Texas
• KISTI in Korea
• Juropa2 in Germany
• ACCESS in Australia

According to a Sun press release done on the KISTI super computer, the KISTI cluster is the 4th installation which would put Juropa2 perhaps as the 5th or 6th at a minimum.

So herein lies the rub, was this a simple mistake by Mr. Morgan, an intentional slight or lack of good journalism?

What Mr. Morgan does next will tell. (Hopefully any corrected version will have the same wide re-distribution as the original. )

This blog entry was triggered by Neelakanth's on MySQL InnoDB ZFS Best Practices post.

There's always a running debate about "best practices" and I know several people that say, "there are no *best* practices, only good or better practices".

• Separate the mailstore mailbox partitions (data) from the database files (indices)
• Match ZFS recordsize with page size (8 kb for mbox database, 4 kb for database index files and default of 128k for the actual message store file system)
• Disable File Access Time record
• Stay below 80% space utilization
  

Going beyond those things and considering what Neelakanth wrote, the following things are worth investigating at your own risk*:

• Use a Seperate ZFS Intent Log (slog) - Messaging is definitely write intensive and we've seen some improvements by moving the Intent Log off onto separate drives
• Make sure the ZFS Adaptive replacement cache (ARC) is enabled
• Make sure that the ZFS prefetch is enabled
• Consider using an SSD as L2ARC, SLOG or for the messaging database files / indices
• Determine if your storage is ZFS Write Cache friendly or not -- some storage devices / systems that have NVRAM interpret ZFS's command to flush the write cache in different and un-performance friendly ways. If your storage device has battery backed caches, consider turning off the ZFS cache flush

Interesting article on the internet today...

Sounds like Fort Hays State University is looking at newer, more modern ways to get people quality education for an affordable price. Hmmm, and that's bad? Isn't the job of the university to do exactly that? Deal with scarce resources (eg. time, money, talent) and get the most out of it?

In my dealings with Universities and Colleges I see many things. One of the things I see constantly is this very struggle at many of my customers. What are they really in the business of? "Isn't it obvious, it says 'University' right in their name, Dave?"

Ummm, no not really. Because after seeing how many of them are trying to re-invent the wheel time and time again when it comes to IT related things, it's just boggles the mind. Seems like most institutions have lab equipment purchases down to a science (yes that's a pun). And food services working well.

What seems to be missing in most cases is that extra value add that IT can never get around to because most of their time and money are tied up delivering (or re-inventing) basic commodity services.

Some are at least beginning to ask the right questions:

• Why are we providing email for students when everyone's got one (or more already)?
• Why are we running computer labs when our students have computers already?
• Why are doing X ourselves when most corporations outsource that already?

It's very interesting that Universities and Colleges are looking more like their corporate counterparts in many ways these days. Overall it's a good thing I think.

This is another one of those things you look at and say "Why didn't I invent that?!?"

KeyRingThing

Adium 1.4 beta does Twitter and Facebook! Awesome, awesome.

Always looking for things that let me pare down the number of clients I use and make my life simpler.

I was interested in upgrading my telescope recently but this presents some exciting and intriguing opportunities.

Looks like I might be spending some money renting telescope remotely

Here I thought colleges and universities were all about freedom, creativity and education.

From Slashdot: College Threatens to Sue Students Over Email Addresses

It's always amazing to see things like this. Now I admit I put my foot in my mouth from time-to-time but this takes that to a whole new level.

As Bill and Ted once said, "Be excellent to one another"

hehehe... just had to post this one

Dilbert Make Up a Number

In light of all the news regarding Sun, much of it sour or negative, Joerg Moellenkamp has a good post on the HHOSUG blog about Sun's recent quarter financial performance... folks, it just isn't us, if you're out there saying Sun stinks because of the year-to-year quarter performance, you must think that Intel really stinks at a 26% decline quarter-to-quarter... even the "jewel" of the tech industry Microsoft reported a decrease in revenue and a 32% decline in net income quarter over quarter.

Regarding systems sales companies, Dell (server+network) is down 17% (down 16% as a whole), HP (servers+storage eg. excluding printers and ink cartridge sales) down 18%, Sun down 20%, IBM (systems and technology) down 23.5%...

As the title of this post says, it's relative.

I know the invites have been emailed but I thought I would post an invitation here as well...

More details and the registration form at:

https://www.suneventreg.com//cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=2708

DATE: Tuesday, April 28, 2009

TIME: 9:00 AM Pacific // 12 NOON Eastern

AGENDA (ALL TIMES IN PACIFIC TIME)

9:00 AM To 9:10 AM Welcome, Introductions, & Agenda

9:10 AM To 9:30 AM What's New in Comms R6 Update 2 Jeff Allison, Product Mgr., Messaging Server

9:30 AM To 9:50 AM Mobile Device Update Marc Daniels, Technical Prod Mgr, Comms Suite

9:50 AM To 10:10 AM Comms R6 Best Practices Greg Balmer, Sr. Architect, Deployment Engineering

10:10 AM To 10:30 AM Convergence Update and Best Practices Arindam Chakraborty, Product Mgr., Convergence

10:30 AM To 10:40 AM Roadmap Update Jeff Allison, Product Mgr., Messaging Server

10:40 AM To 10:55 AM User Roundtable

10:55 AM To 11:00 AM Close, Next Steps