Thursday June 07, 2007

Bob Porras just posted an entry about pNFS, NFS, and QFS on his blog, including a pointer to a nice demo illustrating some of the basic concepts of pNFS. If you care about file system throughput, you should be aware of the ongoing work on pNFS at Sun and elsewhere. Sun's efforts are being run in the open as an OpenSolaris project.

I don't mean to turn this into a product blog, but occasionally I come across an item that is so cool or useful that I can't help myself. A case in point is this universal plug adaptor by APC, which is both extremely useful for international travel and a lot of fun to play with (think transformer toy.) In other words, it has high utility and extremely high geek appeal.

You can click on each of the images below to get a better idea of how the universal plug works. There are two pieces to the unit, each festooned with a variety of swivelling, sliding, and rotating sub-pieces that can be deployed in a variety of ways to achieve a remarkable number of plug configurations. I don't have a list of the countries this plug covers, but I'm guessing it covers most or all plug configurations, worldwide.

I bought mine direct from APC. It's a steal at $18 even if you only use it as a desk toy. :-)