There I was running my windows in a window on my desktop. Running a nice little word processor from a company in Redmond, WA. Working on a document. About 15 minutes in, and I usually save at 30 minute boundaries … because … hey … they haven’t quite figured out that the word processor should do this for you … AUTOMATICALLY … Ok, I am shouting. Calm down. Anyway, for some reason, some little Cupertino company’s code pops up and says “hey, you wanna update me?

So there I was, trying to use a serial port on a node which was connected to a serial port on a switch. Which I needed to properly configure the switch. So I light up minicom and get garbage. Great, a baud rate mismatch, easily fixed. Fix it. Connect again. I get the first 10-12 characters … and then garbage. Hmmm. I’d like to pause our story for a moment, and say I had the key insight at this moment … but that would not be true.

I generally expect baseline distro packages to be “old” by some measure. Even for more forward thinking distros, they generally (mis)equate age with stability. I’ve heard the expression “bug for bug compatible” when dealing with newer code on older systems. Something about the devil you know vs the devil you don’t. Ok. In this case, Cmake. A good development tool, gaining popularity over autotools and other things. Base SIOS image is on Debian 8.

I won’t say where, but it is fascinating watching what is being tried. I won’t divulge details of any sort (asymmetric information works to my advantage here).

This has happened multiple times over the last few months. Just variations on the theme as it were, so I’ll talk about the theme. The day job builds some of the fastest systems for storage and analytics in market. We pride ourselves on being able to make things go very … very fast. If its slow, IMO, its a bug. So we often get people contacting us with their requirements. These requirements are often very hard for our competitors, and fairly simple for us to address.

Article is here at Firstround capital. This goes to a point I’ve made many many times to customers going the cloud route exclusively rather than the internal infrastructure route or hybrid route. Basically it is that the economics simply don’t work. We’ve used a set of models based upon observed customer use cases, and demonstrated this to many folks (customers, VCs, etc.) Many are unimpressed until they actually live the life themselves, have the bills to pay, and then really … really grok what is going on.

Short version. Day job sending some marketing out. URLs are pretty clear cut. Tested well. But some clients seem to have mis-parsed the url. Like with a trailing “)”. For some reason. That I don’t quite grok. I tried a few ways of fixing it. Yes, I know, because I fixed it, I baked it into the spec. /sigh First was a regex rewrite rule. Turns out the rewrite didn’t quite work the way it was intended, and it killed the requests.

Systemd has taken the linux world by storm. Replacing 20-ish year old init style processing for a more legitimate control plane, and replacing it with a centralized resource to handle this control. There are many things to like within it, such as the granularity of control. But there are any number of things that are badly broken by default. Actually some of these things are specifically geared towards desktop users (which isn’t a bad thing if you are a desktop linux user, as I am).

For a partner. They made a request for something we’ve not built in a while … it had been end of lifed. One of our old Pegasus units. A portable deskside supercomputer. In this case, a deskside franken-computer … built out of the spare parts from other units in our lab. It started out as a 24 core monster, but we had a power supply burn out, and take the motherboard with it.

This was the request that showed up on our doorstep. A room. Not a system. But a room. Visions of the Star Trek NG bridge came to mind. Then the old SGI power wall … 7 meters wide by 2 meters high, driven by an awesomely powerful Onyx system (now underpowered compared to a good Nvidia card). Of course, the budget wouldn’t allow any of these, but it was still a cool request.