Short handed + lots of very near term projects + many things that demand our attention == us pulling out. I wish it was otherwise, but we have limited people bandwidth, and I can’t afford 2 days doing booth duty while we have hard deliverables. /sigh Maybe 2017. We’ll see. And no, even though HPC on Wall Street is the same time, we aren’t going to that either. I like the show, but same issue with timing/people/projects.

Thus ended the plaintive cry of a management consulting hawking their wares, promising us high level meetings with “customers” with “budgets” in our space. This isn’t to say we don’t want more customers, we do. We always need more (and repeat) customers … this is the nature of our business. What we don’t need is pay-for-play. There is no shared risk, no incentive for the management consultant to deliver a set of business, as they are being paid, and that … the pay for play, is their business.

Ok … very long story that boils down to us trying to help a customer out. I am trying to avoid the “lets just add another user to /etc/passwd” or similar such thing. And they aren’t quite ready to hook into AD or similar. So we have this issue. I want to enable their nodes to use ldap. I’ve done this before for other customers with older tools (pam_ldap, etc.). But it was somewhat crazy (as in non-trivial), involving gnashing of teeth, gums, etc.

I’ve implemented a very strict policy for inbound phone calls. If I don’t recognize the number it goes to voicemail. If its important enough to call me, its important enough to leave me a message. If a call comes in with an unknown number, I won’t answer it. It can go through to voicemail. If it comes through with a restricted number, it only goes through to voicemail, though I am starting to think that such calls should be automatically blocked (as in never even given the opportunity to go to voicemail).

To put it bluntly, its escaping not only doesn’t match its docs, but appears to be internally inconsistent. I kept getting errors that google couldn’t really find much on, other than to suggest they were fixed bugs. I might have something to say on that. Looking forward to the next phase of this work, where we skip this db and focus on kdb+.

We have an automated build process for our boot images. It is actually quite good, allowing us to easily integrate many different capabilities with it. These capabilities are usually encapsulated in various software stacks that provide specific functionality. Most of these stacks follow pretty well defined workflows. For a number of reasons, we find building from source generally easier than package installation, as there are often some, well, effectively random (and often poor) choices in build options/file placement in the package builds.

TL;DR version: 10GB/s write, 10GB/s read in a single 2U unit over 100Gb network to a backing file system. This is tremendous. The system and clients are using our default tuning/config. Real hyperconvergence requires hardware that can move bits to/from storage/networking very quickly. This is that. These units are available. Now. In volume. And are very reasonably priced (starting at $1USD/GB). Contact us for more details. This is with a file system …

Saw this in a post on VentureBeat. Intel Capital has been an important player in the space for a while. What happens next to them is worth paying attention to. They’ve been in the thick of many interesting companies, though usually outside of Intel’s core foci. Somewhat beyond the normal corporate strategic VC roles. This could change a number of things for startups … new and existing. VCs have been sitting on the sidelines, or being less active over the recent past, and this is likely not to help the situation.

I am trying to help people conceptualize the experience. Here is a video depicting very fast, very powerful cars and their sound signatures. This is a good start. Take one of those awesome machines, and turn off half the engine. So it is literally running with 1/2 of its power turned off. Remember this. There will be a quiz. As we flippantly noted in the video, this is face-melting performance. Had I any hair left, it would have been blown way back.

I like the installers that attempt (and then fail) to calculate what they need, and generate installation target names programmaticlly. I know … I know… its an attempt to reduce the level of pain for some folks, as the algorithm works for some sets of inputs. But not mine. And mine are valid. What we need is an –I_know_what_the_heck_I_am_asking_for_so_please_just_do_the_install switch. Or, I have their installer (thankfully non-terrible perl code) up in an editor to see if I can find the offensive part, and then I can patch it (and send them the patch).