My article on Cloud Computing is up. Only one equation. I promise!

Every now and then we look to see how people have found our web site. Usually a search engine is involved. So today, I found someone googling “JackRabbit Delta-V” and thought “Hey, people are starting to get to know our product names!” I’d been worried as I had discovered shortly after we got our trademarks on JackRabbit, that Apache has a “JackRabbit” project. No overlap, I am not worried about brand dilution.

Working on a proposal document for a (prospective) customer. In some things Word is a little smarter than OO3. I did most of the spreadsheet work on OO3 and saved the excel document. Started the proposal in OO3 as well. Thought, to myself … “ok, why not boot the laptop into windows and use Word”. After all, it won’t bite me in the rear … hah hah … it would never do that … and like … I dunno … FAIL TO SAVE … and then CRASH after it FAILS TO SAVE … thus taking hours of work down with it.

The day job showed up on the local news, Great Lakes IT report. I loved the title … Huge New Storage Machines From Canton Firm FWIW: WWJ is the local AM radio station (950AM) that my car radio is tuned to about 1/2 the time. :)

well … er … ah … ok. mmmmmm …. coffee …. mmmmmm … well … its Nescafe … not Kona. So maybe not really coffee … Being a former computational physics type, I had to warm my coffee on the processors …

Have a look here for the PDF version, or below for the text version. ** Scalable Informatics Enables Companies To Do More While Spending Less With Low-Cost High Performance Storage Appliances** Canton, MI - December 2, 2008 - Scalable Informatics (www.scalableinformatics.com), provider of high performance computing and storage solutions, announced the introduction of Delta-V, their latest storage appliance providing outstanding performance and reliability at an exceptional price. A Delta-V 3 unit was demonstrated at SC08, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, in downtown Austin in mid-November, 2008 in support of Pervasive Software.

Doug has been trying to convince me that he could do a better job with the CMS tools and some cranking out basic design (I like simple …), than I could at hacking code. Have a look here. The JackRabbit site was also folded in The (now former) website we had up was an MVC based application using Catalyst. I used jQuery for the effects … yadda yadda yadda. This meant I coded it.

A good read over at the Register on the trials and tribulations at Sun. Yeah, I know, shortly after I post this, our sites are gonna get DDoSed. Seems to happen all the time (any post that doesn’t paint Sun as a glowing ball of hot plasma … seems to disagree with some groups out there). The basic premise is that Sun is in the not so enviable position of its valuation being approximately equal to its pile of cash.

Ok, we wouldn’t benchmark these machines in quite the way these folks did, but there are some useful nuggets within. Also, these folks appear to be skirting the “do not talk about Nehalem performance” requirement of getting early access Nehalem. See this link. The interesting benchmarks show up around page 9. Interesting though, regardless. Java people ought to love Shanghai. Not to many others though. And the Nehalem performance “hints” left one’s jaw on the floor.

Paul Graham writes quite a few essays. Some are ok, some are really good. This is one of the latter. With a slight rewording, I can replace placing “checks” on “programmers” to introducing “barriers” to “HPC consumers”. Seriously, his statement on costs is quite consistent with a dictum I often mutter … er … say: Every decision has a cost. A decision to use a certain prescribed subset of vendors guarantees you will not get the benefits of an open collection set of vendors.