Short … From blackberry. A number of people have noted what we have been observing, that life science users don’t want to pay for performance. Business models predicated upon higher price for perceived value of being faster won’t fly well. Similarly there is even more interest in storage.

20-30 mouse clicks, and I went from 2.5 to 2.5.1. There is a bug in the wizard, will file it later on. but … it works. Easily. BTW: if you haven’t got the news, update your Wordpress 2.5 to 2.5.1 … Now. As in immediately. Some sort of bad bug with live exploit apparently in the wild.

I had expected Microsoft to announce another record quarter after Intel announced their results. They two did go hand in hand. Well, it turns out that Microsoft did not do as well as anticipated. Nor did Intel. Not that there is anything wrong with Microsofts' $4.39B earnings on revenue of $14.3B. Nothing at all. Very good revenue. We would like something like this on our day job. Maybe sell 1.4M JackRabbits.

Ted T’so did a good job of analyzing the current poor state of open source solaris as a community. He points to a number of community building and engineering failures (such as building a mercurial repository … really it is easy). He points to the marketing and business case issues. On a humorous note, he points to the response of a Solaris engineer to posts by David Miller on why Linux outperforms Solaris on some microbenchmarks.

[updated] Liveleak staff support proved to be quite helpful. The issue may be less of a platform dependence as I had presumed, and more of a flash and (format/video) coding issue. [update 2] Looks like it may have been a problem in the player for flash8 video. They fixed it, within about 3 hours of my reporting it. That is the sort of service we like to deliver to our customers.

At Storagemojo, Robin Harris has an interesting take on the evolution of storage systems. This is interesting to us, given how much bandwidth we can provide from our JackRabbit storage systems. The issue for us is finding the right protocol to pull 750 MB/s per small unit, and distribute this to consumers of the data.

So I checked logs. Like I always do, to make sure things aren’t broken. Since yesterday, someone from Italy, specifically IP address 84.220.89.155 has been attacking our infrastructure. Their attack was a DoS. Try to bog our servers down way past the point that they could respond. They were not successful. Their ISP has been notified. Hopefully they will take action. I wonder if we need to start considering DRDOS … Distributed Response to DoS.

Been getting quite a few mails of a bounce/spam rejection from external mailers. Turns out someone is using my day job email with random spam mail. Some sort of filter poisoning? Prevent our mails from getting to others? Obviously this must have an economic connection. But this is so specific, the only “logical” connections I can think up require donning a tin foil hat …

is up at Linux Magazine. See here for more details. First: There are formatting errors, and a few spelling errors. This is a problem, I will construct an errata and send them a link. Second: I am told it is also in print form. And it is “severely edited for space at the expense of correctness” (hows that for a euphemism) up relative to the online form. I haven’t seen the print version yet, will go buy the mag tomorrow.

A server reliability report is out, comparing OSes and machines. Had a few surprises in it. They did note that Redhat and others had good uptime. [spam@scalableinformatics.com:~] 1 >uptime 11:43:37 up 462 days, 21:23, 11 users, load average: 0.25, 0.20, 0.31 [spam@scalableinformatics.com:~] 2 >cat /etc/redhat-release CentOS release 4.3 (Final) that email is a real email address, and yes, if a spammer sends to it, our spam filtering will get better …