Yes, we were knocked off the air for a bit today. No, it was not from load, hackers, etc. It was from a successful php upgrade. A long overdue one. You may have noticed the fancy coloration. Really, this happened automagically. I didn’t do it … I swear! The issue was an errant plugin, that happened to die in a specific corner case. That got tripped. And stayed tripped. A quick “mv " saved the day.

John West of Inside HPC wrote a great response to my response toDeepak of BBM. My arguments were that to enable cloud computing to work economically, one has to consider all of the costs (infrastructure, pipes, computing, people, …). John’s response was that yes, and sometimes you need an act of congress to get even moderate sized infrastructure. I probably need to clarify my thoughts. I am a firm believer that this sort of computing will likely happen.

We are hearing about SGI wins on HPCwire and other venues. These should be good, and reflective in the stock price. [ ](http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=SGIC&t=2y&q=l&l=on&z=l&p=s&a=v&p=s) But they aren’t. SGI’s market cap is 90.6M as of this morning, with 1500+ employees. Trailing 12 month revenue is 415M. They have 85M of debt. About 33.2M in cash. Something has got to give here. As they stopped making their own stuff, COGS increased, as their suppliers made more margin off completed product.

Apparently someone out there really doesn’t like how effective the anti-spam effort was. Go figure. Update: Well looks like we weren’t the only one. The SK2 RBL was knocked offline. Fixed the problem on our end, looks like someone tested the scalability of the RBL back end.

Wow… what a difference. I am typing this on my laptop after firing up wireless with our WPA2 key. Through a nice simple panel. Wireless has not worked this easily in Linux since … well … ever. I used to think wireless in windows was easy, though some of the connection managers are annoying. This connected right away, no problems. Showed me which access points were available. Allowed me to set up auto detection profiles.

From /., they linked to this blog post. Interesting take. What I note is that like all infrastructure, IT is viewed as a cost center, and is often relegated to cost minimization practices. Sometimes these are a good thing. Sometimes they are a very bad thing. Real talent costs money. To a very large extent, you get what you pay for. Getting competent generalist people from a low cost body shop is possible, though more than a few of them may be paper MCSEs.

This was linked from Drudge or one of the other sites. Some of the articles writing is a bit on the biased side, and there are some things I don’t quite agree with. However, the thrust of the article (ignoring the title and other elements) is summarized in the last few paragraphs. Yes. Absolutely. You sink, or you swim. In HPC, the markets are growing rapidly. And they are shifting rapidly.

… it means that they have to. That many others have asked. That this is a concern. Specifically I am talking about the MySQL acquisition by Sun. The article talking with the current VP of DB (former CEO of MySQL AB) is attempting to put to rest these fears. Unfortunately, the headline/title is designed to inject conflict. The title of this bit is “Mickos, As New Sun Exec: Linux Will Stay In LAMP” This looks like an attempt by the author or editorial staff to inject controversy.

Yeah. 1 day with a Blackberry 8830. One day. Thats all I needed. I am sold. Best phone/device I have used. The Nokia E61 was close, but it didn’t work in the US on a 3G network. Palm Treo was good, but had too many issues. The windows hand helds are, well, not quite there. Windows mobile 6 is a huge improvement of windows mobile 5. That said, WM6 is IMO significantly behind BlackBerry on usability and performance.

Yes, I got a BlackBerry. I had the Verizon xv6800 phone as a replacement for the abominable Motorola Q, which replaced a Treo 650. The Treo was ok, 2.5 day battery life with reasonable usage. It just rebooted and crashed at random. Went through 4 hand sets. The Q was terrible. Absolutely horrible. The 18 hour battery life was annoying. I thought the xv6800 would be better. Well, I was half right.