So I had two events to attend, overlapping of course (of course). Beobash and a dinner with Microsoft. John and I got to Beobash and I spoke with Chris Samuel of VPAC and some associates from Australia. Doug Eadline interviewed me (and I didn’t have the slightest clue as to what I was going to say, so it came out rather funny sounding, sorry Doug). I spoke with lots of good people.

Lots of stuff. Some of it pretty nice. Still lots of “me-too” products. The usual suspects are there. Evergrid is neat. Yeah, there I said it. It is neat. Vipin suggested I look at it and I did. Did I mention it is neat? Lots of RAID cards/storage companies all showing off 5+ GB/s to hundreds of disks. Live on the floor. Running IOmeter (hmmmm). Mellanox showed off some nice new 10GbE cards.

Go to the PSC (Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center) booth. Look at the Wii-steered molecular dynamics. Do some bowling with bucky balls using the Wii. In 1990, I wanted a VR system, and a data glove to position my atoms for my MD simulations. Vi is not a great user interface to configuration. In 2007 the folks at PSC did a bang up job (great job) showing what could be done. This isn’t just a cute demo, it has real potential, for people studying specific reaction pathways, or needing to explore CVD, or protein misfolding (their alanine example shows guided folding), or … Provide enough computing power, and you create an enabling technology.

We had an adventure going from Detroit to Reno. In LA, our outbound flight was canceled. Engine problems from what we understand. So we were booked at a hotel, and got to enjoy a relaxing 4 hour sleep. Thank gosh for Starbucks (Starboooooks). Triple shot mocha … enough calories and caffeine to stave off a crash … for a while, though I am gonna be paying for it later on. But, we are here.

… I know you think that pushing sound out to a browser is a good idea. I know you think the technology is cool. It is annoying. Absolutely, positively, completely annoying. I do not want to be listening to something I want to listen to, only to be interrupted by something intruding, un-invited, onto my audio system. It is worse than popups, whichi I block as they are annoying. I never gave you permission to use my resources in this manner.

Won’t live-blog, but I will try to snap pictures, get some video, and other things. Will report on neat new things. Maybe some neat old things. Hopefully will see many old friends, and make some new ones. Much to do, much to do …

Here are a few screenshots. Too tired to make thumbnails. Login * Projects Add Project Jobs Project Users Wizard Apps The web system is fully db centric now. Finishing up the utilities. Hopefully they will be done before SC07. The Mercurial repository is up if you want to see what we are up to (and look at our latest commits).

There is a name for my pain and it is WWW::Mechanize. This module is a complex little bit which allows Perl code to programmatically load and interact with web sites. Of course it doesn’t have a built in JavaScript engine or anything else like that, but it is supposed to be used for unit testing. That is, provided it works. Which, on many machines and systems I have tried, it simply does not.

SuSE has been resisting me running it diskless. Actively resisting. The end result was that I had to build a custom kernel (we are using/supporting 2.6.22.6 right now), making sure to build nfs, and networking in, and not as modules. What I learned was that even if you think you have built everything, you could leave important little things off. And Murphy’s law dictates that those left off things are important.

Update 24-Dev-2007: One of the site owner listed below contacted me and asked me to remove their personal information which was contained in the site registration. I complied. I have not checked whether or not their system is still an attack host. It is very important that people with good intentions protect their systems before placing them on the net. It is generally very hard to do this for windows, and fairly easy to do this for linux.