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reading an interesting book, and an interesting site
“The education of an accidental CEO”. Very interesting read. It turns out a number of the folks whom have written about their experience running companies, all talk about the “gut feeling” about things. People, partners, etc.
I had some “gut feelings” about some stuff I won’t get into, and I found myself not following them. This was a mistake. Past times when I did “follow my gut” I wasn’t lead astray.
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teaching an old distribution new booting tricks
So I am trying to get SuSE to PXE boot into a diskless session. In order to do this, first I have to get it to install into a directory. Next we have to do something about the kernel.
The first part is sort of, kind of, solved. Took a while, but it is working. Second is more complex. SuSE doesn’t make it easy to remaster the kernel. Nor does RH (or Fedora, …).
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When bad people/bots attack
In some of our logs, we come across some of the more interesting things people try to jam into our forms. The examples below have some, well, interesting aspects to them.
<a href= http://6.exefiles.cn/adduserexe-resource-kit.html &rt;adduser.exe resource kit</a&rt; [url=http://6.exefiles.cn/adduserexe-resource-kit.html]adduser.exe resource kit[/url] <a href= http://7.microsoft-security.cn/ntfrsexe.html &rt;ntfrs.exe</a&rt; [url=http://7.microsoft-security.cn/ntfrsexe.html]ntfrs.exe[/url] <a href= http://7.exefiles.cn/jammerexe.html &rt;jammer.exe</a&rt; [url=http://7.exefiles.cn/jammerexe.html]jammer.exe[/url] <a href= http://7.exefiles.cn/piv-pivbrowardschoolscom-pivexe.html &rt;piv piv.browardschools.com piv.exe</a&rt; [url=http://7.exefiles.cn/piv-pivbrowardschoolscom-pivexe.html]piv piv.browardschools.com piv.exe[/url] <a href= http://10.antyspyware.cn/spdbvexe.html &rt;spdbv.exe</a&rt; [url=http://10.antyspyware.cn/spdbvexe.html]spdbv.exe[/url] <a href= http://5.exefiles.cn/regenv32-has-caused-an-error-in-regenv32exe.html &rt;regenv32 has caused an error in regenv32.
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Duct tape, baling wire, and sealing wax
None of the above were used in DragonFly, though sometimes, sometimes, it feels like it. DragonFly launched its first job this morning at 2am. 11 hours before the demo. Nah, thats not cutting it close … not at all. The job is the same ptb.exe job from before. On 4 cpus, with 100000 iterations (the other one finishes too quickly).
Had to hardwire some bits to deal with bugs I need to fix.
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The power of good tools
Ok, sort of another minor DragonFly milestone … except that no code in DragonFly has changed. Previously, we pulled our job description from a file, and used it to create the job for us. Now, without changing a single line in the code, we have done this:
dragonfly@dragonfly:~/utilities$ ./build_job.pl --job=http://dragonfly:3001/jobs/xml/14 --program=ptb.xml --debug D[27064]: os = 'linux' D[27064]: directory = '/home/dragonfly/utilities' D[27064]: opening temp file in directory .... D[27064]: parsing XML from job='http://dragonfly:3001/jobs/xml/14' D[27064]: parsing XML from program='ptb.
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And yet another learning moment
No, won’t get into detail. Sometimes in the course of business you realize that the people speaking to you have expectations that are entirely out of alignment with yours. After spending months in a careful and cautious dance to make sure that they are in fact in alignment. I learned a great deal today. Saddened by the course of events, but I learned.
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DragonFly milestone
A long time ago, on a computer not so far away, we built a program called “SICE”. Yeah, I am not known for naming things well. SICE’s entire purpose in life was to be a user centric interface to HPC systems. When users wanted to run jobs, they filled out a web form that described the job, and off it went. This was not similar to other things out there in the market.
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Interesting comment from one of the largest vendors of computers
The arguments for vendor support of Linux are simple economics. In HPC this usually means that a vendor has a reasonable expectation of return on their investment if they support Linux. This is a valid view if you have something of value that people want at a price they are willing to pay. The arguments for computer vendor support of Linux are again, simple economics. If Linux is driving business, you expect a vendor to pay attention.
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Vote for your favorite HPC technologies at HPCwire
[to vote, go to this link ] I received this email from HPCwire:
You know, we happen to have this terrific high performance storage system, that generates incredible performance at a highly aggressive price … If you think it is worth spending some electrons/clock cycles on, please go to their link and vote. If you like what you may have read about JackRabbit here or elsewhere, please, by all means, let them know.
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[head shakes in disbelief]
I saw this posted as an update from Groklaw.
I think I said something to the effect of [
](http://scalability.org/?p=417) just a few days ago. Turns out that it doesn’t appear to be just in private. The Microsoft folks could do great things in the HPC space if there was a little less NIH and a bit more “hey lets work with the community”. Unfortunately, with a CEO making statements like this, it is a little hard to convince the community that you want to, I dunno, work with them as opposed to suing them.