ECCB06 is starting tomorrow in Eilat. The story of this travel is full of sound and fury. And time. Lots and lots of time. Waiting. And things breaking. Or not working. And did I mention time? I am presenting accelerated informatics demos for AMD at 10:30am monday morning. Should be lots of fun. Ok, being a good little presenter type, I gathered up everything I needed and got it into my carry-on bags for the trip.

No, not a Not-Safe-For-Work variety. I just visited a web site which is used in potential customers purchase processes. They have links on this site. Someone decided that it would be a “Good-Thing”(TM) if they set up these links to launch not one, but 2, yessirree, 2 modal dialog boxes on mouseover events. Yup. Roll over the link, and these two pop right up … … and … you … cannot … use … the … browser … until … you … click … them … which would be just moderately annoying (and a funny but bad design) if it wasn’t for the fact that your mouse is in the middle of a forest of links there.

I used to watch a rather funny show on ABC TV named “Dinosaurs” about your typical Jurassic period nuclear family, with large dinosaurs having similar problems to modern day humans. It was quite funny. The father dinosaur worked for “We Say So” corporation. Should give you an idea of what they did, and how they did it. You didn’t have a choice. You had to do what they wanted. The following is a bit of venting.

Some customers have binding agreements with specific (pick your favorite TLA) vendors and insist upon buying from only them. They somehow believe they are getting a discount. It is worked into the price. They somehow believe that this saves them money. It doesn’t. It reduces competition for their business. It increases their costs when the technological fit just isn’t there, yet they try to force the issue. So how does decreasing competition and efficiency increase savings?

We have been under a DDoS with spambots sending us a few messages per day. Something north of 100k messages per day. I am not concerned about our infrastructure, it was holding up fine. I was more concerned about components that we didn’t have control over, or had no part in designing or building. This begged the question: is there nothing that one can do to defend against a DDoS (email spambot) attack?

The bot attack continues for a third day. We are rejecting, on average, one email per second. At this rate, we will have rejected 31.5 million emails over the course of 1 year. I wonder if the attackers think that DDoS is a good thing, or something valid to do to other net-denizens. Sad.

We must be famous. We are being distributed bot-attacked by someone/thing. They are trying to knock over our mail system. Some of the bad IPs are here: 67.90.119.98, 195.50.165.22, and 12.154.55.44. Lots of others. For laughs: whois 12.154.55.44 [Querying whois.arin.net] [whois.arin.net] AT&T; WorldNet Services ATT (NET-12-0-0-0-1) 12.0.0.0 - 12.255.255.255 ATT MIS IP-WCS OPERATIONS CTRS ATT-MIS-44-55 (NET-12-154-55-0-1) 12.154.55.0 - 12.154.55.255 # ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-01-11 19:10 # Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

Usually start with a few small nucleation sites. Create enough of a net savings in energy, and entropy, and whammo, you are starting the rapid, highly nonlinear, often discontinuous traversal of the phase coordinate. Of such things, revolutions are born within computing. It is happening with APUs, it has happened with dual core, and it appears more likely to be happening outside of HPC. Update: R.L. Polk is not that far from us.

Sharad Sharma at Orbit Change responded to my criticism with a note of his own. He clarified his context. Quoting him, his original thesis is Fair enough, needs drive innovation. The “must have” phenomenon. Build something that remarkably alters the economics to be strongly positive for customers to acquire and use over their existing technologies, or reduce their pain points so that they can save lots of money due to the secondary effects of workload reduction/automation.

Short version: MPI-HMMer has been released. See this link for details, and if you want RPMs, go here.