The day job’s products have never been stronger, fit together as well, or had as great a story arc as they do today. We can deliver denser, faster, easier to setup and manage systems quite easily. Our application stacks run atop this system on our ample computing power, and we provide massive network pipes in/out, as data motion is hard. Many more cool things are coming, but for now, we are working very hard on building something awesome.

There was a great post on the marketing of big data by John Foreman on his blog. I found it a very enjoyable read for one … and it showed that hype is a self-similar phenomenon. No matter what topic it is in, some people will try to generate and exploit the generated hype, regardless of the true information content associated with it. I could shake my head, but I’ve seen this, many times over my career.

Just to get this out of the way, apart from this ideologically and politically charged debasement of real science, I am and remain firmly a “believer”* that the earths climate has changed, has been changing, will change, and continue to change with or without our input. Moreover, our climate has gone through some remarkable changes over its existence, all lovingly preserved in one way or another in the fossil record, and through mechanisms that effectively store state of a system.

I don’t get this. Yeah, sure, your contacts are curated, and I don’t accept everyone. I need to see some aspect of a connection and be pretty sure they wont spam me personally or try to spam my contacts. So when I find out that this is what happens, I want to block their access to me. Which usually means un-connecting with them. So why does LinkedIn make this effectively impossible on the phone apps?

Oh my … this is goodness I’ve been missing badly in Perl. Just learned about it this morning. Short version. You want to mix programming languages for implementation of some project. One language makes development of some subset of functions very easy, while another language handles another part very well. You need some sort of layer to handle this usually, or a way to sanely map. FFI is the concept behind this … and while there is no mention of CORBA or XDR/RPC type things, this is the logical follow-on to these (in their time) ground breaking technologies.

[Update] As I had wondered, and other suggested to me, this number (25%) was likely a click bait fabrication. Forbes and others also “fell for it.” I’ll admit I did as well. It was too large to ignore, but it also didn’t make sense. Close down mainframe and storage? Seriously? Lets call this what it is, an internet rumor that was busted. Paraphrasing Mark Twain “An internet rumor can travel around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”.

I’ve been a user of Linux on the desktop, as my primary desktop, for the last 16 years. In that time, I’ve had laptops with Windows flavors (95, XP, 2000, 7), a MacOSX desktop. Before that, my first laptop I had bought (while working on my thesis) was a triple boot job, with DOS, Windows 9x, and OS2. I used the latter for when I was traveling and needed to write; the thesis was written in LaTeX and I could easily move everything back and forth between that and my Indy at home, and my office Indigo.

According to The Register. No real differentiation (AoE isn’t that good, and the Seagate/Hitachi network drives are going to completely obviate the need for such things). We once used and sold Coraid to a customer. The linux client side wasn’t stable. iSCSI was coming up and was actually quite a bit better. We moved over to it. This was during our build vs buy phase. We weren’t sure if we could build a better box.

So I’ve been trying to diagnose a problem with my Android devices running out their batteries very quickly. And at the same time, I’ve been trying to understand why my address bar on Thunderbird has taken a very long time to respond. I had made a connection earlier today when I had noticed the 50k+ contacts in my contact list, of which maybe 2000 were unique. I didn’t quite understand it.