There are a set of modules in the Perl universe that I’ve been looking for an excuse to use for a while. They are the MCE set of modules, which purportedly enable easy concurrency and parallelism, exploiting many core CPUs, and a number of techniques. Sure enough, I had a task to handle recently that required this. I looked at many alternatives, and played with a few, including Parallel::Queue. I thought of writing my own with IPC::Run as I was already using it in the project, but I didn’t want to lose focus on the mission, and re-invent a wheel that already existed elsewhere.

Information at this link. It is being called a “strategic transaction”, though it likely came about vis-a-vis Seagate doing some profound and deep thinking over what business it was in. Seagate has been weathering a storm, and has been working on re-orgs to deal with a declining disk market. They acquired ClusterStor as part of a preceding transaction of Xyratex. Xyratex was the basis for the Cray storage platforms (post Enginio).

I’ve written about approved vendors and “one throat to choke” concept in the past. The short take from my vantage point as a small, not well known, but highly differentiated builder of high performance storage and computing systems … was that this brand specific focus was going to remove real differentiated solutions from market, while simultaneously lowering the quality and support of products in market. The concept of brand and marketing of a brand is about erecting barriers to market entry against the smaller folk whom might have something of interest, and the larger folk who might come in with a different ecosystem.

My new day job has me developing considerably less code than my previous endeavor, so I like to work on problems to keep these particular muscles in steady use. Happily, I get to do more analytics than ever before, so this at least is some compensation for the lower amount of coding. When I work on coding for myself, I’ll play with problems from my research days, or small throw-away ones, like on Hackerrank.

The birthday problem is a fairly simple to state situation. There is at least a 50% probability (e.g. even chance) that at least 2 of 23 randomly chosen people in a room have the same birthday. This comes from some elementary applications of statistics, and is documented on Wikipedia. While we care less about networks celebrating their annual journey around Sol, we care more about potential address collisions for statically assigned IP addresses.

This is an on-going process I won’t comment on, other than to provide a link to the bidding site. There are numerous cool items in there. Lot 2-57207: a 64 bay siFlash/Cadence machine with 64x 400GB SAS SSDs. Fully operational, SSDs very lightly used, extraordinarily fast unit. Lot 2-57215: 2 mac minis (one was my desktop unit) Lot 2-57216: My old Macbook pro, 750 GB SSD, 16 GB ram, NVidia gfx Lot 2-57081: Mac pro tower unit Lot 2-57232: a bunch of awesome monitors Lot 2-57222: Mini 24U rack with PDUs Lot 2-57015: Supermicro Twin 2U system (5 others just like it) Lot 2-57100: a 40 core 256GB testbed machine And many other computer systems, parts, etc.

As I had written previously, my old company, Scalable Informatics, has closed. Read that posting to see why and how, but as with all things … we must move forward. It is cliche' to use the title phrase. But it is also true. We know the door that closed. It’s the door that has opened afterwards that I am focusing upon. I have joined Joyent to work on, as it turns out, many similar things to what I did at Scalable.

This jives very well with what I’ve observed. Decreasing demand for enterprise storage hard disks, or as I call them “Spinning Rust Drives” (or SRD) as compared with SSD (Solid State Drives). The summary is here with a key quote being Again, jives well with what I’ve observed. Mellanox has a good take on its blog, noting that This is a critical point. While SRD are dropping in volume, there is not enough SSD fab capacity to supply the market demand.

Given that the (now former) day job has ended, I am selling some of the old day job’s assets on ebay. We’ve sold some siFlash, Unison, and have current listings for Arista and Mellanox switches. More stuff will be listed in short order, check it out here. Feel free to reach out to me at joe.landman at the google mail thingy if you want to talk about any of these things, or buy before I list them.