that’s whacked

If Asimov produced electronica….

Friday, Oct 12. 2007  –  Category: Music

… it would probably look something like Hexstatic’s “When Robots Go Bad”

I’ve been listening to this all morning and it’s thumpingly cool. Makes me want to bang on things.

what’s going on…

Friday, Oct 12. 2007  –  Category: Musings

…. cue sounds of 4 Non Blondes

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks since I left Sun. I’ve spent 2 weeks at Songbird now, and am starting to feel like less of the retarded-idiot-who-knows-nothing now. It’s been a challenge switching between two completely different jobs at two completely different companies. But damn if the commute to SF isn’t a helluva lot nicer (and a lot more fun…. riding a skateboard is orders of magnitude better than sitting idling spitting out noxious fumes on 880). Seriously, I don’t drive my car on weekdays anymore…. and that is just lovely.

I’ve been using a MacBook the past couple of weeks and I’m starting to adjust, but I still miss my Solaris environment. This is the first time I’ve used a Mac since busting out on Oregon Trail (”Your party has died of starvation”) in the third grade, so it’s been a while.

WE’S HATES THESE @)#(@)(#*%)@# KEYBINDINGS, YES WE’S DO

Seriously… hate ‘em. Just hate ‘em. The lack of virtual desktops and ZFS is a bummer too. Apparently the next release of MacOS fixes those though (though what’s up with ZFS read-only??), so I await that patiently.

Job wise, it’s been different. We’re pushing for a new developer release soon with a whole new accompanying developer portal. We’re really trying to push for developer adoption with the extensions and web page APIs we’ve been working on. I’ve been goofing off learning the webpage APIs (that brings up an interesting discussion I had with my boss: is it “webpage” or “web page”? wikipedia claims both are valid). It’s pretty awesome stuff - the interaction between the media library and the web is really starting to come together. More importantly, it’s not just an iTunes clone - the level of interaction available is a lot more two-way and dynamic than what you can do with iTunes.

Plus: it’s f-ing open. yeah, suck on that - closed proprietary DRM’d up-the-wazoo iTunes.

So that’s what’s new in the world of work.

Wendy and I are in Hawaii this week for her annual OMFS meeting, so I’ve been working in the hotel room trying not to stare out the window at the ocean and surfers. Fun, neh.

We’re going parasailing this afternoon and snorkeling tomorrow - so I’m looking forward to that. More importantly, we’re going to Nobu for dinner tonight: mmmmmm… as Campbell’s would say, that’s “mmm mmm good”

time for a new grommit

Wednesday, Oct 3. 2007  –  Category: Computers

So it looks like grommit is both overloaded (starting to hit some higher load averages) and out of space. Doh.

I started shopping around for machines; I think I’ve found some pretty good 1U quad core Intel boxes with enough storage to keep me happy. I looked pretty longingly at the x4150, but I think I’m going to have to end up going with a whitebox system for a few reasons.

grommit’s biggest limiting factor is its storage. I need gobs of storage…. as much as I can pack into 1U. The best bang for the buck here looks to be a 1U chassis with 4xSATA drives. I can populate initially with 2×750 Seagate ES drives and have the other two bays for future expansion. The x4150 looks nice, especially with the 8 SAS drives, but as benr pointed out recently, the 2.5″ SAS drives are only at 176GB right now. I’d need at least 4 of them to meet grommit’s current requirements which rapidly prices me out of the ~$2k I was hoping to spend on a new grommit machine.

Colfax has a pretty nice 1U Quad-core Intel Xeon box (Supermicro board) with 4xSATA bays (with the 2×750GB Seagate drives) and 4GB of memory for $2100 which looks pretty tempting. I think it’d run Solaris pretty well; wouldn’t have the sexy Sun look - but well, it’s going into a datacentre - so who cares.