Will be there with a new siFlash unit. Uses some new Flash and SSD devices. Should be able to talk about that soon. Whats cool is this is our chassis. Not a COTS chassis from one of the larger vendors. This is a new chassis we worked on designing with the ODM. The unit is a prototype, and sadly the motherboard we will use for this isn’t quite in full production yet, so we are using a stand in.

If I read this correctly, this applies to all gene patents. Which opens up genes to multiple groups trying to target specific diseases. Its good for people as it increases the likelihood that no one company can “landgrab” a set of genes implicated in various diseases and do nothing with them. Its bad for companies business models attacking these diseases, especially smaller biotech/startups. The model wasn’t sound to begin with, you cannot patent nature or natural things.

I have lots of drafts in queue, just not enough time to finish them. I’ll make a concerted effort this weekend. As an update to a previous post, I managed not to collapse during my brown belt test (had some respiratory issue going on … allergies, or a cold, or something). The kata were not “hard”, but they expect different things from you at higher rankings. You can’t go blasting through the kata like a robot (as I probably did with my first one).

ХудожникEvery now and then we get customers asking us to perform only services under contract. They send us what they think their T&C; ought to be. Yeah … I especially like the lines the relieve us of our IP, our rights to collect royalties, our rights to what we develop, … Yeah. Ok, maybe not so much. I have to admit, when I see this, my first reaction is to start laughing.

Basically, I can boot quite a few Linux systems completely stateless. I like this. Makes setting up clusters drop-dead simple. Makes setting up/testing hardware similarly simple. Where I am going with this: I’ve been playing with Solaris 11, and to a lesser extent, the Illumian distros for Solaris. So far, I like what I see in Solaris 11, and I like the Debian-ed version of Solaris in the Illumian distro. For the former, I want to see if we can formally offer this on our gear.

I hate when I try to write generalized code up front. That is, I try to write a code base that is sufficiently generic that it works for all possible use cases. Some argue for this sort of development. I don’t like it. But I do fall into this every now and then. Tiburon suffered from some of this. I want one system to “bind them all, and in the PXE process, boot them.

So if you are like us, you are a belt and suspenders person … you like multiple administrative modalities. You like them because you know they are needed. Because breakage usually happens at the least opportune time, and you need a way in to express your control. So we have KVM. And we have IPMI. And we have a serial over lan (replacing the old serial consoles). If you are more that 5 miles away from the gear, you will appreciate having these multiple modes.

This is OT from HPC and from Storage. Sort of. The death this past week of Andrew Breitbart, whether you liked him, hated him, or hadn’t a clue who knew of him, again highlighted for me, the need to take time off, for me, every now and then. Just a few hours per week of time to get out and exercise. To burn off frustration from high on the pony scale discussions.

Ran into this earlier in the week and thought it strange. Centos 6.2, brand new installation on a box that has had Centos 5.7 installed. Set of our newer RAID cards, 10GbE, and IB cards. This is our in-lab JackRabbit JR5 machine (happily still the fastest single spinning rust machine you can get in market). As soon as I start the PXE load … CRASH!!!! Kernel doesn’t panic, it just gets stuck.

that to process all the requests, and service all the potential business we have, I’m gonna have to hire a Joe-clone (since cloning is illegal in Michigan for some reason). Possibly 2. Lets see if we get these contracts first, but this is a good problem to have. But back to the Joe-clone … would we be allowed to not pay a clone of me, or provide health coverage, as they were just another instance of the “Joe” object?