Bilateral Mastectomy with a sentinel node biopsy. The latter appears to be clean. I can exhale now. Well, mostly. The more detailed pathology data should be ready next week. The rebuilding part is in process. Another few hours. Readying some good jokes to keep the Mrs. happy. Let her know not to worry. U of M hospital guest internet is … annoying. Looks like they let 3 TCP ports out to the world (22, 80, 443).

A new code golfing site. Gaaaak! If I have time to work on such diversions, I’ll post mine under the ID numbercruncher. [update] Played with the starburst code. Have something that works (though they failed to specify their input method, or their output requirement, e.g. newlines, etc.) This is at 135 characters: <code> $l=@a=split//,shift;$i=-1;while($i++< $l){map$x[$_]=" ",0..$l;$i==int$l/2?@x=@a:map$x[$_]=$a[$i],$i,$l/2,$l-$i-1;print join"",@x,"\n";} </code> </code> which for the input “asdfd” gives a a a sss asdfd fff d d d among other things.

On James' blog Heh. I think we’ve had and seen others have this conversation before. RAID is not a backup. Backup is very important. Ok, I did burst out laughing. The low level scan of 1PB of data to find data on the “no_backup” folder … Yeah. Customer has a file system. We’ve asked them “is your data important” and they’ve answered “no”. And we try to really get whether or not its important out of them, as they didn’t spend money on a backup, and there is the potential for a single failure to take down their data.

In a number of our tools, I’ve written rudimentary command parser hacks using getopt and some creative ARGV processing. And this almost always led to something more complex and harder to develop/maintain. For something else we are looking at, I’ve been exploring “compilers”. Basically, define a grammar to do something, then do it. Keep the grammar consistent, simple, and easy to manage. Turns out that this maps far better into our target code than I would have thought.

Latest updates from all distro vendors. Java plugins no longer work on any browsers. Updated from Oracle, or the OpenJDK stack, or … Doesn’t matter. Can’t get it to work anywhere. This is a positive development … right? We can call this “experiment” over? Maybe all the nice folks who’ve been coding their IPMI/iLOM tools for years as Java clients will now … please … switch to HTML5 so we can drop this anachronism from our machines for once and for all?

Business models and business model changes. Not ours, but a general observation I’ve made. This is oddly important for me (outside of the business) as I’ve been writing some stuff I’ve been thinking of submitting for “publication”, and what “publication” means is rapidly changing. FWIW: this is science fiction stuff. I’m an avid reader of these things (much to my wife’s dismay, given the number of books I buy), and I am enjoying writing this stuff as well.

This is nice. Our JackRabbit JR4 high performance tightly coupled storage and computing unit, 54TB usable (72TB raw). Simple 64GB uncached streaming read/write. Run status group 0 (all jobs): READ: io=65412MB, aggrb=2515.3MB/s, minb=2575.7MB/s, maxb=2575.7MB/s, mint=26006msec, maxt=26006msec Run status group 0 (all jobs): WRITE: io=65412MB, aggrb=2619.3MB/s, minb=2682.7MB/s, maxb=2682.7MB/s, mint=24974msec, maxt=24974msec Yeah, thats about 10-15% better performance (newer driver, updated/tuned kernel, …) Nice! FWIW: some of our competitors have trouble sustaining this performance out of their storage clusters with double to quadruple the number of drives, RAIDs, etc.

Yeah, its taken a while. I started out many moons ago with tools like rcs/sccs, moved to the great new CVS when it came out. Then when subversion (SVN) came out later on, I happily set up a private instance, and tried learning it. Wasn’t too painful. But SVN doesn’t do collaborative development very well. Actually, “not very well” is being kind to SVN. SVK was a perl wrapper around SVN that added some of what we needed.

икони цениAs the year winds to a close … only 16 days left, we’re still quite busy. I am taking this as a net positive. I’ve heard lots of M&A; whispers over the last few months, some interesting things going on that I can’t talk about (not involving us). We’ve got lots of potential activity for Q1 lined up, and this is … good. :) More soon. (Won’t have monster 7 part posts next week, but some I’ve been thinking about for a long time and have been wanting to write about)

… thanks for being a partner of ours. Unfortunately, the 10x baseline requirement amount of gear that you purchased through other channels doesn’t matter to us, you must purchase the baseline amount by years end (today is 15-December) through one of these very specific (and problematic) channels to remain being a partner. Oh, and there are a few other things you have to do by years end, that we’ve notified you of only 2 days ago.