As of today, we have achieved our highest revenue ever in a year as a company. And the year is only 3/4 over. We’re not done. Not by a long shot. If we shut the doors, and went on a nice 3+ month long vacation until the end of the year … we’d have a 20% growth rate over last year for revenue. As it is, the 4th quarter is usually our busiest time.

ikoniLooks like HP is looking at ditching its PCs. First off, they are definitely killing off WebOS and the whole Palm business. Ok … WebOS looked interesting. Now having an Android, and an iPhone (about to be retired, which the Android is replacing), I find it hard to put down the iPhone and get excited about Android. I have a sense of … a less polished integration. Some things don’t work very well in Android.

Imagine you have a product, and you really haven’t measured its performance, but you want to make performance claims. So you take an “easy” way around this. You simply add up all your bandwidth or IOP data. Yeah, thats it, you add it up. No, I’m not kidding. You do this. Is this meaningful in the HPC world? Hell no. Do people do this? Hell yes. Is it wrong? Extremely. Should you call vendors out who do this?

No, really, bugs can be cool … Customer has a user with a proclivity towards writing large files. Sparse large files. Say a couple Petabytes or so. Single file. I kid you not. (filenames and paths changed) [root@jr4-2 ~]# ls -alF /data/brick-sdd2/dht/scratch/xyzpdq total 4652823496 d--------- 2 1232 1000 86 Jun 27 20:31 ./ drwx------ 104 1232 1000 65536 Aug 17 23:53 ../ -rw------- 1 1232 1000 21 Jun 27 09:57 Default.

Православни икониUgh. See here. Got bit by this. BTW: The new internals of Tiburon are getting even more wild. This thing is turning into a very powerful system for booting large numbers of machines with (nearly) identical configs, very quickly (hmmm … can you say … cluster? Cloud? VMs? …. mwhahahaha!). Will be re-adapting our menu system for this, but the Web GUI portion for configuring this is definitely in the near future.

The day job is asked for monitoring and admin GUIs for our products. I’ll be the first to admit I am a CLI person these days (having started out a CLI person, then becoming a GUI person, now back to a CLI person). I understand the desire for this, and some of the rationale behind it. So we’ve been thinking how to provide this as simply and unobtrusively as possible. And leverage/use/reuse our CLI goodness.

[update: reorganized to have link up top, and commentary below this] Have a read of this blog entry. Very interesting. As a small business person, I am acutely aware of all the myriad ways that rules, regulations, taxes and fees can rise unexpectedly upon you. When taxes aren’t sane or predictable, you can suddenly get a bill for a substantial fraction of a well paid employees monthly or yearly salary. We had that experience last year with Michigan’s MBT which replaced the SBT.

Color me unimpressed. You have a “disk” drive, you expect all the trappings of that “disk” drive to work. Like activity lights. So you plug this device into a backplane that lights its activity lights from the disk. And it doesn’t work. Speaking with the backplane folks, they get their signals from the disk. Speaking with the disk folks … Me: The activity light appears to be solid on all the time.

I saw this initially on /., and it linked to PLoS. PLoS is a great system BTW, and I’d love to see Physics, Engineering, CS, and other things join in. arxiv.org serves a similar function (rapid publication) though it isn’t peer reviewed prior to publication, while PLoS is. Basically, this anti-viral appears to show excellent efficacy across multiple virus infections … everything from Dengue Fever to Rhinovirus (common cold). It would be wonderful if this technique would be active against retroviruses (HIV, etc.

… sumthin fierce … This could be (the) fastest 4U box on the market for streaming, which doesn’t use RAM for storage. Run status group 0 (all jobs): READ: io=761904MB, aggrb=7455.4MB/s, minb=7634.3MB/s, maxb=7634.3MB/s, mint=102196msec, maxt=102196msec That streaming is more than 8x RAM size. No PCIe flash cards in the unit. None. Zero. Zilch. yeah BABY!!! Right now, running a random read of that data set. 8k random reads across the entire 700+ GB data.