Lake Superior Ice

I naively had never considered the fact that large amounts of ice form in lake superior during the winter, I came across this satellite image take March 19th 2009 showing clearly the ice along the southern shore of the lake, a few days later these slabs of ice had fragmented and drifted apart, unfortunately the cloud coverage made the imagery less clear. the MODIS web site has a image per day for the entire country in 250M resolution, a tremendous asset.

Landauer's principle

In my continuing quest to maximize the efficiency of our data centers I became embroiled in a discussion with Dan about energy conversion inside servers, it seems quiet illogical to me that all the energy goes up the cool tower and it "cost" no energy to do the actual computation, Dan then sent me a link to the following Wikipedia entry:

"Landauer's principle can be understood to be a simple logical consequence of the second law of thermodynamics—which states that the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease—together with the definition of thermodynamic temperature. For, if the number of possible logical states of a computation were to decrease as the computation proceeded forward (logical irreversibility), this would constitute a forbidden decrease of entropy, unless the number of possible physical states corresponding to each logical state were to simultaneously increase by at least a compensating amount, so that the total number of possible physical states was no smaller than originally (total entropy has not decreased).
Yet an increase in the number of physical states corresponding to each logical state means that for an observer who is keeping track of the logical state of the system but not the physical state (for example an "observer" consisting of the computer itself), the number of possible physical states has increased; in other words, entropy has increased from the point of view of this observer. The maximum entropy of a bounded physical system is finite. (If the holographic principle is correct, then physical systems with finite surface area have a finite maximum entropy; but regardless of the truth of the holographic principle, quantum field theory dictates that the entropy of systems with finite radius and energy is finite.) So, to avoid reaching this maximum over the course of an extended computation, entropy must eventually be expelled to an outside environment at some given temperature T, requiring that energy E = ST must be emitted into that environment if the amount of added entropy is S. For a computational operation in which 1 bit of logical information is lost, the amount of entropy generated is at least k ln 2, and so the energy that must eventually be emitted to the environment is E ≥ kT ln 2.
This expression for the minimum energy dissipation from a logically irreversible binary operation was first suggested by John von Neumann, but it was first rigorously justified (and with important limits to its applicability stated) by Landauer. For this reason, it is sometimes referred to as being simply the Landauer bound or limit."

3/4 done

After spending the morning at the pool I went over to the cabin and spent three hours completing the fiddley siding arround the door and fitting the second vent into the gable.
The shed now just has one side remaining for the siding and then the door I will be ready for the door. I have ordered a custom made sectional roll-up.
Doing the siding on the front was more complex than I had imagined because each of the two sides had to be level with each other so that the first full length of siding meets at the top of each small section accurately, fortunately we had spent time making sure the top of the door was horizontal so I was able to use that as a datum and measure downwards to start the second size the correct distance. It ended up only being a 1/4 inch out by the time both sides were completed, and I hid this in the channel above the door. I finished the inside of the door space with 4 inch wide solid vinyl board which looks excellent, held in place with white painted stainless screws. I still have yet to decide how to finish the front of the floor, maybe more vinyl board....

Great pool session

I took J & K to the pool session today, basically to make sure they could be safe this summer at the cabin. We practiced wet exiting with and without a spray skirt, then reentry using a second boat (pool wall) and then the cowboy reentry. K then decided to try paddling while standing up which she could do very well once she got the hang of it. The girls then practiced the static brace position, they were not able to right the boat from the position but they hung there for many seconds. I practiced rolling their new boat, doing a regular roll (with no spray skirt), an extended paddle roll, a reentry and roll, and then practiced my static brace. The new boat was easy to right, and seemed to flop back upright quickly when provoked to. The girls were not able to fully experience the rudder due to the limited length of clear water in the pool,and I didn't bother trying it. The boat turned very well when put on edge, I was easily able to turn 180 degrees with one extended paddle forward sweep stroke.

While the girls were showering off (K got very cold) I took my Nikon in a dry bag into the pool and took a bunch of pictures, I was pleasantly surprised how well they turned out. You can see the whole set here at this link. I spent some time photographing Jeff underwater, as well as attempting to capture all the action, with people teaching, practicing rolling, and practicing multiple boat rescues.

I am not sure if Jeff is smiling, or manically making a weird grimace, either way he looks like he is having fun.

Siding the shed

Today we got up early and headed over to the cabin for our last day before my folks return to the UK for the summer. We started on the inside to keep the noise down and not wake the neighborhood. We connected up the new bath tub, which of course then leaked from the old drain P-Trap where an ancient rubber ring had given up the ghost, I will have to fix that tomorrow with yet another trip to Homedepot. Yesterday when we made our daily visit to Homedepot a group of the store workers were gathered together and then finally they came over and started talking to us, they had realized they had been seeing us for the past 20 days and wondered what we were doing, I think they though we were kidding them when we told them everything we had done.
Last night we went to Menard's to pick up some siding to smarten on the boat shed, unfortunately a diode failed on the starter motor on BART (Big Ass Red Truck) so Dad froze while removing it lying on the black top in the parking lot in sub-freezing temperatures. He was triumphant and we finally were able to pick up the siding and made it home just before 10pm.
We spent this morning hanging a floor in the shed, 15/16 inch pressure treated plywood, supported by many many 2 by 4 frames, it looks great. We also put in a series of cross beams to support the boats and loaded a couple into it to see what it looks like. The afternoon was spent learning how to fit siding, we completed one of the long sides and also the back of the shed which was complex due to the roofs joining and having to mount a vent as well.
While we were working away in the morning the ice floating on the lake kept making the most amazing creaking groaning and cracking noises, a cross between a whale and a science fiction movie. We finished the day by putting the truck away for the summer, its done its job for now, having moved all the materials we needed to get the cabin to its current state.
Time to sleep now....

Brrrr....

This morning we spent three hours blowing 1000 cubic feet of insulation into the attic, looking like alien invaders with goggles face masks and boiler suits we must have looked quite a sight when we finally emerged triumphant, the photograph looks blurry, that though is just the dust floating in the air my dad "drove" the hose and I loaded up the blower with the 52 bails of recycled paper, this eventually turned into 15 inches of insulation, I hope this should keep the heating bill nice and low. When then fitted two new windows into the crawl space replacing the wooden rotting frames with modern upvc double glazed units.
The afternoon was spent firstly roughing in the new door, we then facxed the front with treated plywood, then wrapped the boat house in Tyvek, and finally nailing roofing felt tiles onto the new roof. All the while snow kept falling, the air temp was 24F with a biting 10-20mph wind from the North West.... by the end my fingers were so cold I could not hold the nails while wearing gloves, so I just took the gloves off so I could see what was going on, by the time I went inside and the end of the day my fingers were blue and numb, but the job was done. We have special ordered a new roll up sectional door to be built. This evening we picked up all the moulding and quadrant to complete the bedrooms once the floors are down, as well as plywood to complete the wall in the breezeway.

How much fluff can a red truck truck?

Today we went to Homedepot, it must be our 50th trip of the month, my Dad is on first name terms with most of the employees) and we picked up cellulose insulation to blow into the cabin loft. We needed 52 bails, we did not however think through what that meant, there we were buying wood tools, renting a blower and then.... the forklift delivered the insulation. it was stacked about 9 feet high on a pallet, we had them lift it up into the back of the truck, first problem the pallet was wider than the bed (side truck boxes got in the way) then we decided to try tipping the pallet over, bad idea, bails falling everywhere, the plstic wrap gave way and we ended up pilling bails up in the back and then wrapping them again.
We left all our other shopping outside the store and drove the bails back to the cabin, quickly unloaded and then returned and picked up the rest, naturally the heavens opened up and soaked everything, good thing we dont need to use any of it until Thursday.
We are planning on insulating the loft, plumbing in the bath, wrapping the boat house in tar paper and then installing a raised floor. we shall see if the rain gods are kind or not.

Huge progress

Lots of progress today at the cabin. Mike 'the network' Strukel came over and mixed up a bucket of porridge looking mud and then sprayed using his hopper and gun across the ceiling where the wall used to be, it has dried now and look excelent. REady to be painted when we get to that stage. IT took him all of about 10 minutes, and has done a remarkably good job of blending in with the previous ceiling coating. We then set to work on the water heater and Mike bought over his pneumatic impact wrench and successfully removed the 3 foot long sacrificial anode, we cleaned it up and replaced it using PTFE tape to allow for easier extraction next time.
The boat shed then became the critical path and with the application of 15 8x4 sheets of treated plywood we enclosed the previously unstable rickety structure and it becamce a magnificant structure, the future home of all our Kayaks and Canoes. We have the front to complete and a door to purchase and fit. We are currently debating the floor, we probably are going to fit a treated wood raised floor. Back home now via a new route which takes us straight by the casino, very easy and quick, fewer traffic lights to negotiate.

Exhausting day

We spent this afternoon filling a 40 cubic yard dumpster with all the acculumated debris from the cabin work. My dad and I managed to complete this feat in two hours and had the dumpster removed again before everyone was back from work to notice it had happened. The garage breathed a sigh of relief as it became usable again. If you have never seen a 40 cubic yard dumpster, it is 7 feet tall, 7 feet wide and 22 feet long, and yes we filled it.... I now ache in places I didnt know existed previously.

Cisco – the day after

This morning we are at Cisco, yesterday they announced their Unified Computing vision, clearly this created a lot of excitement within their organization.
We talked at length with John McCool who is responsible for their Data Center 3.0 vision. The main proposition seems to be bout virtualization at the data center scale – rather than at a cluster or farm scale that we do. This introduces interesting challenges to do with risk and failure domains, the upside of simplified management through the creation of a “whole” is clear but what about the impact of failure.
We recently experienced an outage caused by a power supply failure in an ESX host, it took around 10 minutes to recover (automatically) from that, what would happen in we lost a whole farm? What type of failure could cause that? It brings in an interesting question to mind about physical architecture – should you ever build a farm in a single blade chassis, or should farms always span physical environments?
Ed Bugnion the CTO of the unit responsible for the UC strategy led a fascinating discussion focused around the power savings from converging the server connectivity to 10Ge, dropping the HBAs potentially saving 20W per server… They threw out some interesting statistics about the network taking around 20% of the power in the data center, converging on Ethernet potentially can halve that consumption.
David Bernstein raised the interesting challenge about how to provide IP address mobility in the virtual world, especially in “the cloud” if you enable applications to migrate “inter cloud” how do you maintain their identity? They are working on standards to address this.

VMWare Briefing

After the introductions I gave a brief overview of our Virtualization projects, both storage and server. Then the VMware CTO Steve Herrod gave us a deep dive into their current offerings as well as a bunch of road map items which unfortunately under NDA so I cant share them. He raised an interesting idea which was to allow multiple VMs deal with concurrency in applications, take single threaded apps, run many instances of it on the same device and hence reap the benefits of multithreading performance without coding for it, food for thought...
Steve also mentioned several times the Cisco announcement today of their Unified Computing System, which is their solution that brings together Dynamic Management of Compute, Network, Storage and Virtualization. We had received a couple of briefings over the past 12 months about this initiative, I look forward to the maturation of this offering so we can examine where it fits in our environment.
VMware talked at length about their ability to massively out perform native apps running on 16 core systems, again this is building upon the applications inability to multi-thread, they will be publishing data soon to make this real...
Distributed Power Management is interesting, the ability to power down servers in a farm at time of low utilization, automatically VMotioning VMs off onto fewer systems freeing up ones and then powering them down. Massive potential opportunity to save power....more food for thought.
Interesting the top three reasons for virtualization are 1. Speed to provision, 2. H/W independence, 3. Reliability (using their HA, and VMotion).
I was delighted to hear about vLockstep which will be available in ESX 4.0, this is basically the VMware response to clustering. Current limitations are single CPU VMs only 8-10% cpu overhead, and some bandwidth will be gobbled up.
VMware AppSpeed is a new feature within vCenter it allows multi tier application discovery, it baselines the performance, can then alert when performance varies, and finally they are looking to provide automatic remidiation.
VSafe provides an interesting approach to deploying technology at the hypervisor level to provide security based features such as virus scanning and firewalls, thus decreasing the chance for failure to deploy by removing the need for them to be in the individual VMs.
The briefing wrapped up with the CEO Paul Maritz, he was insightful as ever (third time I have spoken with him now).

Silicon Valley Bus Ride

I am traveling around Silicon Valley in an executive bus, visiting technology firms with a collection of TRI executives. Straight after lunch we met with Scalent, they offer a hardware abstraction layer designed to offer the same flexibility of dynamic provisioning of workload as we are enjoying with VMWare ESX server. It is interesting that they have focused on abstracting first the HW device drivers, then SAN HBA World Wide Name Spoofing and then finally Network abstraction.
I can see the applicability in environments with little hardware variability, I struggle with the concept of hardware abstraction when changing processors and chip sets.
The WWN spoofing is a great concept, several other companies offer the same concept, using the host to manage the redirection of SAN traffic, unfortunately it does not deal with the migration of SAN data so it only partially resolves the SAN virtualization challenge. Maybe when combine with Array based virtualization this could provide for the full non disruptive mobility we are seeking.
The use cases for the technology seem to have been low risk (non production) or grid based environments, also it may provide some DR inovations that are similar to SRM (Site Recovery Manager) from VMWare, which allows the scripted fail over of one site to another.
Next bus stop VMWare, will be interesting to here what is new.....

Great Pool session

Today I went to the Inland Seakayakers Pool Session and practiced rolling my NDK Explorer, which went well, at least on my on side. I messed up once but recovered on the second attempt. I was also lucky enough to be able to try out a new kayak that was recently built by a club member as a replica of an early Greenland skin on frame boat, but constructed out of plywood. It was extremly easy to roll (even without a spray skirt!).

I then continued my practicing of the sculling brace, Tony assisted me, I found it tough to relax lying on my back facing the roof and not sculling, I will need further work on that. My father came and took the low res video and the two stills below. The camera did the best it could in the humid conditions. We left early as I am still nursing a cold and have a long flight to CA tomorrow for work.

Progress on the floor

As you can now see the floor where the walls once were has now been replaced, we managed to find two boxes of tongue and grove original flooring from the same manufacture and remarkably exactly the right style and color.
We also replaced a substantial hole in the bedroom floor and removed a very strange air vent from under where the bed would be!
The bathroom now has a ceiling fan and all the dri-wall damage is fixed....... progress continues.

Futher progress

Today I grouted the new tiles on the bathroom floor, light gray grout between mock marble ceramic tiles. I completed the framing around the new window, we also fixed huge numbers of leaks in the HVAC, I also fixed the ceiling where the wall had been. Great progress today. More on Thursday.... We have to replace the water heater chimney and make some more progress on the bathroom.

I'd rather be...

... punching through a wave, take a close look at this picture and you can sea snow capped mountains, something tells me this is not the time to roll the boat.... Thank you Scott Dickerson for sharing

Tofu and Grapefruit

I subscribe to a newsletter from Paul Glenn, author of "Leading geeks" and an excelent motivational speaker. This week he published an article which describes two distinct human characts which I found rather interesting to read, maybe it is over simplifying the situation but I agree with him that I have worked in teams with both, and now manage teams with both, here is an extract:

"Tofu, while a very healthful food, doesn't bring a lot of flavor to a dish. It adds a bit of texture, but it readily accepts the flavors of everything around it. If you douse it with soy sauce, it will taste like lumpy soy sauce. If you sauté it with garlic, it will taste like lumpy oil and garlic. But if you eat it by itself, it does have a subtle flavor. In other words, tofu is happy to be colonized by whatever surrounds it. It gets along with everything.

So it is with the tofu people. They are good and helpful people, hardworking and diligent, and they don't try to impose their work habits or personalities on those around them. In fact, they're happy to accept how others want to work, and they adapt to whomever they are working with. These are the people we sometimes forget are there, but they are always plugging along productively. They don't cause problems, and they don't demand attention.

Grapefruit, on the other hand, while also a very healthful food, demands attention. It has a very strong flavor, and you either love it or hate it. It never melds with the flavors of anything around it. In fact, quite the opposite. It insists that everything around it start tasting like grapefruit. If you've ever made a fruit salad, you've probably noticed that once you add grapefruit, the entire salad starts tasting of grapefruit no matter how little you put in. In other words, grapefruit is an imperialist fruit, insisting that everyone around it bend to its will.

So it is with the grapefruit people. They are good and helpful people, hardworking and diligent, but they demand that everyone around them work in the manner that makes them -- the grapefruit people -- comfortable. They have trouble adapting to other people's styles but work well with those who can adapt to their own."

Progress at the cabin

This weekend I took off early and we took advantage of the warm (44F) Friday afternoon to replace the chimney for the furnace. We introduced an external air intake for the combustion air which was previously absent, we also discovered how badly configured the entire heating system was, leading to all sorts of potential hazards. After much work and spare parts the furnace and forced air system is running great, safely, and efficiently.
We also were triumphant in reconnecting the water supply, we discovered two leaks, one resulting from a mistake I made fitting a drain for the new kitchen sink, and the second from a long nail that was piercing the hot water pipe for many years which I removed when demolishing the bathroom. The water escaping at high pressure from the nail hole was like something from a cartoon, shooting several feet across the room. In other circumstances it would have been funny.
Sunday we turned on the water for the first time and now have a functioning bathroom, albeit covered in dust and not exactly ready for visitors.
We decided to take advantage of the lack of snow on Sunday and replaced the original small kitchen window with a six foot sliding glass door providing a beautiful view of the lake from both the new kitchen area and the dining area. The resulting effect has been to lighten the room and create the feeling of more space and allow us the truly benefit from the view. We wrapped up the afternoon sealing the window so that we can survive the next few days of bad weather without leaks or damage from frost.

Formula One

"Why do we sponsor a Formula One™ team, you ask? With over 600 million unique viewers watching F1™ races around the world in 188 markets, Formula One™ is one of the world’s most popular sports. Thomson Reuter's relationship with the AT&T Williams team affords significant brand exposure and unique experiences for many of valued customers"


And above all else Formula One is very very cool.

Triumph in the pool

After spending two hours practicing I am now proficient at my on side sculling brace, the video below shows the technique. I am not sure when I would use this, however I think it helps train the body to have the muscle memory necessary to before bracing under extreme conditions.
I also had the great pleasure of helping Peggy a recent addition to the Inland Sea Kayakers start to learn to roll, by the time I handed her over to one of the expert instructors she had successfully executed an extended paddle screw roll. Not bad for a rookie like me, and excellent for a Peggy. By the time the pool session was over she was rolling unaided on her on side.

I also spent some time practicing the hanging draw, which is a method of moving sideways while proceeding forwards but keeping the boat heading straight, it is quite an art requiring very precise paddle positioning and body rotation, if the paddle is too far forward the bow turns towards the paddle, too far aft and the boat does very weird things!
(Thanks to Mike Cannon for the photographs)