Kindle 2

At this years MHTA conference I visted the exhibit hall and stopped by the booth of Asset Recovery Corp . They offer either the service or tools to deal with end of life technology reclamaintion and or distruction. I was particulalry impressed with their disk destroyer which was about the size of a trash can and was able to mangle and punch holes striaght through disk drives rendering them unreadable to all but the NSA.

Why am I telling you this? because while at the booth I exchanged business cards with their sales team and they apparently entered me into a drawing for a Kindle 2, and ... I won.

I spent a couple of hours using it yesterday, I downloaded a few books, sent some of my teams documents to it via email and generally tried it out.

First impressions are very favorable, the screen is highly readable, the refresh is slow but who cares its like a book right? The user interface is quirky but it did not take me more than a few tries before I was comfortably navigating it. I am very impressed by the free Whispernet 3Q technology built into it and I intend to find out more about this technology and the economics of how they offer it for free. Whispernet is actually the Sprint EVDO network re branded, ebooks are relatively tiny packets of data compared to voice so I imagine Amazon is dropping very little to Sprint to cover the data transmission. The cheapest ebooks cost about 25 cents, it is hard to imagine Amazon is loosing money on them so that tells me what the data costs must be below... For the first time in an age I read rather than watched a TV show last night, it will be interesting to see if the Kindle causes me to also read more when I travel. I have a trip to Maryland and back twice this weekend to celebrate E's birthday so I will have plenty of opportunities to try it.

Swine Flu

Were you, like me, wondering what Swine flu was? I pulled this from the World Helath Organization web site this morning:

Swine influenza, or “swine flu”, is a highly contagious acute respiratory disease of pigs, caused by one of several swine influenza A viruses. Morbidity tends to be high and mortality low (1-4%). The virus is spread among pigs by aerosols, direct and indirect contact, and asymptomatic carrier pigs. Outbreaks in pigs occur year round, with an increased incidence in the fall and winter in temperate zones. Many countries routinely vaccinate swine populations against swine influenza. Swine influenza viruses are most commonly of the H1N1 subtype, but other subtypes are also circulating in pigs (e.g., H1N2, H3N1, H3N2). Pigs can also be infected with avian influenza viruses and human seasonal influenza viruses as well as swine influenza viruses. The H3N2 swine virus was thought to have been originally introduced into pigs by humans. Sometimes pigs can be infected with more than one virus type at a time, which can allow the genes from these viruses to mix. This can result in an influenza virus containing genes from a number of sources, called a "reassortant" virus. Although swine influenza viruses are normally species specific and only infect pigs, they do sometimes cross the species barrier to cause disease in humans.

I follwed some links and came across a US government site dedicated to Flu Pandemics, and it provided this little javascript widget to direct people to the appropriate info, so doing my bit for pig/man kind here it is:

The latest WHO update states: 27 April 2009 -- The current situation regarding the outbreak of swine influenza A(H1N1) is evolving rapidly. As of 27 April 2009, the United States Government has reported 40 laboratory confirmed human cases of swine influenza A(H1N1), with no deaths. Mexico has reported 26 confirmed human cases of infection with the same virus, including seven deaths. Canada has reported six cases, with no deaths, while Spain has reported one case, with no deaths.

The right room

Based on the pythonesque comment posted last night I thought it important to broaden the glitterati's education of Monty Python.
Monty Python's sketches were distributed in many media, the "Monty Python's Previous Record" which was released on vinyl as an LP was a fine example, my family had a copy and it was one of the first ways I was introduced to their humor. It include a sketch that was titled "The Argument", it includes possibly the best put-down line of all time:

Q: WHAT DO YOU WANT?
M: Well, I was told outside that...
Q: Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!
M: What?
Q: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!!
M: Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I'm not going to just stand...!!
Q: OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse.
M: Oh, I see, well, that explains it.
Q: Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.
M: Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry.
Q: Not at all.
M: Thank You.(Under his breath) Stupid git!!

I don't want to include the full text from the sketch (you can read it here) however I can not help my self from including this section, perhaps my favorite ever:

M: I came here for a good argument.
A: No you didn't; no, you came here for an argument.
M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn't.
M: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
M: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
A: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't!

Strategic Thinking

It doesnt matter how fast you going if your heading in the wrong direction. -Steven Covey

Strategic Thinking and Planning, The process of deciding the optimal alignment between unlimited needs and limited resources to achieve our priorities. - UC Berkeley

“Thinking Backwards” in order to move forward to grow your business is what
outstanding Strategic Thinkers do, time after time, day after day.—Stephen Haines

Painting continues

I spent three hours at the cabin tonight. I completed fitting the faucet. and then put a second coat of paint on the living room walls. By the time I was done in the living room it was too dark to paint the hall way so tomorrow evening I will start there and move back to the living room. Tomorrows plan will be to put a coat of the ceiling, complete the hall way and then if time permits to start the final wall color.
I met the neighbors and three dogs on the beach tonight and we had a rather difficult conversation about keeping them off our area and not using it as a rest room. Rather difficult to deny when there was a steaming pile at my feet... At least they agreed to try their best and to clean up after their dogs if they do fail. Its a start at least. They also suggested worst case fencing down to the waters edge, I would prefer to avoid that as it would look ugly, I would prefer a natural barrier of plants and rocks, they would too.

Ice Dance Show

I thought I would share these couple of pictures from the show K took part in last night, I have a bunch more that I will upload to Flickr. The light level was very low and apart from a few pictures I took of K with a flash the rest I struggled to get crisp pictures, the shot on the left shows a spectacular move going on rapidly rotating and way beyond my basic lens and ccd could capture. That said I liked the effect it produced. K was great she did her routinely perfectly. For me the highlight of the show was probably the very young kids dressed in bumble bee costumes barely able to stand up, they had a group of bee keepers who took care of them, including scooping them up at the end of the show and carrying them off the ice in the dark, they got the biggest round of applause.

Painting

Lots of progress today again, I rubbed down the spackling from yesterday in the bathroom and on the living room walls. The living room I declared ready to paint and so spent a good amount of time masking the entire floor, in the hall and kitchen as well. I then cut in the edges, and then rolled a coat of primer everywhere.
Prior to going to the cabin I visited Home Depot (of course) and purchased copper pipe and fittings to construct the faucet fitting for the tub. The faucet requires a 1/2 inch copper pipe sticking out from the wall by 3 3/4 inches, so I also purchased a soldering kit. I manged to sweat the pipe and threaded fitting together and fitted them. I have yet to cut it to its final length and fit the faucet, that treat can wait for tomorrow. Painting the hallway walls white has transformed how it feels, previously it has felt very dark and pokey back there, now it is a lot more open. I am looking forward to seeing the walls in their final color which is a very light creamy yellow. It should look very summery.

Fitting the tub

Much progress today, the bathtub is in its final place and I framed in the walls, it is amazing how much you can do with an eight foot 2 by 4 and a table saw, I would have been into using three different pieces of wood otherwise. It all fitted great I cut a slot for the tub surround to fit into and then lowered an area as a seat for the drywall. After screwing the framing to the wall I added drywall and then spackled the edges and screw head areas.
I removed two of the broken floor tiles and replaced them while at the same time removing the flexible layer under them that seemed to be allowing the movement that broke them. Hopefully the tiles will last now.
Mike S came over and helped me move the furniture out of the living room into the garage and I completed my day by painting the ceiling in K's bedroom. Now we are all off to see her perform in an Ice Dance Show.
Tomorrow the spackling will continue as will the painting....

Early start

We stopped work on the power mitigation plan at 9pm last night. We have until 8am this morning to be ready for a walk through with the CIO so we all are back working hard again this morning. When I left my house this morning the moon was still shinning bright and the sky was just beginning to color like the rainbow. The last couple of days have been inspirational to see how the entire organization has rallied behind us, supporting our requests for data and helping us mitigate needs across the organization. I look forward to getting the plan complete and then sharing with the organization.. then working on preventing us getting here again by improving the processes and operating mechanism in the strategy group. To be honest this is my favorite aspect of my job, help people learn how to get strategic...
On a different subject I heard on the news that China has surpassed to US to rise to the number one location for new car sales globally, additional the Chinese government is promising massive number of these vehicles will be hybrids and electric cars, I hope they are true to their word. The shanghai car show has been an amazing sight to behold, check out Porsche's launch of their first small 4 door car the Panamera, amazingly launched in China - that's a first for an exotic car manufacturer and really speaking volumes to how the world is changing, in the background of the picture you can see the worlds tallest hotel the Hyatt, I stayed there a number of years ago, amazing place, many westerners still think of China as an impoverished third world place, not so the big cities..

Things of note

You may not have noticed but Intel is going around the US launching their new Xeon 5500 processor code named Nehalem. James Powell CTO of TRI was interviewed recently as a part of launch and appeared live in NYC at their launch event. We are planning on adopting this chip set for inclusion in our virtual server farms to increase the consolidation density for those applications

Other notable news was Oracle's bid for Sun being accepted unanimously by the Sun board.

Read Sun's release here, and Oracle's here. Much gossip in the media about Oracle eventually selling off the struggling Sun Server business...

On the home front, the team worked extremely hard today and pulled together a start of a plan to maintain the power supply for the next 120 days, as well as starting to define the business case for the next build out.

And I have a rougfh deisgn consructed for the new deck at the cabin....

Should I have more than one blog?

I seem to be creating a complete mash-up of personal home life, work life and technology related blog postings. Should I separate them into two?
According to Google Analytics this blog now gets over 50 visits daily, what types of post are they to read? Until you tell me what you enjoy I will just keep on keeping on.....Please let me know your thoughts.

12 days of work left

This weekend J and I spent two full days working together and made some great progress. K’s bedroom now has two coats of primer on the walls, and the floor is scraped clean ready for the laminate. The master bedroom woodwork is painted and the closet (only half the original) is back in place. The kitchen cabinets all have shelves and doors (this was necessary so we could move around the living room again and start preparing it for painting) and the Lazy Susan(s) have been assembled and fitted. In the bath room the bathtub now has a new tap system and has been reconnected to the water supply using push fit “Shark bite” fittings with flexible PEX pipes – why have I never used this before! The bathtub surround is fitted and I can now work to close up the gaps where the original tub was a different length than the replacement. The PEX system was impressively simple to use I fitted 12 connections each without any signs of leaking, including two valves fitted directly onto half inch copper pipe .
The kitchen walls are completely repaired after two more coats of “mud” plus judicious use of wet sanding (thanks Mike for the hint), a wet lightly abrasive sponge was so much better than having the dust caused by my traditional spackle sanding. The kitchen area has two coats of primer on the walls, and an area has a coat of the final color to see if we like it once it dries. The kitchen is looking a lot brighter with the white primer on walls. The walls a washed in the hall and living room ready for priming. Next weekend J will be occupied at K’s Ice Dance show so I will be on my own most of the weekend, I plan on painting ceilings and fixing the walls around the bathtub. If I get that done it will be a success.
We have worked out what we are going to do at the back of the house where there is a weird round brick patio raised up by the master bedroom, its going.... and a small deck will replace it and a lower patio of pressed and stained concrete built at ground level to tie the stairs from the new deck and the stairs from the main deck together. We have found someone who can take away the old "thing" and lay the concrete. We also have found an enthusiast to help us with the planting of all native plants to help us hide some of the neighbors sheds, fences, log piles etc. and make sure the resulting yard looks fabulous and needs no watering and very little maintenance - sounds like heaven.
And in case you are wondering, no kayaking this weekend, I have promised myself another outing next weekend.

Marc met Tom

How cool is that! Read his post here.

Fortune Global #290

Thomson Reuters was ranked #290 in the Fortune Global 2000 list this year, beating everyone one of our major competitors royally. most impressively was TRI's inclussion in the Global High Performers category which highlights “fast growing, nimble and well-managed companies that help set the benchmarks for their respective industries.”
The UK has 102 of the global 2000 and the US 551, not bad for a little island stuck over there...

Not the only one confused

I was not alone in my thoughts around V-Max, I was reading Gestalt IT this evening and came across this quote from Stephen Foskett:

"V-Max is not a virtualization platform! IBM and HDS have had solid success with their SAN volume controller (SVC) and USP-V systems. Both unify disparate storage, even legacy devices, behind a unified, scalable, and high-feature virtual front-end. Many wondered if EMC would head in this direction too, perhaps leading to broader adoption of their Invista technology. Despite the marketing hype, however, V-Max is not a general virtualization platform - it’s just a fully-virtualized storage system like its Symmetrix ancestors back to the stone age! I wonder what this means for Invista’s long-term prospects: It’s not dead, but it’s not integral to this new platform either."

When listening to the V-Max presentation I was scratching my head to understand how Invista still fits within their product line, but then I realized V-Max was not about virtualization of heterogeneous environments, it is about dominating the data centers, its a bit like the Cisco UCS in that respect, its all or nothing..

The other thing I found missing from yesterdays presentations was an explanation for their statements about being VMware focused, Steven was similarly confused:

"V-Max is not especially VMware-focused! Although it’s certainly a solid storage platform for massive VMware ESX shops, I am surprised to see little architectural focus on virtual platforms. Unlike Cisco’s UCS, in which hardware and I/O choices seem dedicated to the task of server virtualization, V-Max isn’t especially integrated. Where is the storage equivalent of vSwitch? It looks like EMC will simply come to market with a solid set of support for VMware and call it a day. EMC can say that V-Max was designed from the ground up to support virtual servers, but it doesn’t show…"

I read EMC's Chuck Hollis ( Global Marketing CTO) blog this morning, he lays out nicely all the various architectures that exist for storage virtualization, but he then makes the massively presumptuous leap that by making it all one big ball of wax life will be good:

"we can consider an entirely new model where storage virtualization is an inherent property of the array architecture, and not just an alternative way to use the box"

"V-Max architecture is a single, giant pool of intelligently tiered storage"

and the final kicker:

"no, you can't plug old legacy storage into the back of the V-Max"

EMC V-Max announcement

I was underwhelmed by what I saw, EMC's hyped up marketing claimed a massive industry leap forward in virtualization, unfortunately for them they are now barely at parity with their major competitors, and two years late to the table.

If you are interested in reading some heavily biased yet rather on point analysis try Claus Mikkelsen's Blog (CTO of HDS Storage)

And if you want to see what I am talking about go to the EMC product launch site here.

What EMC should have been promoting perhaps more is FAST their fully automated in array dynamic tiering, it rocks, and offers huge potential for high performance.

Refactoring the datacenter

We have been engaged in some interesting discussions of late about power consumption growth in our datacenters, this has led us to look for low cost alternative ways to leverage existing space and resource capacity is innovative ways.
Conventional wisdom a few years ago proposed a modular design where equal electrical capacity was designed for M&E (the over head) as for the compute load. Hence a 2.4MW usable datacenter would be designed to supply 2.4MW max to the M&E simultaneously, including in failure situations. Thus generators were provisioned to support double the compute load in a N+1 or N+2 fashion. Turn the clock forward a few years and achieve a PUE ratio less than 2 (PUE is a measure of the total elcrical supply requiored to deliver a unit of 1 to a compute load, lower is better), lets say 1.7, thus for every 1W delivered for compute 0.7W is delivered to support M&E at peak.
Extrapolating this proposes that in a 2.4MW module there is an additional 720kW of untapped capacity in the M&E supply 2.4MW*(1-0.7)=720kW.
A 2.4MW design uses a single power bus for ease of management, this single bus design is the maxed out due to the constraints of off the shelve breakers.
So how about this for an approach: refactor the datacenter into a dual bus environment creating an additional smaller 400kW bus leveraging the redundant backup power created by the M&E excess supply, this would represent a 17% gain in capacity. 400kW at a PUE of 1.7 would need 680kW of total supply well within the available 720kW.

Seems like cheap growth to me….

MHTA

This morning I had the honor to be asked to present at the Minnesota High Technology Association spring conference. I walked the audience through the growth of infrastructure, where the costs come from, and how virtualization is one of the tools that we are using to reduce the impact of growth on our expense base. The audience was great, we ended up over flowing the room, they had to open the double doors at the back and at the peak I counted 20 people standing outside unable to fit in. this was a great warm up for a series of presentations I have been asked to give at VMWorld, Cisco Live and over industry events. Thanks to Chris Mosses for borrowing my camera and snapping this action shot....
Thomson Reuters was one of the conference sponsors and we used the event as a recruitment opportunity for many positions including the storage team I have be helping with. I ran into the Hauschildt's (photograph of them to the left, in front of our stand) who are heavily involved in the organization, fund raising and ensuring that the conference was the great success that it was. I don't know if this year was a record but the crowd exceeded 1000 today in the convention center. Our COO Rick King was doing the afternoon Keynote, I wish I had been able to stay and listen.

Susan Boyle

The show before American Idol - thanks for the link M&D

You Tube

Huffington Post

She is awesome, inspirational.

un oeuf

Last night K & J died eggs then we had an Easter egg hunt and a treasure hunt combined. Caption Jack Sparrow left some buried treasure for the girls - a tent for their dolls so they can go camping this summer. He left clues throughout the house eventually leading to the dungeon (otherwise know as the basement). I was fast asleep this morning when I was roused to come and be the photographer, I was in the middle of dreaming about the cabin so I was unamused especially as there was no coffee (until I made it) maybe on fathers day there will be some waiting... one can but dream.... ;)
For lunch we went to Hastings to visit J's Sister and family, Larry was building a climbing frame for the boys, all three older boys were out but the two young ones were there playing outside in the sun, as well as watching the Sponge Bob movie.
Kyle (the youngest) is now walking, he started about 8 days ago, he has such a look of concentration and he waddles around with his arms out and raised like a victorious champion. We had bbq chicken breasts with baked spuds and veggies.
Afterwards we drove over to the cabin and spent a couple of hours tinkering. J painted the edge of the ceiling in K's bedroom in preparation of me rolling it soon. I re spackled the kitchen walls where the tape had gone wrong, and also spiled the thresholds around the doors and fixed them in place. I also fixed the last of the siding around the new sliding glass doors. It came in on Saturday to Menard's and so I used all seven feet that I needed of the twenty feet length.
The neighbors have put out their dock, they manged to put it so that their boat elevator sticks about 4 feet into out property lines.... go figure, now we can see it directly in the middle of the view from the living room and bedrooms.

First trip

This morning I decided it was time to take the first trip of the year on the lake. I put on my dry suit for its first real outing, it was far less uncomfortable than I expected, I wore thermals underneath. With my neoprene skull cap and gloves I stayed just right in the bright but crisp morning.
I took the explorer out across the lake to the far shore, turned around and then went up the creek to the weir, I then explored a couple of the short tributaries flowing into it. The girls are going to have a blast navigating up their this summer.
There were about ten boats on the lake at peak during the day, several were fishing early in the morning, and I again saw fish jumping for flies.
There was pool water still in the explorer's day hatch and remarkably it was frozen when I launched. It had melted by the time I came ashore. I took the camera with me, the lens cover on the dry bag is getting scratched so I am going to have to attempt to polish it soon. The pictures turned out okay though, at the corners the get blurry and sometimes the camera does not seem to know what to focus on. I completed the floor in the master bedroom today, and then cut the moulding and quadrant to length, mitred the ends of each length, and then painted each with two coats of semi-gloss.
Once dry I fitted them around the room. It did not go as smoothly as planned but with suitable applications of caulk and speckle all was good. I am pleased with how the room looks. I still need to fit thresholds between the living room and the bedroom and across the sliding glass doors. And of course paint the window and door frames - maybe J's arm will let her do that tomorrow.
At about four o'clock I could smell burning and imagined a neighbour was having a bonfire, the next door kids started yelling so I looked out and saw that someone had set fire to the reeds on the bank of the southwest shore. Fire trucks came lots of interest from the Police and the local TV station. The flames quickly died away and peace returned again.
Tomorrow not a lot will get done, family lunch at my sister-in-laws house. I have decided to remove and replace the dry wall tape I had used as it was ballooning. I have some mesh tape designed to stop that so I am hopeful this time it will work better. The kitchen is in need of cheering up, as is the bathroom. I intend to do another coat on the bathroom and kitchen walls to repair all the damage if possible. Then move back to the plumbing to sort out the bath faucets.

Then we are six

This evening I painted the second top coat on the master bedroom walls, the paint has hidden the ghastly blue nicely and I finished the painting off by touching in the ceiling paint where I had encroached upon it with the wall paint and primer. Going there I also delivered our sixth (the banana) boat and rearranged the boats to fit on the lower to shelves. The top rack still awaits at least three more boats ;)
I finished the evenings work by laying the underlay (with vapor barrier) and started to lay the hardwood floor. I completed about a third of the room before returning home for the night.
As I was leaving a saw a large fish jump for a fly, it was about fifty feet away from the beach but I could clearly see in the dusk it was a large fish, a heron was standing with its feet in the lake just in front of the boat house watching too. Unfortunately I startled it and it took off low and fast across the lake towards the marshes.

SUNs Open Cloud Platform

"We think everybody in the world deserves to have their own virtual data center in the cloud"
Their acquisition of Q-Layer provides them a tremendous interface to quickly establish and manage virtual infrastructure. It is interesting that SUN has chosen to describe cloud in this manner, a virtual compute and storage service, with open APIs. Their emphasis on Open APIs is consistent with their wholesale move in the Open Source community, it also helps to address the concern over vendor lock in as well as provide opportunities to provide massively disparate redundancy to manage DR or HA through multiple providers of cloud infrastructure.
I look forward to see how they propose to resolve the IP address mobility challenge as Apps redeploy across geographies.

This video provides a good background on SUNs cloud strategy: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1640183659?bctid=16839814001

Goodnight Sun

I completed the first coat of the final paint in the master bed room this evening, its called Tea and Sweets, made by Ralph Lauren, sort of a light warm coffee/chocolate. It is covering up the hideous blue which managed to bleed through the two coats of primer I had attempted to cover it with. One more coat the weekend and then the floor. Today I tried a couple of really simple yet effective painting tools, until today I have been a simple brush and roller person, today I tried using a special edge painting device with wheels, it worked great, and then a sort of hairy carpet type of brush thingy, it worked great for edging.
Fabulous evening, I sat on the door step of the boat house and watched the sun set. The boat house now has another resident, the red canoe. Only one more to arrive the four seater sit on top, other wise know as the banana boat.

STEM

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, a staggeringly underfunded area of our children's education. At my staff meeting yesterday Kathy mentioned her involvement in the MHTA GetSTEM initiative and asked that we publicize it and get involved.... so go GetSTEM

And then there were 4

c'est fini

The boat shed/house door was installed yesterday by Action Overhead Door, this was not a low cost solution, a galvanized double skin steel door with low profile tracks to fit inside the low roof lines, I could not resist driving there this morning to take a look at the finished product. I also dropped off the six gallons of paint that has been rolling around in the back of my Volvo...

Small world

Tonight I had dinner with a group of representatives from Sun Microsystems. During the course of the evening I learned that one of them (Sean Harris) had spent a great deal of his career working with people that I knew through my Bristol University days, one of my lecturers David May was a friend of his. David was a part of the development team responsible for the now obscure language of Occam which we were “forced” to learn at Bristol University in the 1990's as a part of the Computer Systems Engineering degree program, it is a concurrent programming language designed to execute on the Inmos Transputer architecture.
Not only did he know the people I studied under but far more importantly we had hung out at the same bars! Captain Jaspers, the great subterranean Port bar under Habitat the furniture store, is now apparently a trendy nightspot for the glitterati!
We also discovered he was an avid kayaker...... its a strange small world we live in that would put two British guys together in a restaurant in Minnesota who had both eaten and drank our way around the same holes/bars and pubs in Bristol in the late 1990's, who also both love to paddle.....

Update from Sean: The pub was actually "Colonel Jaspers" - which explains why I could not find any reference to it online. Also the other pub we used to hang out in was the Lord Byron. And the third update was I forgot to mention that the guy who taught me about the TI DSP chips which I eventually used as the heart of my medical device business was and is a friend of Sean's (John Edwards) and he by chance is a canoer.

Wilkens Ice Shelf

This film was taken a year ago showing a massive 300 foot fracure forming in the Wilkens Ice shelf. Apparently this year the melt is even worse, Reuters news are reporting the near total colapse of the 10,000 yearold "bridge".

OSLO (Reuters) - An ice bridge which had apparently held a vast Antarctic ice shelf in place during recorded history shattered on Saturday and could herald a wider collapse linked to global warming, a leading scientist said.
"It's amazing how the ice has ruptured. Two days ago it was intact," David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, told Reuters of a satellite image of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.
The satellite picture, from the European Space Agency (ESA), showed that a 40 km (25 mile) long strip of ice believed to pin the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place had splintered at its narrowest point, about 500 meters wide.

VMWare Guest OS Certification

Last year I pushed hard on Novell and other Operating System vendors to treat VMWare the way they would a chip vendor. Could you imagine a release of SUSE Linux coming out that did not support the latest AMD and Intel chip sets? not likely is it. Well previously there has been a considerable lag between the initial product release and the certification of VMWare as a platform for the Operating Systems. Not so the latest release 11 of SUSE which has already been certified just a few days after release. This represents real progress for us as an organization that would like to consider its virtual platform as the platform of choice for the future. Hats off to both organizations for listening and responding so well. If you are interested in Guest OS certification VMWare maintains a relevant Blog.

Save 4 Billion

I recently sat in on an internal web cast for the senior leaders within our company, I found it inspirational to hear how the executives are responding to the market conditions and the staggeringly good performance of our company(s) and share price compared to the rest of our industries and competitors. This morning I saw that one of the business unit CEO's had posted his quarterly video blog, Mike Boswood runs the Healthcare and Science business, and I applaud his use of technology to stay in touch with his global organization. As a part of his update he highlighted a new few service offering to hospitals, a program called Save 4 Billion which is focused on driving optimizations in our health care industry, check out the web site at save4billion.com

So Watt?

I have to admit I don't see what all the fuss is about. The media was all in a (brief) frenzy about Google finally unveiling some of their data center technology. Which included these servers, with built in 12V battery to reduce the need to have large centralized UPS systems.
Also revealed was the 4 year old fact that Google uses standard containers to modularize their facilities.
Cynicism aside what is impressive is a stated PUE rating of 1.12, which estimates only 12% for mechanical electrical load and the rest for the compute. What this does not show though is the actual efficiency of the servers, for example by putting a battery in the server is this biasing the measure of PUE given that traditionally the UPS would be a part of the mechanical burden? Looking at the server it is consistent with expectations, a simple box designed for a lot of air flow, and of course with direct attached storage.
It is very noteworthy that Google has distributed so much disk across all their servers, clearly challenging the notion of centralized managed storage. It is also worthy of note but not surprising that the server is maxed out on memory, typical of a search engine server that needs to hold massive indexes possibly...
I quote from CNET; "Jimmy Clidaras revealed that the core of the company's data centers are composed of standard 1AAA shipping containers packed with 1,160 servers each, with many containers in each data center.
Modular data centers are not unique to Google; Sun Microsystems and Rackable Systems both sell them. But Google started using them in 2005. "
Okay I take it back I am impressed they have achieved a power density of 780W per square foot, where as we are struggling to show we can use 180W per square foot.

A blustery day

I completed two coats of primer on the master bedroom walls before I ran out of paint, it certainly has cheered up the room, making it considerably brighter.

After running out of paint I tried out the new scraper, cleaning off all the glue and giving the floor a final sweep in anticipation of a new hardwood floor going down next weekend. I figure I can paint the walls this week during the evenings, and then get to the floor with any luck on Sunday.

I took off all the tape I had been using to hold the trim in place while the glue set, you can see from the picture on the right how I still need to trim the top of the window on the left and complete the siding. The glue has held and the place looks a lot smarter without the trim hanging off!
I put the doors on all the kitchen wall cabinets to cheer the place up a bit, my arms ached by the end of screwing in each hinge and then adjusting each one so they all closed flush. I am sure they will need to be readjusted once they have settled.
We now need to choose the 20+ knobs or handles to go on the cabinets, and as soon as the walls are painted I can fix the base cabinets in their final resting places and get the counter tops measured and made. That reminds me we still have not picked out the sink....
I moved outside once the snow had melted and finished the lake side roof edge of the boat house (compare the picture to this post if you want to see the difference), only the south end remains now. It was very windy the gusts kept blowing the metal out of my hands, which were getting very cold by the 30mph gusts. I think it looks great now. This week the door should get fitted and all the boats can be moved in. I found that the paddles fit nicely about the roof rafters, unfortunately this cant be their home as the girls will not be able to reach them, so I will need to develop an alternative rack once I see how all the boats fit.
I raked some of the beach to clean it up and explore what the sand quality was like. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that someone had cleared up most of the mess left by the neighbours dog, real progress. It was too cold to finish the job though, but that will be on my evening job list to tidy up the beach, and then research what I can do about bringing in fresh sand.
On the drive home I stopped off at a small bridge and photographed what I think is the head of the creek that I hope to explore with the girls in the canoe. Last year I made it quite a way up the creek, I eventually ran out of water, however there was a fork to the left which may be the way through to the main flow. This is not technically the head but there is a tunnel/bridge under the road and 20 feet later there is a weir, the pool above the weir is where the chemicals are being added to counteract the chemical imbalance in the lake caused by the fertilizers and septic drainage from older homes. I found a web site a few months ago which explains what is going on.

Apparently Ferric Chloride is pumped in to the lake to adjust the chemical properties. It also appears that over the past few year aggressive attempts have been made to reduce the weed growth along the edges of the lake, it seems both harvesting by cutting it out, as well as herbicides have been used with varying degrees of success.

April showers

The forecast was right, it snowed while we slept and we woke up to frosted trees, J's arm is more painful this morning than before. I need to finish my coffee and decide what to do, clearly nothing outside...

Sofits and more

I aimed to get to the cabin early, I managed 8:00am, my joints were aching and I was just plain tired. I started work on the fascia boards and sofits, Mike turned up not long after and we quickly cranked through the remaining work on the boat house. It was amazing how wiggly the walls were (remember we just wrapped the old structure) the aluminum sheet metal was not happy being asked to bend the ways we needed it to so we ended up persuading it with copious screws (stainless of course). Once finished we realized that there were still the front and back edges of the roof line to finish, but we were out of material so they will have to wait.

We moved onto the main house, I had a 20 foot length of trim to fit around the new sliding glass door. You would think that 20 feet would be enough, I did, but I forget to add the mitre lengths for each corner so we were only able to do two of the three sides.... more delays (the trim was special ordered from Menard's so I have yet again had to order more). We were however able to complete the siding on either side of the window all that remains is the top trim and three 4 foot length's of siding to be cut and fitted. I resealed all the siding trim around the other windows, some of which had fallen down and was looking very shabby, I used a combination sealer adhesive, hopefully that will work better than the previous persons attempts.

Mike bought over his aircraft tin snips, I don't know how I have survived this long without any, I acquired some last night, along with a paint scraper to clean the old carpet glue from the floors.

J bought lunch over for us all, and we munched sandwiches amongst the dust. Mike took off to look at a trailer he has been lusting after, and J started painting the master bedroom ceiling. I picked up all the tools and mess that had accumulated around the house and then fixed the last two kitchen cabinets, the sink one required a lot of trimming to fit around the pipes, and I fixed up the shelves that sit at the end of the upper cupboards.

I moved into the bathroom and started looking at the tub again, unfortunately I discovered that the three piece surround that covers all the walls is going to prevent the use of the existing taps and faucet, so I now have to investigate what it is going to take to remove and replace all that jazz..... J stopped work about 4:00pm complaining of acute pains in her elbow, we had some cookies and then I finished painting the ceiling. After cleaning up we went home and by bed time she could barely move her arm, clearly some tendon or muscle damage, not good news, I guess I am now the painter too...

Siding done....

I left work early, the afternoon was warm and sunny and my meetings ended quickly. I aimed to complete the siding, but got a lot further.....
I was kept company this afternoon my a highly inquisitive black bird that sat perched in the rushes at the waters edge. I completed the siding single handed, which was tough given the 12 foot length of each section. Fortunately 18 pieces was all it took to finish the side. The nails continued to bounce between vertical studs, but eventually I got them all in. After I finished the siding I decided to keep going, and took a quick trip to (of course) Home Depot where I picked up vinyl boards and metal sofits to complete the edge of the roof.
I got back to the cabin around 7:15 and had 45 minutes of light before it got too dark and chilly to continue, I finished one side, including the strip that slides under the shingles to prevent the water running in the edge and icing up. It looks good, I just have the sofits to do on the one side then I can complete the far side and then only three things remain, the door, the electrics, and potentially water for a hose and maybe an outside shower.
This evening I saw the first boats on the lake, a few intrepid fisherman I guess, I had my first experience of what it is like for people to be using the boat ramp, which is located about 150 feet to the west of our property.
Our neighbors dog has continued to use our beach as a bathroom, I guess soon I am going to have the difficult conversation I had been hoping to avoid...

45 cold minutes

I went over to the cabin this evening, via Home depot of course. I replaced the fashion pieces surrounding the door opening with wider six inch pieces to ensure the door can shut against a clean edge. Additionally I fitted a vinyl board across the front of the shed at floor level to finish the look more than anything else. Yesterday I found another door manufacturer locally who has agreed to fabricate a sectional steel (galvanized of course) roll up door. They came and measured today and have agreed to fit next week. Mike "the network" has agreed to come and assist me this weekend as I have some two person jobs to complete, including finishing the siding on the boat shed, and completing the work around the new sliding glass doors which are still just Tyvek at the moment.
The lake has fully thawed now, and as I put the final screw into the vinyl the sun set across the lake, the colors looked great. On the beach on the far side I can see great sheets of ice piled up, I guess pushed there by the southerly breeze.
Next week I look froward to moving the remaining four boats over to their new home and if I am lucky taking the first paddle of the season in Spring Lake.
The temperature plummeted this evening once the sun went down, dropping nearly ten degrees from the time I arrived, hopefully the warm weather forecast for Friday and Saturday will come through, but it looks like Sunday will be an indoors day, as snow and rain are forecast (again). If you have been noticing the poor quality of the pictures recently on the blog, I have taken to using the Blackberry Bold to snap a few shots, they are just about okay for the blog, but no good for printing, they are all blurry, I intend to find out if it is possible to focus the lens better, of if this is as good at it gets.