Author: chuck goolsbee

Car Photo of the Day: That New Car Smell

sniff

Note the temporary tags on the Benz.

This shot was taken on the second day of the 2001 Forza Amelia at the Gainesville Racetrack in Florida. My father had lost his mind (not the first or the last time!) and bought a dream car of his, a 1957 300sl just before the rally and this was the car’s first outing in his ownership. OK, well technically it is my mother’s car… at least that is the story I keep hearing since she’s the big Mercedes fan. That is his story and he’s sticking to it.

The car was purchased out of a large collection and like any car that sits too much, it wasn’t running as good as it should, BUT it is a Mercedes, so it still ran FINE. Funny how those Germans make such bullet-proof cars. 😉

But here we were, taking laps around a racetrack. Wow, what a blast that was. Well, until my dad spun it not far from where this pic was taken a while later. I posted pictures and the story to my website that night and we got a voice message from my mother on my dad’s cell phone:

“YOU ARE DRIVING MY CAR TOO FAST!!”

heh… boys will be boys.

The 300sl has become the focus of my father’s small collection (down to 3 cars now that the Jags are gone) and is now running VERY well. Much better than that first rally in 01. Maybe we should go back to that track and check our lap times?

That is Pascal Gademer’s S3 E-type parked in front of us.

Another Registry!

BeBox!

To add one of my obscure bits of hardware to: The BeBox Registry.

I literally stumbled upon this site this morning, as I was considering putting the old box up on eBay or something. You see I have a rather vast collection of odd computer hardware stashed away in a few places. Mostly Non-Intel CPU workstations and servers. One of these is a BeBox. About 1800 of these were built and I managed to snag one from a friend of mine about 8 years ago (Hi Jeff!)

…

Then I came to my senses… I can’t put this on eBay. What I have is a collection of obscure, high-end systems from the 90s. These are the last gasp of non-Intel driven errata before that branch of computing lost its momentum. I have PPC, Motorola 68K, Sun Sparc, MIPS and Alpha boxes. I imagine if you liken the pre-PC era like the Brass Era of automobiles, these machines are like the explosion of brands pre-WW2. I have the computing equivalent of Auburns, Cords, Dusenbergs, REOs, Pierce-Arrows and the like. Names like Be, NeXT, SGI, Sun, and of course Apple. They are like used cars now, like those REOs in the 40s; old cars from failed, or merged into some larger entity companies, whose usefulness is gone and whose parts are unavailable. They have little value now, but it should grow over time. I even have a few “one of a kind” machines – unshipped prototypes.

So no eBay. Instead I’ll catalog them here over time. (You’ll note I created a new category for this subject .) Should be fun.

For my 500th post, here is 500HP

I don’t usually highlight contemporary automobiles, but I had to post this. The big news arrives at about 4:40 in the video.

500 HP, 737, ft-lbs or torque (1000Nm), and 23 MPG.

Gotta love it.

Now Audi, hurry up and ship the thing so you can get around to building my TDI TT Convertible please!

Yes, this is post #500 since the changeover from the old goolsbee.org site!

C’mon Apple… keep it coming.

A small step for apple...

OK, so maybe somebody at Apple has a clue or knows how to listen. They announced a new rev of the Xserve today. I won’t bother to talk about the stuff everyone focusses on (CPU horsepower and whatnot, I have friends and customers you can turn to in order to get the skinny on what’s happening inside the new box. ) I’ll stick to the subject of all my usual rantings about servers and server design, the case. This is because I don’t manage servers, as in “what goes on inside the server” I manage Datacenters, namely what happens OUTSIDE the server once it is racked and operating.

The momentous cause of my small celebration today? Apple put a USB port on the FRONT of the Xserve. Whoo hoo!

Mind you this is only a very small step away from ‘style” and towards “substance”, and ironically “usability” but it IS progress and I have to give Apple credit for that.

As I have said before, to be truly useful in the environments it was designed for the Xserve should have all “user” ports on the front, namely USB, and Video, and all “system” ports on the back, namely power, network, FibreChannel, etc. If it connects to another system or the datacenter infrastructure, it goes on the back. If it interacts with a user, it goes on the front.

Datacenters are laid out in hot aisles and cold aisles, where the hot back sides of servers are isolated from the cold intake side. This allows for optimum cooling and airflow. In ideal datacenter environments the hot aisles will be contained and the heat given a specific path for removal. If users have to constantly have access to the back side of racks (or more accurately the hot aisles) then they can not be easily contained. Putting user-required ports on the back side of servers is counter-productive.

Of course, that isn’t my biggest complaint about the Xserve’s design. That remains the completely absurd overall length of the box, which still lays out to 30″ (76.2cm) which is so long that it completely obliterates and density advantage a 1U server supposedly buys you.

I know I’ll get video ports on the front panel long before Apple pulls their head out their butts on case length of 1U boxes though.

Thanks guys.