Category: life

where everything else happens

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.

My Xmas Gift

Along with the analog-to-digital theme of the past few days, I received a USB turntable for Xmas. I’ve brought a box (one of many!) of old LPs to work and I’m running the conversion process in the background while I work. It is such a joy to hear all these old, obscure albums again! So far I’ve focussed primarily, and quite ironically, on my vast collection of early electronica. Very old Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre LPs.

Today I am finally hearing all of The Concerts In China again! It is as amazing as I recall. It is like I’m back in 1982.

In the height of the Napster craze I was able to snag a few tracks, and since then I’ve (re)purchased a few of JMJ’s albums off the iTunes Music Store… but TCIC and Rendez-Vous, two of my favorites have yet to be released there. (Obscure Chuck Fact: I traveled to Houston specifically to experience the “Rendez-Vous” concert… along with 1.5 million other people… to this day my parents thought it was to visit them… if they only knew. 😉 )

I’m listening as I capture, and right now is the sublime “Fishing Junks at Sunset”… I’m in heaven.

Family Treasures

Mary Adams, Oregon 1940

I’m spending a little holiday downtime taking a collection of my father in law’s old 35mm slides and making digital copies of them to distribute to family members. It is mostly pictures of Sue’s family life & adventures in east Africa in the late 60s when her dad was working for the UN’s FAO. Mixed in are plenty of photos of Oregon in the 50s and 60s. This one above caught my eye though as it is clearly different than the rest. It is a Kodachrome slide, but the mount is made of brown kraft paper and is very thin. One side has a red border around it with “KODACHROME” in Futura type.

Handwritten on it is a note, “Orluz, 1940”

From the position of the Three Sisters mountains on the horizon I’d place this photo somewhere west of Terrebonne in Deschutes County, Oregon. Somewhere around here… near Lower Bridge perhaps. But I could be wrong, who knows that could be Mt. Jefferson from the East… it has been a while since I was in central Oregon on a clear day. 😉

It is clearly the oldest photo in the whole bunch, and shocking to see a color image from that time.

Entropy on the path to a Christmas Tree


Above: The boys at Tannenbaum Tree Farm circa 2002. Our home is off beyond the treeline behind them.

We moved out to the boonies 10 years ago not long after our return from the UK. We were pleasantly surprised to find many tree farms around our house. The first few years we just walked to the nearest of them, Tannenbaum Tree Farm to pick and cut our holiday tree. For several years we’d walk a path through a 44 acre wood that existed behind our property and exit right at the tree farm. The family that ran Tannenbaum had created an ideal world for the acquisition of Christmas trees. A log shelter with a warm fire in a cast-iron stove. Hot cider. Candy canes. Some small decorative gifts for sale. Custom-built tree-netting stands between the shelter and the parking area. Just grab your saw and go pick your tree. They had a great assortment of VERY nice trees. Like I said in the beginning we would walk over and cut our tree and carry it home. One year we even did it while it was snowing. It was sort of magical.

It was obvious that they treated their customers like family and many people would drive from as far away as Seattle every year to pick their tree. People there were always smiling and happy, even if it was wet, or cold, or snowing. Magical.


Above: Sue & Nick at Tannenbaum Tree Farm circa 2002

Then the 44 acre wood was clear cut and some developer built a housing development on it. So we would all just pile into the old pickup truck and go drive ‘around the block’ (though that is about a 2 mile drive) to Tannenbaum and select our tree. They would always ask if we needed it netted, and we always answered with “No, we live just over there” (pointing east towards the mountains).

This year we received a post card just before Thanksgiving from the Tannenbaum Tree farm that said they were no longer selling trees, and thanked us for our years of patronage. One of our little family traditions was lost!

This weekend the family decided that we had to get our tree now, so they pulled me away from my computer and we went off in search of a tree. All the Christmas Tree Farms that littered the neighborhood have all vanished! Every last one has been replaced with housing developments. We saw a sign advertising one on the road down to Granite Falls, so Nick & I went there. Boy were we disappointed. Scraggly little trees that only Charlie Brown could love, and all of them outrageously priced. I can’t recall paying more than about $40 for a tree and Tannenbaum, and in fact most years it was less than $30. Not a single tree at this other place was less than $35 and all the reasonably good looking or tall ones were priced between $75 & $150! Not only that but it was all out in a muddy field behind a travel trailer. Not what I would remotely call “magical”.

We gave up on tree farms… ok tree farm.. and drove into town and grabbed a tree at the grocery store. A fine looking and quite tall Douglas Fir. (Logical since one fell over in our yard exactly one year ago!) I paid $20 for it.

On our way home Nick & I drove past Tannenbaum, and their trees are there, but they are closed. Out in front is a Snohomish County Land Use Permit application sign. Obviously the site of another housing development, coming soon.

It is official: The Boonies have devolved into the Suburbs.

Ramps and Staircases. The economic realities of the data center business.

Econ 101

Note: This is something I zipped off just now to “Server Specs: A SearchDataCenter.com blog” after I had a conversation with Matt Stansberry via IM. He was bugging me about not writing anything for a while, and I claimed how busy I was. Then we were just casually conversing about some industry trends when I made my “ramps and staircases” analogy. He said something like: “If you had typed that in WP instead of IM it would be published!”

True enough. So Sunday before we went out to get our holiday tree I cranked this out. After sleeping on it I added a few bits, then had a couple of trusted friends (writers both) rip up my grammar and wording and put it back together looking much more polished (Thanks Bill & John!) So if market analysis is your thing click “more”…

Continue reading “Ramps and Staircases. The economic realities of the data center business.”

I just got pushed…

…over to the Anti-DRM side of the debate.

Chris is compiling a Christmas gift package to send to his Chilean host family. He wanted to include a few DVDs for his host parents. He asked me to help him buy some online. I vaguely recall that DVDs might have some sort of region-based anti-copying bit in them… something that would make a DVD bought in one part of the world un-playable in another part of the world. I look around and sure enough, it is true. Not only is it true, but South America is a completely different region with regards to DVD. Oh well.

Ironically the only way we could realistically send them a DVD is to copy one on my computer, remove the region encoding, and rip it back to a DVD… basically PIRATING IT. Go figure.

Has this anti-pirating technology stopped any video “piracy”?? No. You can go online and find software copies of any movie you would ever want to see, available for download. Even movies that are currently in theaters! But here is a scenario where we’d like to legitimately BUY a DVD, but because the Studios/MPAA/whoever are so damn paranoid of piracy they’ve made it so we can’t… so the only thing we can resort to is piracy! What moron thought this scheme up?

Up until today I had never really had a real stance on the whole DRM debate. Mostly because it had not affected me yet. Yes, I’ve bought many songs from iTunes, but have never had a situation where I could not use it the way I wanted. Gifts are not an issue either because Apple has made it easy to give iTunes data away as a gift. Too bad the bozos who make DVDs haven’t figured out how we want to use them.

Oh well. Our online search came up empty, so we went to a store and scoured the racks for something interesting without the region coding hard wired into the disc. It was damn near impossible to find anything!

The morons in Hollywood really need to reverse their cranial-rectal inversion.