A gathering of three beautiful E-types. On the left is Adrian Brennan’s FHC, ahead is Doug & Constance Martin’s OTS. This was taken as we left the Seattle Jaguar Club‘s 2004 Slalom event. So… what’s wrong with this picture.
Another Registry!
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!
Oops!
Laughing at others’ mistakes is classless, yet somehow therapeutic. As an ex-goaltender though some of these are painful to watch.
Car Photo of the Day: Draws a Crowd.
What happens when you park a old Jaguar XK 120 FHC on the main street of Concrete, Washington on a grey October day? You draw a crowd.
C’mon Apple… keep it coming.
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.
Quoted again…
This time in the Detroit News. Read it here. (Scroll to the very end of the article.)
Mind you it is a throwaway quote… I talked to the guy for a long time about Diesel technology, the cars I’ve owned, etc. Of all things he picked that one. Oh well.