In the end, the screencasts didn't seem to fit with the overall message of the Greening: Monitor Sleep in Brainstorm, but I did put in some work into creating them so I figured I'd include them below for your please.
Animated Bubbleplot of Lab Usage by hour over a 1-month period.
Animated Bubbleplot of Lab Usage over a 1-month period.
It includes narration, too!
Ah, the wonder of JMP. Oh yeah, and I used Jing to capture the screen-contents (and my mellifluous voice).
Dell released some details about their new 11th Generation PowerEdge line, and while of course it's more of the usual faster procs, more embedded hypervisors, and higher density and more power-efficiency, the thing that catches my eye is just how awesome they look.especially when you've got them all stacked together.
The new M710 Blades are looking pretty cool, too. I'd love to have 8 of these arranged in an awesome renderfarm, grid, or VMware ESX Cluster. By my count, there are 18 memory sockets, which means at least 72GB of ram for the max (assuming 4GB modules).
Still only two CPU sockets (can I get some 4-way action please?***), but with 6-cores (and likely 8-core procs on the horizon), that's still a good deal of compute-power in a 0.8U package. Here's my favorite picture from Dell's 11G Flickr photoset (because I'm a geek about blades).
And believe me when I say that I wish I could wake up every day and look at a row of DataCenter equipment that looked this HOT!
*** In the immortal words of Vala Malderan, "Not everything I say is innuendo!"
I happened to be browsing www.stardock.com, looking at their latest 4X gaming offerings, and ran across a product that they claim will help me "clean up my desktop clutter".
If you're anything like me, you keep a ton of links, documents, folders, and other stuff all over your windows desktop (not unlike your physical desktop). I have been manually organizing my clutter for a long time. PDFs here, Zip Files there, To-Dos up there in the right-hand corner. My "nightmare" scenario? Having to do a presentation with my laptop on a projector with less than the native 1920x1080 resolution of my screen. All of my desktop icons get re-arranged all over the place!
I installed Stardock's Fences about three days ago, and it really has changed the way I interact with my desktop. For the better! Here's a look at my desktop with Fences, followed by my favorite feature: double-click on any empty space on your desktop and all your icons are automatically hidden.
I wish I had a picture of my desktop *before* installing Fences, but I never want to go back! It's free for personal use (at least for now). Here's a short video giving you a demo of the product.
Any other nifty desktop productivity apps you want to recommend? Shout out in the comments!
A year ago, roughly, we had a major SAN outage; half of all the LUNs on our primary Fiber Channel SAN went belly-up, and services were down for approximately 36 hours. That event started us down a long path to a different storage vendor and technology.
Today, me and some die-hard SAN geeks, met and said goodbye to the disk subsystem we've affectionately known as TUPPERWARE (in all-caps, 'cause that's how we identify systems, ya dig?). And yes, at one point we had a ZIPLOC, a HEFTY, and a RUBBERMAID. And PYREX is still humming along in the new DataCenter.
Yes, we had a TUPPERWARE Party. Check below for the festivities! First up, the storage scene before and after. Our power and cooling requirements just got a heckuva lot lighter in that DataCenter! Woohoo!
UPDATE: I accidentally deleted my blog directory on GUTENBERG and had to re-create this post. Sorry for the redundancy! I'm furiously adding the Backup Client to the server now!
More photos after the break.
Had this strange conversation over IM this morning. It's like Kurt and I were sharing a brain or something!
Oh yeah, and we're *still* running Live Communications Server 2005. Upgrades coming soon!
First off, I thought this day would never happen:
<N/A> | BlackBerry Messaging Agent bes-blackberry Agent 1 (Application Event Log on BES) | 01/20/2009 20:14:17 (*********) -> [AUDIT] jcruz@wharton.upenn.edu - User activated on the BES
That's one of the automated messages we get when a user successfully connects to our BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Yes, true believers, I've switched from a vaunted Windows Mobile phone to a BlackBerry.
Mostly because my AT&T Tilt is dying, and an 8820 became available recently, but also because we need some in-house support expertise on the BlackBerry itself.
Which leads me to the subject of this post.
BlackBerry and their vaunted Enterprise Redirection is not worth the money. Here's my tally (assuming we're buying a phone for a new account)
- BlackBerry Enterprise License: $100
- BlackBerry Enterprise Redirection Plan: $45/month (unlimited), $39.99/month (4MB.yeah.*4*MB)
- BlackBerry Bold: $299
Look at the below for an iPhone:
- Exchange Active Sync License: Free/included
- iPhone Data Plan: $45/month (unlimited for Enterprise)
- iPhone 8GB: $199
And for a new HTC Fuze:
- Exchange Active Sync license: Free/included
- MS DirectPush Data Plan: $29.99/month (unlimited)
- HTC Fuze: $299
Out of the gate, the iPhone costs us less, and even more insidiously, the data plan costs us less per month. So my question to everyone is:
Why are we still buying BlackBerries?
Granted, you know, we're *not*, because we're trying to cut spending, but think about how much money we could be saving if all 200+ BlackBerry users we have had started with iPhones to begin with?
Do I hear a call to switching to the iPhone? Even switching to Windows Mobile phones (the HTC Fuze being the current example) would save us some bucks!
Don't even get me started on the amount of staff time *wasted* because the various carriers out there don't have a clue about how to add BlackBerry Enterprise Redirection to the phone's plan. It took me 55 minutes to do that tonight, and I know exactly what I need and what to ask for!
<sigh>
As you were, true believers. I'm saving up for an iPhone.
UPDATE: So it turns out that the Enterprise plan for the iPhone, the one that lets you connect to Exchange, is actually $45/month, not $30/month. Soooo, looks like this whole post is a wash!!!
UPDATE2: According to peeps in the know (and an actual iPhone user on our Exchange servers) only the $30/month plan is necessary. Take that, BlackBerry! iPhonez still rulexz!
I was tooling around with my Brother's home computer over the holidays, and noticed that there may have been a good bit of malware installed (thank you BearShare!).
I was about to run a scan using Symantec, then my other brother piped up and said:
Why don't you use Windows OneCare? It's online and free!
I was confused, befuddled, and intrigued! There's a free scanning tool from Microsoft? And my little bro' knew about it and I didn't? Something isn't right with the world.
Turns out it's quite useful and pretty effective; check it out:
After years of resisting, saying something about cultural differences or some such nonsense, Mike Adelman has posted his first blog post.
Not too shabby; read more about how we're saving the school some dinero by adjusting the temperature in our DataCenters.
Temperature Control in the Data Centers
Most modern computers with a wired network adapter in them can accept a Wake-on-LAN signal which will power up the computer if it is off, asleep, or hibernated. It's a combination of the NIC's MAC address (which is a low-level hardware address, which is unique across all network adapters out there), and some other voodoo, combined into an Ethernet frame commonly known as a "Magic Packet".
I thought, hey, this would be a great thing to help you shave off even more of the electricity footprint of your always-on computers. I know a lot of us might like to keep our desktops powered on, just in case we need access to them remotely.
So how about this?
- You put your computer to sleep when you leave for the day. Sleep modes routinely use <10W of power relative to the 100+W when it's fully powered on.
- Go to a site like www.remotewakeup.com, enter your IP address and MAC Address, send the Magic Packet to your computer to take it out of sleep mode (or power it on).
- Do the work you needed to do remotely
- Put the computer back to sleep
Say your computer used 100W when fully on and 10W when asleep. If your computer is on 24x7, that's 16.8kWh per week. If your computer is only on during business hours and asleep the rest of the time, that's 5.7kWh per week, a savings of 66%! If you shut your computer off at night, you can bump that savings up to 75%.
Congratulations; you just saved the planet.
Will you try to configure Wake-On-LAN and invoke the Magic Packet? Hit the comments with your experience!
So what do you do when you're Major Nelson, the voice of the Xbox Live community, and you're covering one of the largest media events for the Electronic Entertainment Industry, and you're stuck with a paltry uplink from your hotel to the internet, and you've got tons of video and content that you've got to push through that pipe up to the Xbox Live Mothership?
How do you go from piddling to 5.5/4.8Mb Up/Down in less than 12 hours?
You call this dude, Mark (links below are from the Original MajorNelson blog post).
From the 1 Gbps feed on the rooftop of an apartment building across the freeway we used a custom 2.4 Ghz mesh radio to get from one part of the roof to another. One of these devices also acted as the NAT router/firewall. From the corner of the apartment building roof to you we used Ligowave 5 Ghz point to point radios that are built into the panel antennas. All of the traffic from the Hotel to the 1 Gbps feed was encrypted by using a VPN which the radios do naturally. The apartment roof is part of a 1 Gbps ring around downtown Los Angeles using Freespace optics (ie lasers) which terminates in a building which houses the largest carrier hotel/interconnect point in Southern California. Their normal use is to provide internet and VOIP to tenants in the apartment buildings.
Now that's what I call Guerilla Networking! Why not recruit this guy to configure the networking for "that really big MBA simulational thingie"?
Awesome.
