Recently in Chaos Theory Category

This is one of those things that is just too weird to be true, and then you realize that it's not a joke, but then it might actually have some merit and might actually be exactly what's called for.

PaperBack translates a digital file into an array of dots that you can then printout and store securely.  To recover the data, you use a scanner to create a bitmap, and then the application recovers the paper into the digital file.

Crazy, you're thinking, but then you realize:

. paper, on the other hand, to claim it will last for 100 years is not even vaguely impressive. High-quality paper with good ink regularly lasts many hundreds of years even under less than optimal conditions. (via CodingHorror)

To the right is a small sample of the microdot array that is generated by the PaperBack product.  I printed a copy of a 36MB PDF file, and it ended up being about 100 pages of nearly edge-to-edge microdots.  Not terribly efficient, but when you think about it that long after you are dead this could be readable by a computer, it's kind of cool!

I almost forgot the most important part.  You can recycle paper, so when you're done redigitizing your content, you can shred it and recycle without fearing where those nasty petrochemicals will end up in the waste stream.  Cool!

And yes, it even has built in redundancy to protect against those darned coffee mug rings!

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).

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.

I know how they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about a thousand words (well, actually 250) as a picture?

Here's a couple of pictures of previous articles about Link Aggregation and Dell Blade unboxing, as rendered by wordle.net.  Pretty cool, huh? 

wordle.net via LifeHacker.

Ran across this nifty little CAPTCHA project at Carnegie Mellon, which also happens to be a free WebService for CAPTCHA plus it helps them digitize old books!

Makes so much sense.  Read more at reCAPTCHA's site.

I think Dell shipped us the wrong Blade Chassis.  When I look at support.dell.com for the M1000e, I see this picture:

But we got this.  I think we're going to have to return what we got to get the right product.  Boy it's going to be tough returning that 400 pound monstrosity.

UPDATE: There was some confusion about this post.  We got the right equipment, only Dell's picture on their support web site is wrong.  Some people just don't get sarcasm.

Some of you with engineering background may be familiar with the Doppler Effect.  A while ago, I read an article from Information Week about an insightful analog of the D.E. with regards to computing demand today versus Moore's Law, as described by Sun's CTO.

Basically, Red-shift Companies/processes/applications are growing so quickly that Moore's Law can't keep pace.  No matter how much faster, bigger, or better the technology is, they will still need more more more.

Blue-shifters are the opposite; their IT needs are more than adequately accommodated with today's technology.  This is a space I see VMware and service consolidation fitting very nicely; our own foray into VMware started with the idea of consolidating lots of underutilized servers, to higher util% on perhaps bigger hardware.

WRDS and Research Computing, on the other hand, is clearly a space that can always benefit from faster/bigger/better technology.  Amazon, Google, Twitter, YouTube, they all have monumental Blue-shifted requirements.

Remember when Huntsman Hall first opened, along with our new DataCenter?  Remember how quickly it filled up with rack upon rack of server upon server?  Clearly, we Red-shifted in terms of space, cooling, power, etc.

With the VMware and other server consolidation projects, with the advent of Blade technologies and consolidated SAN storage, I think we've crossed over to the Blue.

I'd posit that two crucial pieces of our infrastructure has remained squarely in the Red: storage and square-footage.  I don't know how many times in the last 6 months I've said that our limiting factor is Storage.  And, you know what?  We're expanding into a newer, bigger DataCenter in the next six months!

So, here's the question.  Is Wharton (Computing) Red-shifting or Blue-shifting?  Give that article a read and share your own insights into your own processes in the comments!

When a Technet Magazine article starts out by quoting Karl Marx, it makes me sit up straighter and take a little notice.  When the title of the article includes a word I've never heard of before, and I need a quick iNet-search to define, I'm hooked.

It's a good read, but it's strange how sometimes my daily tech-life experience resonates with some tech rags.  Mr. Mahajan mentions a lot of ideas around the "consumerization of IT", but the one thing that just stood out was the "halo" effect.

I never really understood the phrase beyond the obvious: an event, a product, or a service becomes so culturally important, that whole other industries are affected.  He uses the example of the iPod and posits that, because it's the de-facto portable media player in the market, Apple Inc. has enjoyed a tremendous upswing in its proprietary desktop and laptop computer sales.

That's rings true to me about Apple, but how's this for a personal halo effect?

My partner sends me an e-mail, which is basically an announcement from his non-profit's IT staff explaining that they will be doing system maintenance on their Terminal Servers starting at 10:30am.  He forwards it to me laden with some well-chosen, but fictional expletives (thank you Battlestar Galactica).

I wrote back quickly and told him to be careful, that they might be monitoring his e-mail.  You don't want to piss off the IT department after all.  He writes back immediately and says:

I set higher standards for IT/user convenience since you guys almost always do such maintenance at very low traffic times.

See the halo effect?  He has to, literally, live with Wharton's IT maintenance windows, and he knows that we are a "world-class" IT shop, so he is expecting the same from his!

What crossovers of your work-life are finding their way into your daily personal life?  Maybe the more important question is, what was traditionally in your personal/daily life is now part of your workday?  Drop a comment; I'm all ears!

[Joe's Note: The halo-effect nod in the original article was just that, a nod in the idea's general direction.  It talks about a larger range of supporting ideas for the IT consumerization concept, how the changes that are happening in technology today (and arguably for the foreseeable future), will affect not only the business world, but also our daily, personal lives.  A good quick read.]