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This blog isn't dead. It's on vacation. I simply don't have an internet connection. So don't touch the unsubscribe button. Main blogging activities will resume on next sunday.

I just came back from checking in my luggage. I´ve got an exit-row seat for the flight to JFK. Not business-class comfort, but much more space for my legs and that´s all i want from my seat

There was one fact about my trip to Andorra that was really depressing: The shoes were cheap, but no shoes in a size above 45. Today i walked to a shoe shop in Hamburg, saw a nice pair of Geox, walked to the shoe sales man, asked for a pair in my size. The answer: "Sorry, we don´t have this shoe in sizes above 45" ... fsck ....

Perhaps you remember the "Last Lecture" of Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist. I wrote about it some time ago. Randy Pausch´s battle came to it´s inevitable end: He died at 47.

Here the video that made him famous to a large audience:

I´ve viewed the Berlin speech of Barrak Obama yesterday evening on CNN (the german networks had terrible translators). I really think, i saw the next president of the United States. From my perspective it was a good speech. Refreshingly different than the other politicans i saw before (the US ones and the german ones as well). I really hope, your get it right this time, dear US voters ... i really had some doubts about the mental status of the US people at the last election.

BTW: I don´t think that this age is a problem. Long and vast Experience is often not much more than an excuse for stubborn narrow-mindness. You have advisors for this task, knowing much more about an issue than you will know ... you just take care, that your advisors haven´t an own policy (but Bush (the younger one) got even relected with such advisors).

Today is the System Administrator Appreciation Day. Apprecciate the sysadmins of the world. Without them, your display would be black, the banking systems with your money would broke down, you couldn´t load porn through the internet, you couldn´t buy shoes or gadgets via Internet and so many other everyday occurrences. So ... appreciate them.

Es gibt mehr als 414 Folgen der Simpsons, doch Pro7 schafft es, immer wieder die selben Folgen zu senden ....

I wrote about the the strong "Not invented here" syndrome in the Linux community a year ago in DTrace, systemtap and a brief history of "NIH". Nothing has changed so far ... systemtap is still not admin-usable, dtrace find it´s way in more and more environments and the linux community is still discussing about their way. Paul Murphy reports about the reignited discussion in his article "DTrace and the Linux bunker mentality" (refering to Bryan Cantrills DTrace on Linux article)

There is so much talent in the linux community. I don´t really understand why nobody is analysing DTrace. With analysing i don´t think about "Oh, it measures things". I think about analysing all the concept, the ideas, and the implementation. And after this implementing something on par with DTrace. But that doesn´t take place at the moment.

Oracle and CMT are often a natural choice. Whenever you have many parallel requests and the latency isn´t a key performance indicator, you should give it a try. But sometimes there are loads, that should scale well on CMT systems but they don´t scale well. In most cases there are some quirks in the SQL statements that makes the code single- or few-threaded. Glenn Fawcett summarized some great tips for Oracle and CMT in a series of blog articles to overcome such problems.

(via: Stefan Hinker)

Strangely i found more and more google searches with my name in the logfiles of my blog and in the referer list of Xing.com in the last few days. Just in case: I haven´t done it and it´s not my fault ...

In the press release issued yesterday was another intereting news: Sun released a new version of it´s Coolstack. It consists out of:

The primary components in the Web Stack include (partial list) the Apache HTTP Web server version 2.2.8, Apache Modules Memcached 1.2.5 (distributed memory object system), MySQL 5.1 Database, lighttpd Web server v 1.4.18, Tomcat Servlet engine 6.0.16, PHP 5.2.5, Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.3, RubyGems 0.9.0, Mongrel 1.0.1, fcgi package, RedCloth (text parsing), Perl 5.8.8 and extensions, Squid proxy server 2.16.x.

In the past it was somewhat problematic, the versions delivered with Solaris were supported, but they were selected for stability and were often bugfixed, but not updated. The versions in the Coolstack were really actual, but they were unsupported. But this changes now: Sun will announce an offer to support the complete webstack soon. At first (this quarter) for Solaris on x86 and SPARC, but later on for Linux and other operating systems.

The supporting movie in front of Pixar movies is a good tradition. Presto is the one before Wall-E. Absolutly hilarious.

What is habituation? When you borrow a portable navigation device from your brother, try to scroll through the menus and twitch through the maps like on your iPhone and think at first: "Fsck ... the display is broken" ... i want an iNav!

Yesterday i visted a customer with severe space problems. You think: "Hey, my datacenter is full, too. Not a big deal". But those folks have really no space for euquipment, to be exact ... they have negative space for new equipment ... when they remove one or two systems the datacenter is absolutly full I thought at first, the people of the customer had a "paint it black" day when they talked about it at first ... but i have to admit, that they even vastly understated the problem. This challenge will be a hard nut to crack .... but is solvable .. i have already some ideas. Sometimes it´s a good thing to work for a technology company, because some problem must be solved by technology. And can be only solved by technology.