c0t0d0s0.org

The usage of SSDs has an really big impact on the performance of mysl. Kazuho Oku wrote about his experiences with the Intel X25-M ssd in "Benchmarking SSD for MySQL". Looks really promising.

There was much hassle in the media about the part-time job of Andy at his new company. I think IBM has a bigger problem: It looks like they will totally loose an really important person :

Until recently, Papermaster was IBM's vice president of microprocessor development and had been at the company for 26 years.[...]
According to the complaint, Papermaster informed IBM that he'd accepted a senior executive position at Apple that involves working closely with CEO Steve Jobs, providing technical and strategic advice

Whereas Andy will still work for Sun on a part-time basis, this looks like a large area of scorched earth, as IBM and Papermaster are already in lawsuit mode about the new job at Apple. Papermaster is important for IBM, as he was the guy who oversaw the development of Power proccesor line and recently the development of IBMs blades.

One of the nice features of my new Nokia E71 mobile is the integrated GPS receiver. So i searched for a tool to use it as a GPS tracking device for geotagging of photos. I found such a tool ... it´s even from Nokia. This tool was developed for tracking sport workouts, but it allows you to export your tracks as GPX or KML files as well, so you can use it for photo geotagging (for people like me).

Yesterday evening i´ve decided to walk from cinema to home instead of using the subway and played around with the tool. You can directly upload at home. You can even activate "Life Tracking" so other people can look at your workout while you are at workout. I didn´t use this feature. I´m not a fan of this kind of exhibitionism and obviously it´s a security risk. It tracks speed, altitude, position and allows you to look at some analytic screens while tracking (for example time/speed, time/altitude and similar graphs)

You can share your tracks with friends of with anyone. I opened up the track from the picture above for everyone, so you can take a look at the data collected by the tool. The application for your mobile and additional informations are available at the website of the Nokia Research Center

heise.de hat einen sehr wohlwollenden Artikel über unsere neuen Server auf Basis des UltraSPARC T2+ prozessors veröffentlicht: Suns Enterprise-Server T5440 mischt die Szene auf:

Mit dem neuen Vierprozessor-Server SPARC Enterprise T5440 stellen Sun und Fujitsu unter Beweis, dass mit der SPARC-Architektur in der Serverwelt weiterhin zu rechnen ist.

und

Mit solchen Ergebnissen haben Sun und Fujitsu eine gute Chance, verloren gegangenes Terrain im HPC- und Supercomputer-Bereich wieder zurück zu erobern.

(via: Egghat)

Ein Kommentar beim Rebellmarkt erklaert, wie diese absurden Summen an ausstehenden CDS zustande kommen: Die Magie der CDS. Dieser Kommentar erklaert den Irrsinn ziemlich gut.

Don gave an update to his article about mysql on Opensolaris. Now he published an update to his article with ZFS & MySQL/InnoDB Compression Update:

Conclusion? Unless you care a great deal about eking out every last byte (using a RAM disk, for example), LZJB seems like a much saner compression choice. Performance seem to improve, rather than degrade, and it doesn’t hog your CPU. I’m switching my ZFS volume to LZJB right now (on-the-fly changes - woo!) and will copy all my data so it gets the new compression settings. I’ll sacrifice some bytes, but that’s ok - performance is king.

Good news for Sun(NASDAQ: JAVA) : The Forschungszentrum Julich in Germany Chooses Bull to Deliver a 200-Teraflops Supercomputer for the JuRoPa Project. JuRoPA stands for "Jülich Research on Petaflop Architectures".

Good news for Sun? Yes ... because Bull is mainly the prime contractor for this HPC project. Sun delivers large parts of the hardware and important components of the software:

Julich's new supercomputer is a cluster combining Bull NovaScale servers, Sun blade servers, all based on Intel(R) Xeon(R) Nehalem processors, and complete HPC cluster software provided by Partec. This is combined with a high-performance input-output (I/O) system based on a Sun ZFS/Lustre file system, guaranteeing end-to-end data integrity.

Based on the actual Top500 list, this would be the sixth largest supercomputer worldwide and the largest supercomputer in Europe.

One of my first tutorials was the tutorial about RBAC. In this new tutorial i want to come back to this topic. In the RBAC tutorial i used su to assume a different role. But Solaris offers an additional way to work with the privileges of a different role.

You may remember the news about newly found Mersenne primes. mersenne.org writes:

On August 23rd, a UCLA computer discovered the 45th known Mersenne prime, 243,112,609-1, a mammoth 12,978,189 digit number! [..] Congratulations to Edson Smith, who was responsible for installing and maintaining the GIMPS software on the UCLA Mathematics Department's computers. On September 6th, the 46th known Mersenne prime, 237,156,667-1, a 11,185,272 digit number was found by Hans-Michael Elvenich in Langenfeld near Cologne, Germany!

But there is something Sun-related in this news. The 45th and 46th known Mersenne primes were verified first by two employees of Sun with Sun Hardware.

Both primes were first verified by Tom Duell (Burlington, MA, USA) and Rob Giltrap (Wellington, New Zealand), both of Sun Microsystems, using the Mlucas program by Ernst Mayer of Cupertino California USA. The verifications ran on 8 dual-core SPARC64 VI 2.15Ghz CPUs of a Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server and 4 quad-core SPARC64 VII 2.52GHz CPUs of a Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server in Menlo Park, CA, USA. The first prime verification took 13 days, the second prime took 5 days.

I have one customer, who has a strict "no cams" policy in place. And "no cams" means "really no cams", not in your mobile, not in your notebook and digicams are especially bad. Besides of the fact, that this rule is security theatre (cams are so small today, you have to do a strip-search to find them), it´s one of my prefered customers, so i respect this without further complaining. But i have some problems with presentations. I have a notebook without a cam, but it´s an old one and don´t even think about doing a multi-VM Solaris presentation with it.

This is the reason, why i look at this cheap Netbooks. And some are really great the tasks i want to have one. There are even some working for almost the complete flight from Frankfurt to New York and still cost under 450 Euro. The problem: They all have cameras. So they don´t solve my problem. I hope, i´m not the only one who wants such a netbook without a lousy cam. And by the way: Dear Apple ... a MacBook Pro without a build-in iSight would be nice.

Yet another tutorial finalized - this time about one of the really hidden features of Solaris - CacheFS. CacheFS is something similar to a caching proxy. But this proxy don´t cache web page, it caches files from another filesystem. I divided the tutorial in 8 parts.

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Theory
• Part 3: A basic example
• Part 4: The Cache
• Part 5: On demand consistency checking
• Part 6: A usecase for CacheFS
• Part 7: The future of CacheFS
• Part 8: Conclusion

I hope, this tutorial gives you some new insights into Solaris. Have fun while trying out the stuff in the tutorial

CacheFS is one of this features even some experienced admins aren´t aware of. But as soon as they try it, most of them can´t live without it. You should give it a try.

According to a report at Aviationweek Boeing thinks about to leave the tanker rebidding process. The new proposal gives more credits to a bigger tanker and thus a 767 based tanker wouldn´t be competitive to a A330 based tanker ... and as i wrote before. A 777 based tanker is no alternative for Boeing besides of the short timeframe for this proposal.

Now, however, the Pentagon is pushing for the replacement tankers as soon as possible after multiple delays. It remains unclear if a no-bid position from Boeing would drag out the KC-X competition or it if would compel the Pentagon to attempt a sole-source of the work to Northrop Grumman/EADS.

This is an interesting development. Stopping the former decision with the help of the GOA just do leave the proposal process afterwards will not help to make friends for future proposals ....

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).