via editblog
I have a couple Google Voice invites left. So far it has been working amazing. For instance do we route our 24/7 support number through it, and forward it to different people depending on the time of the day. That way people are awake when they answer. Google Voice has numerous other nice features. And best of all, they work very reliably.
If you like to get one of those invites then please get in touch.
I would guess this clip is about ten years old :
The compute power you see here can be replaced by one or two racks today. For maybe a tenth of the price. I used to know my way around SGI hardware, Irix, OpenGL a little bit. I think it was patch number 1508 that brought me over to the US. Or was it 1805?
None of that matters in the slightest bit any longer. The 7 billion Dollars that SGI had in market cap at one point completely evaporated. The glorious campus they built is still in use today: Google picked it up.
Bought an awesome painting today:
In some areas technology moves forward so fast, that the outdated components still far away from the their own end of life.This can be good and bad. Some people have warehouses full of Onyx2s. Not so good. I happen to have lots of disk drives. Pretty good. I would not rely on those drives for anything critical, but having more drives to rotate the personal Backups for instance is never a bad thing.
A batch of those drives was connected via a 3ware card before. It turns out that both Ubuntu’s installer as well as OS X disk utility have troubles with those drives. They will recognize them, but partitioning will stall with OS X. At least ubuntu will display an error message. It displays an I/O error during the creation of the swap partition.
I would think that this is a feature: Getting drives accidentally confused will not lead to you loosing your array, since -as a civillian- your attempts to harm the 3ware drives will fail. The fix was straight forward: I just connected the drives to the 3ware card and ‘deleted’ the array that was supposed be on them.
just wrote:
$r .= substr($str, int (rand(scalar split // , $str)), 1);
and even though it does what I want and I wrote it down the way I write this it simply feels wrong. Not out of this century.
With INTERDUBS growing in the US solidly it was time to start to add another dimension to its growth. It is an interesting experience to go through the same motions again. Just on a different continent. Luckily we found a great data center partner. It is pretty cool these days that one can get a virtual test server within minutes. Of course we are building real machines again for the real install. After some research we found some great vendors: ISP Proshop served us extremely well for cases, cables and the like. We found that Alternate.de has very decent inventory in terms of high end server parts.
Some observations along the way:
Calling a vendor can mean that they already have your order on their screen. Before they pick up the phone (after the 1st ring). Caller-ID plus decent software makes this possible.
Ordering parts it can happen that they arrive 16 hours after you did so. Standard shipping. 5 Euros.
Payment is done electronically. Online, bank account to bank account. Securely, since you have a little key generating device. And no credit company sits in the middle, getting their 3 percent, just because banks didn’t get their act together.
Prices are horribly high. Almost 20% tax on top of things.
Another drawback: If you are fond of those plastic packing chips (who isn’t) you will come up empty. Crumpled recycled card board works just as well it seems.
For years now there have been gmail keyboard shortcuts. Finally enabled them. After 2 hours I can not wait to get more email so that I can handle it without reaching for the mouse. Extremely awesome.
Dennis Baron’s book “A Better Pencil” does not only has a nice title, but going by this Salon Interview it seems to well worth the read.
I tend to disagree with him when he proclaims:
And the funny thing is that you could put anything out there, and somebody is going to read it.
I think there is an awful lot of things that get written today and that will never be read. And not only on Twitter. We tend to apply the existing rules, concepts and understandings for way to long. Cars looked as if you were to put a horse in front of them for way to long. In the past if something got written then it indeed got read. Varying audience. But since publication cost was significant filters on many levels made sure that it was recoverable.
Now publication cost is zero. Yet, we still assume that we publish it and they will view it. This does no longer apply, since their is simply not enough readership to go around.
The corpus of unread things we cared to write is not a bad thing in itself. If we were aware then it would regulate itself.
The error of an assumed audience becomes expensive when you pour resources into something that will never find an audience that justifies the efforts that went into it. That video that you crafted so nicely for your company was not worth it when only a couple hundred people will ever watch it. Company websites cost sometimes 5 dollars or more per visitor. A visitor that most of the time will have forgotten about it after 2 seconds.