Phillip Fayers

The Ballad of Reading Goal

2011-01-02T22:10:00.000Z

Back at the start of 2010 I set myself some reading goals as a new year's resolution. At the end, the very end, of 2010 the results of the goals were that I'd read 2012 chapters.

I should have planned that better, I was reading chapters 2010-12 around midnight on New Year's eve so could have arranged for the total to be equal to the value of the year (well, it would have appealed to me even if nobody else).

The chapters came from 134 different books (99 if you count The Bible as one book instead of many) of which I finished 104. In my worst month, July, I only managed only 23% of what I should have read whilst in the busiest, December, I managed 230% which creates a pleasing sort of symmetry.

The original driver for the targets was the aim to read more of The Bible because, being a Christian, I ought to read more of it. I'll keep that chapter a day Bible target going into 2011, at that rate I'll have read the whole thing by sometime in 2013, but I'm going to drop the others. It was fun for a year but it did mean that sometimes I was actually giving up on books (or avoiding starting them) because the chapters were too long. I suppose that ought to teach me something about how to set targets.

	Bible	Work	Fun	Serious
Target, chapters per day	1	0.5	4	0.5
Target, total to date	365	182.5	1460	182.5
Actual, total to date	366	186	1460	183
Progress	100%	102%	100%	100%
Number of different books	36	24	59	15

And thanks to Mo for the title suggestion...

The forgotten iPhone sales news

2010-08-03T14:55:00.002+01:00

The web is all a flutter with news that Android phone shipments have grown by 886% in the last year.

That isn't entirely surprising given that Android is a relatively new technology, the first Android phone only arrived on the market in September 2008 so its still a very young market. There are lots of interesting statistics from the Nielson report, including very high brand loyalty figures for Android (71% of people who own an Android phone intend to buy Android again) and iPhone (89% of iPhone owners intend to stick with iPhone), especially compared to the 42% figure for Blackberry users.

There's one statistic that hasn't been widely picked up though; Apple failed to grow iPhone sales as fast the rest of the smartphone market.

The overall smartphone market grew by 63.3% from Q2 2009 to Q2 2010.

Apple's iPhone shipments grew at "only" 61.4%.

To be fair, as you can see from the BBC's table (reproduced below) Apple had the second highest growth in the year at 61.4%, nicely out stripping the established players Symbian and RIM at around 41%. However, for the first time in quite a while, what must be decades in Internet years, Apple failed to keep up with the market average increase and actually lost market share. There's no way that Android's growth in shipments or market share can continue at that rate for long but, if Apple want to continue to drive the agenda for smartphones, they'll have to find some way to compete at the lower end of the smartphone market that Android has taken ownership of.

Worldwide smartphone market
OS	Q2 2010 shipments	% share	Q2 2009 shipments	% share	Growth
Symbian	27,129,340	43.5	19,178,910	50.3	41.5
RIM	11,248,830	18.0	7,975,950	20.9	41
Android	10,689,290	17.1	1,084,240	2.8	885.9
Apple	8,411,910	13.5	5,211,560	13.7	61.4
Microsoft	3,083,060	4.9	3,431,380	9.0	-10.2
Others	1,851,830	3.0	1,244,620	3.3	48.8
Total	62,414,260	100	38,126,660	100	63.3

Musashi's Coming Home

2010-05-14T16:08:00.002+01:00

Moosh has spent the last day and a half charming the staff at the vets, he'll be coming home today.

A few people had commented recently that he was looking a little less chunky than usual. We thought he might have lost a little weight but didn't think much of it and anyway he was due for the usual once yearly booster jabs and check up within a few weeks.

Turns out he'd lost more weight than we realised. Enough to indicate there might be something seriously wrong.

Thursday morning saw me outside the vet's at 08:15 on the dot, alternatively looking at the time and ringing the doorbell. Two minutes later I was walking to work and Moosh was being prepared for a series of tests to work out what was wrong. We're still waiting for confirmation of the cause from a biopsy taken by the vet but the expectation is that the problem is treatable.

Moosh has just taught me the difference between being aware of something and really knowing it.

When you get a cat there is an awareness that they don't live for ever. That, all things being normal, the cat will die before you do, but it isn't something that goes beyond awareness until that day looms. It loomed this week but then, fortunately, loomed off again into the distance.

By the end of today we should be a two cat household again (though I still haven't heard from the vet).

Moosh will be on a special diet and his treatable illness will result in him getting more treats than usual. Our shopping list for tonight already has fish, prawns, chicken and expensive cat food on it and there's a pheasant already defrosting in the kitchen (hidden in the oven so Penny doesn't try and get it before its cooked).

New Year's Resolution

2010-02-18T22:27:00.001Z

Yes, I know its a bit late but I've been busy, and I was reminded of it by an article I stumbled across on Setting a Reading Goal.

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions because experience tells me I'm bad at keeping them and they don't make any difference to what happens in the year. This year is a little different in that I did make a few resolutions, most of them are private. One resolution, however, might as well be public as it might encourage me to stick to it. I resolved to read more.

During 4 weeks last year (our holiday in Costa Rica and the Christmas break) I read more books than I could remember reading in the whole of the rest of the year. I didn't want 2010 to pass with such a poor reading record.

Being a Christian the first thing to do was to resolve to read more of the Bible. I've never read the whole thing so that's part of the resolution; 1 chapter a day and keep a checklist of the chapters I've read. At that rate I should have covered the whole Bible (all 1189 chapters or so) in about 3 and a quarter years (Thursday, 4 April 2013 to be precise).

Having set a chapter target for the Bible I though I might as well do the same for other types, and so I ended up with 3 more categories; work, serious and fun.

So, am I sticking to it? Almost. The results so far (stats courtesy of Google spreadsheets and forms):

	Bible	Work	Fun	Serious
Target, chapters per day	1	0.5	4	0.5
Target, total to date	49	24.5	196	24.5
Actual, total to date	32	32	307	25
Actual, chapters per day	0.65	0.65	6.27	0.51
Progress	65%	131%	157%	102%
Required year rate	1.05	0.48	3.65	0.5
30 day catch up rate	1.57	0.25	0.3	0.48
Number of different books	4	7	8	4

The iPad - Does it have to change the world?

2010-01-28T13:15:00.004Z

Yesterday Apple launched the iPad. The frenzy of speculation over the specifications is over but the hyperbole isn't.

"Can the Apple iPad iBook Store take on Amazon?" asks T3. "Apple’s iPad Tablet Could Slay eBooks and Netbooks" shouts Digital Trends. Nicholas Carr in The New Republic goes even further; "The PC Officially Died Today" he tells us.

Calm down people.

Why does the iPad have to take on Amazon, kill the netbook or in any other way fundamentally change the world?

The reality is that yesterday Apple launched a large, flat, iPod touch with optional 3G data connection.

Whether you personally love it or hate it Apple will sell millions of them and make plenty of money. In a year or so they'll launch iPad version 2 into a market crowded with with tablet devices and e-readers all jostling for their own particular niche. But to claim that this changes the world really is misunderstanding how innovation in technology works.

Oh, and if you think the Apple iPad triggers a little sense of deja vu, you might want to take a look at the "oh, so nearly made it" Crunchpad.

Mini Stonehenge discovered ... in St Ives

2009-10-06T23:26:00.000+01:00

The recent news about the discovery of a mini stonehenge a few miles away from the site of the large version reminded of another mini stonehenge we found on holiday in St Ives.

We rented a little cottage a few steps away from Porthmeor Beach and would stroll along the sea front most evenings watching the sunset. As we wandered past the beach late in the evening we'd find it had been taken over by teenagers who were usually having barbeques, drinking and generally appearing to make a nuisance of themslves in the way teenagers do.

One night a small group appeared quieter and more conspiratorial than the usual bunch and, wandering past the same spot the following morning, we discovered the reason why.

The remarkable thing was that this little work of art was still there, complete and undisturbed days later when we left to come home.

The beach henge had appeared on a patch of beach opposite Tate St Ives which, coincidentally, had a free opening night on the very eve of the stones mysterious appearance. The gallery contained no better work of art.

Where has all the Facebook gone?

2009-09-24T14:00:00.000+01:00

For four years now I've been running Introduction to Computing sessions for Psychology undergraduates and this year something happened that I did not expect - no one was accessing Facebook during the class.

The class is a very simple introduction to a few important things they need to know about the campus network. The students find a PC and login, once they are all settled I talk for a while, then the students work through some very simple examples.

In 2007 we saw how big Facebook had become for students. I finished talking, they started working on examples and Facebook started popping up on screens all over the lab with people exchanging, verbally, the names of various groups that they were joining.

In 2008 they sat down, logged in and started Explorer. When I started the talking 90% or more of the screens in the room were showing the same layout of screen with that telltale Facebook blue colour scheme.

In 2009 there was no sign of Facebook what so ever. With 6 of us wandering around helping out we didn't spot a single Facebook page all session.

I think there are a few factors, and I don't think it is because Facebook is waning in popularity is one (we've got another year or two before that happens).

1) INSRV get internet access for the halls of residence working for students very quickly. By the time they get to my intro class in the middle of week 0 they've probably been online for 3 or 4 days so the Facebook surge is dealt with.

2) All the students are carrying smart phones. Psychology isn't usually the subject that technophiles choose but there were a large number of smartphones in evidence at the class, N97's, Blackberries, G1s, G2s and so on but, and here lies another mystery, I didn't spot a single iPhone all day.

Photos, photos everywhere

2009-05-11T13:55:00.001+01:00

Digital photography has changed the world.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed but you can't visit anywhere worth visiting anymore without your view of the interesting thing being interrupted by all the other visitors taking photographs.

When I started getting interested in photography, way back when I was studying Physics at the University of Kent, Canterbury, the hobby required the use of film.

You had to be careful with composing your shot, selecting the right lens and the best vantage point for the scene. You had to carefully consider the light levels, choosing the correct combination of aperture and shutter speed to get just the right exposure and lighting effect. You took your time over each shot because each one would cost you money, the same amount whether it was a work of genius or a waste of photographic paper and chemicals.

These days you just fire away with a digital. You can take so many shots that you'll eventually get a few good ones, pictures that look good enough to have been taken by a professional.

So, what, apart from chucking the pictures on Facebook or Flickr, can you do with all the images.

Upload them to Photosynth. A few seconds effort and you have a sort of walk around view of images that you can amuse yourself with for longer than it took to take the pictures.

Photosynth is suprisingly good at joining the pictures together, though the navigation can be a bit confusing. To see what I mean take a look at this photosynth of Park Place, a few random shots I took today on my way to, and from, the sandwich shop.

An open, not shut, case

2009-03-25T11:44:00.004Z

How "open" should we be with information, knowledge and discussion?

There has been an interesting confluence of events at work that have led me to think about that question and this will be the first of a series of posts exploring various aspects.

I work as the IT Manager for the School of Psychology. The staff in the School know a lot about data protection and related issues, about when data needs to be secure and about limiting access to certain data to only those who need to know. When you are involved with research that can collect private personal data from adults and children you need to be very aware of all the issues, the ethical considerations and the law.

However, the School tries to be open with information that isn't private. The School has, like most university departments, a well defined committee structure with a range of committees meeting regularly to make vital decisions about the running of the School. These committees make their minutes available to staff in the School with only minor exceptions for reserved business that deals with private or sensitive matters.

The School takes a default position of information being open and available.

Making information freely available in this way can cause problems with people misinterpreting comments or drawing the wrong conclusions. There is also the issue of what should constitute reserved business and just how reserved it should be and the problem of encouraging open debate in an environment where you know other people will be able to read what you have said. It isn't always easy being open.

Even given the difficulties involved the default open position shouldn't surprise anyone. We are in a university after all.

The driving force of the university is research, the quest for and the development of new knowledge and skills. The natural outcome of this research is education, passing on the knowledge and skills to those who come to learn. You can't carry out either research or education without the open sharing of information, that's what its all about.

Being open with information can be difficult but I believe the people who work at Cardiff University aren't here because they aspired to work somewhere where everything was simple.

University staff thrive on the difficult; difficult is interesting.

There's a new music craze sweeping the web

2009-01-30T14:00:00.000Z

Every now and then someone in the computer industry decides that something that is very difficult and requires significant training and experience should be massively simplified to the point that anyone can do it.

Music seems to be a popular difficult thing to tackle.

A few years ago Apple tried with Garageband. Apple call this component of their iLife suite "your own recording studio".

Now Microsoft are at it with Songsmith. The idea is simple, select a style, sing into the computer and the software will create a backing track. Instant music! No doubt Microsoft hope to see Youtube filling up with Songsmith records created by budding musicians, but it looks like the jokers are beating them to it.

There's now a growing collection of Songsmith tracks on Youtube where cunning artists have extracted classic vocal tracks and told Songsmith to create the new backing track. I think this version of Wonderwall is my favourite so far.

What's wrong with television today?

2009-01-20T21:29:00.003Z

Flicking channels last night I stumbled on the end of section of a programme in tribute to Oliver Postgate. The presenter was waxing lyrical about the poetry and power of Oliver's voice, how it drew you into the worlds he was creating. We were then treated to a short clip introducing an episode of the Clangers.

The Clangers was a kids programme, aimed at quite a young audience (I watched it when I was 4 or 5) and this opening sequence contained a phrase that stuck in my head. The planet inhabited by the Clangers was described as "A light among the myriad stars of the firmament". Point me, please, to any kids programme these days, or even one aimed at teenagers, that would use the words "myriad" and "firmament" - let alone use them both in the same sentence.

New Year, New Start?

2009-01-09T13:30:00.005Z

The new year is supposed to be a time for a new starts but for us (Claire and I) its more of a time for a new stop. We decided last year that we needed a break, not another holiday as the effects don't seem to last that long, but an opportunity to step back from responsibility.

We've been involved in various things at church from almost the first time we went (frightening to think that was 18 years ago). Work, or worship, in the same place for a while and you tend to accrue responsibilities; our main areas for the past few years being the Sunday evening meeting, the music group and house group. So this year, for at least 6 months, we're going cold turkey and handing over the responsibility to other people. We'll be there to help out, to advise (if anybody wants us to) and I've no doubt there'll still be plenty of work that we'll get involved in. But being able to pass the buck for a while gives us a bit more time to think and makes me feel (if not look) 10 years younger.

Dieppe International Kite Festival 2008

2008-09-25T17:15:00.003+01:00

It's nice to take a break.

A week ago (and it seems a lot longer than that) we returned from what is now a regular bi-annual trip to the Festival International de Cerf-Volant de Dieppe.

We had an uncharacteristic spell of bad weather that forced everyone bar the Scratch Bunnies to down kites for a few hours.

Mostly the weather was pretty good with more than enough sunshine to warrant the liberal application of some factor 30.

Dieppe really knows how to put on a festival. Unlike the UK kite festivals that usually last a weekend Dieppe runs for 9 days with the various sponsors flying in visitors from all over the world. One of the highlights in the night fly on the final Saturday. The organisers line one of the main arenas with flood and spot lights then at 10pm the local council turn off all the street lights and the fun begins.

A load more photos are on my Dieppe 2008 set on Flickr (best used with Cooliris, formerly Piclens - if you have Firefox). Videos will follow once I've had a chance to edit them.

Solid State Disk - Needlessly Expensive?

2008-06-05T09:44:00.005+01:00

There are reports online today that Sun will offer Solid State Disk (SSD) in most of their servers. EMC and IBM have both talked recently about replacing hard disks with SSDs sometime in the next 2-4 years. In the Sun releases John Fowler is quoted as saying Sun will sell you a 32GB SSD for around $1,000. That seems somewhat expensive to me.

The talk of SSDs has prompted people on Slashdot to discuss whether the industry will move to two tier storage - use the SSD for commonly accessed files and move the less frequently access ones onto standard hard drives. The discussion goes on to suggest you could even save power by shutting down the hard drive most of the time, only starting it up when you need those infrequently access files. They might be right - for a while.

At the moment SSDs are new and they are massively over priced. For example a 16GB SSD, something intended to replace the hard disk in a laptop, costs around £200 at the moment but a 16GB USB stick (which is a lot smaller) costs only £40.

Now I know that the type of memory used in the SSD is of a better quality, it supports faster read/write speeds and it can probably support a higher number of write operations before it dies, but a factor 5 in price difference seems to be more than it needs to be.

As SSDs become more common they'll approach USB sticks in terms of cost per GB. That still makes them, currently, a factor of 10-12 times more expensive per GB than hard disks but that gap will continue to close. When it hits a low enough point the size, latency, bandwidth, reliability and durability advantages of solid state storage will consign the hard drive to computing history.

Were back from not so sunny Spain

2008-05-27T17:00:00.007+01:00

Flying into Malaga, uploaded by Phillip Fayers.

A couple of weeks ago we hopped on a plane to have a short break in the sun. We were off to Granada to meet up with Peter and Anna who were revisiting the city. Unfortunately the sun decided to take a short break, starting with the day we arrived. Fortunately there were enough breaks in the clouds to get a collection of photos and by the end of the week the weather had returned to something closer to normality.

Jasmine sky

2007-06-21T13:09:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I was relaxing in the garden and though this would make a good photo. The only processing done since it left the camera is a 180 degree rotation...

I've finally gone digital

2007-05-22T13:20:00.001+01:00

After much internal debate on which digital camera to get to replace my trusty Ricoh GR-1S film camera it finally came down to two models. The nicely portable Ricoh GX100 and the more SLR like Sony DSC-R1. In the end portablity won out, if the Sony R1 had been a real SLR with an optical viewfinder it might have been a different story.

So, yesterday a shiny new GX100 was delivered. I've not had much of a chance to try it out yet but I really like the macro mode - it really brings out the best in our roses.

5 Months

2007-04-27T22:13:00.000+01:00

Today marks the end of the longest break in blog posting for me. Its been almost 5 months since my last post and I can't really put my finger on why.

I suppose I could blame being busy but then that seems to my normal state (on account of finding it difficult to say no) and I'm no less busy now than in the months since my last post.

The posting drought isn't to do with having a lack of things to say either - as those of you who know me will realise.

Maybe its just that I missed a few days, then a week, then just got used to the fact that I wasn't posting anything. Its easier to drop into a habit of omission than a habit of commission.

Anyway, I thought it was about time there was some fresh content here and you've got to start somewhere.

Review: The Prestige

2006-11-24T19:37:00.000Z

Let me say straight away that The Prestige is a good film. Good in the, I'm really glad I went to see it, sense. It doesn't make it into the category of great films simply becuase I'm not sure I'd get much out of seeing it again.

The Prestige is about a couple of competing magicians. These Victorian magicians engage in an unhealthy rivalry, becoming obsessed with outdoing each other. The acting is good, the cinematography is good, its well paced and it regularly manages to create a wonderful sense of foreboding. Without using cheesy music or obvious set ups you regularly get the feeling that something is about to happen and it probably isn't going to be nice. Rest assured the film doesn't always deliver on the foreboding, just to keep you on your toes.

Throughout the film we get taught that a magic trick has three parts. Part one is The Pledge where the magician promises something will happen, like showing you a box and a pretty assistant. Part two is The Turn, where something does happen, the assistant walks into the box and vanishes. The important part is part three, The Prestige, where the pretty assistant appears from some completely unexpected part of the theatre. The film is full of Pledges, Turns and Prestiges - but its the final Prestige which you might have a bit of trouble with if you don't like your films to be different.

All in all its a good film, well worth seeing. As I hinted earlier the reason I don't think its great is because a large part of the enjoyment is not quite knowing what's about to happen. In fact, given enough time to forget the minor twists I'm sure I'd enjoy watching it again.

There's nothing wrong with my choices...

2006-11-22T12:07:00.000Z

I stumbled across an interesting idea for a web site today, I can't remember whether it was via Reddit, Digg or Delicious but I found my way to Imagini, a gift finding service.

Imagini proclaims that it calculates your "VisualDNA" (a term so important they've a trademarked it) from pictures you choose as the answer to a series of questions. From your choices a mystical calculation produces recommendations for a number of gifts you, or someone you want to buy a present for, might want.

I had a quick look and it presented a few things I quite liked when I answered the questions with my own choices. It seemed like a good idea to try the same with choices I thought Claire might make.

A half dozen questions or so later I was presented with:

Notice: Undefined index: 37 in /var/www/module/finish.php on line 100
MDB2 Error: syntax error

Either they have a few kinks to iron out of the system or "Claire's" answers were too much for the poor little algorithm.

Does not compute... Does not compute.

This is a photo I did not take...

2006-11-21T18:11:00.000Z

In honour a site called Unphotographable this is a photo which I did not take on the way to work today.

If I had have taken the photo from just the right angle it would have shown a cyclist who overtook me on the pavement. From each end of his handlebars hung a laden plastic bag. In a position on the handlebars which I can only describe as perched was a young boy, perhaps 3 or 4, held upright only by the support of the cyclist's arms. On the man's back in a sort of piggy back gone wrong was a girl, perhaps 5 or 6 years old, with her arms wrapped around his neck. I'm not sure whether this was normal practise for the trio but the lollipop man didn't seem to bat an eyelid as they passed and they made steady progress down the road with no sign of the wobbling which you might think would accompany such a journey.

Theology by Coincidence

2006-11-17T17:20:00.000Z

The programming sub-reddit led me to this little gem of an article on programming by coincidence from a book called The Pragmatic Programmer.

It struck me that the pragmatic approach not only works for programming but also for theology.

Three problems are outlined in the article which have parallels in the way we work out our theology. Where our can mean the personal theology (belief system) we hold to or the more formal theology of the church (where church can mean your local group of believers, a denomination or even the global body of believers).

The programming problem Accidents of Implementation can sort of be rephrased as, just because it works doesn't mean it isn't broken. This is almost the opposite of the oft used if it ain't broke don't fix it maxim which seems to get applied to theology as much as anything else (it was fine in our day, why do you want to go changing it?)

Accidents of Context mirrors an idea from Descartes, namely:

Whenever men notice some similarity between two things, they are wont to ascribe to each, even in those respects in which the two differ, what they have found to be true of the other.

The theological equivalent is perhaps when people ignore the context of the biblical passage they are trying to incorporate into their theology. It also arises in the problem of associating practise with doctrine. The church, or the individual, does something for so long that it, or he, ends up assuming there was some doctrinal reason for doing it that way. The situation is made even worse when it, or he, looks for and then starts teaching such a reason to others.

Finally Implicit Assumptions pretty much speaks for itself. How many people make assumptions about the Bible (or any other religious or non-religious text for that matter) without making any attempt to understand the provenance of the text.

The solution?

The pragmatic programmer article has a number of solutions which can apply to theology as well as programming. Simply replacing the word code in the original article with belief or theology is enough to repurpose some of the rules. Some other solutions need a little massaging whilst some need no alterations at all:

Always be aware of what you are doing.

Don't work out your theology blindfolded. Attempting to live by a theology you don't fully understand, or aren't familiar with, is an invitation to be misled by coincidences.

Proceed from a plan.

Rely only on reliable things. Don't depend on accidents or assumptions. If you can't tell the difference in particular circumstances, assume the worst.

Document your assumptions. (It's not enough to document the outcome, you have to know where it comes from.)

Don't just test your final theology, but test your assumptions as well. Don't guess; actually try it. Write an assertion to test your assumptions. If your assertion is right, you have improved your understanding. If you discover your assumption is wrong, then count yourself lucky.

Prioritize your effort. Spend time on the important aspects; more than likely, these are the hard parts. If you don't have fundamentals or infrastructure correct, brilliant bells and whistles will be irrelevant.

Don't be a slave to history. Don't let existing theology dictate future theology. All theology can be replaced if it is found to be no longer appropriate.

So next time something seems to work, but you don't know why, make sure it isn't just a coincidence.

I enjoyed the article enough that I bought the book... A review will follow if I ever get the time to read it all and maybe reading it will inspire a few more thoughts on Pragmatic Theology.

Technology: Sun Stealth Launch HPC Blade Server

2006-11-15T14:06:00.000Z

Sun Blade 8000 and 8000P

Sun are doing another of their stealth product launches, this time its the Sun Blade 8000P, a version of their new blade server architecture designed specifically for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments.

Sun launched the Blade 8000 chassis back in the summer. After the launch Sun's Chief Architect, Andy Bechtolsheim, talked about how the 8000 would be the first in a line which would be augmented by a high density HPC chassis. The original 8000 chassis was designed to give huge amounts of flexibility, the new 8000P has stripped out some of that flexibility and left just what the HPC buyers need. The 8000P is down to 14U in height (compared to 19U for the 8000) which enables you to put 3 into a single rack thus increasing the number of processor sockets per rack from 80 to 120. As Tom's Hardware points out 3 full racks of 8000P's gives you a system which is fast enough to be on the current Top 500 Supercomputers list.

The 8000P uses the same blade units as the 8000, namely the x8400 which has space for 4 Opteron CPUs, 64GB of RAM and a pair of 2.5" hard disks. The 8000P manages to shave off 7U of space by dropping a set of redundant power supplies and reducing the number of PCI expansion modules. This leaves the 8000P with space for only 2 of Sun's PCI Express Network Expansion Modules. Modules are available to provide Gb/s ethernet (2 connections per server blade), 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (2 per blade) or a new option providing 4Gb/s Infiniband connections (1 per blade).

I fully expect Sun to replace the x8400 blade shortly with one which takes the new Socket-F Opteron CPUs. That will increase the overal speed (thanks to increases in speed of memory) and also allow upgrading to quad core processors when AMD launch them in early 2007. With those quadcores the 8000P will allow you to put 480 processor cores in a single rack compared to around 320 for a rack full of more standard 1U Opteron servers.

To be fair to Sun the stealth nature of the launch is due to the fact that it's happening during Supercomputing '06 rather than at a special event as is usually the case for Sun. There are so many new products being talked about at SC '06 that its not suprising for this announcement to generate a little less publicity than usual.

Three Engineered to be Blind Mice

2006-11-09T15:06:00.000Z

Claire and I worked on this little ditty in the car on the way to house group after hearing a certain news story. I think the last line might need a little work...

Three blind mice,
Three blind mice,
See how they run,
See how they run.

They're engineered to be blind by a PDRA
Who then restores their rods with some good DNA
Did you ever see such a thing in your day
As three engineered to be blind by the researchers who then take perfectly good retinal precursor cells from other (not engineered to be blind from birth) mice and implant them into the engineered to be blind mice so that they are no longer blind mice.

The gory details can also be found on via the BBC, New Scientist and The Telegraph.

Technology: Sun's Rediscovery of a Sense of Humour

2006-11-07T14:00:00.000Z

Sun's new openness seems to have helped them rediscover their sense of humour.

Whilst hunting through the Opensolaris sites bug list for some information I stumbled across the following bug title: It's capitalized "IPsec", damnit!

A far cry from the serious days when their engineers were repsonsible for the heinous crime of removing the comment:

You can tune a filesystem but you can't tune a fish

from the tunefs(8) manual page.

The comment was originally added to the bugs section back in the early days of BSD. Later, fearing that someone far too serious would come along and remove the comment Larry McVoy added the following curse to the man page source code:

Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until the time_t's wrap around.

The curse didn't prevent the comment being removed which means some poor engineer from Sun's joyless days is currently having their steps dogged, as the time_t's won't wraparound until 2038 (Tuesday Jan 19th to be a little more accurate, see this section from a wonderful book called Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets for the full details.)

If all that meant anything at all to you then you may also enjoy this little story of UNIX folklore which I stumbled across today.

I have to admit I once made the mistake of executing rm -rf in the root directory, fortunately I realised in time to prevent major damage to the system and was able to restore the few files and devices relatively easily.

They Stole My Sky

2006-11-03T14:00:00.000Z

The aeroplanes that is.

I walked to work this morning. It was one of those crisp days you get on the border of Autumn and Winter. Cold enough to make me want to wear gloves, cold enough to see the breath in front of my face and cold enough to see the remains in of the frost in shadows which lay untouched by the sun's rays.

As I walked down the hill to work I should have been looking out over a city scape covered by a dark blue sky and illuminated by a distinct ball of light.

Instead the ball of the sun was spread into a hazy blob and the sky looked more like this:

Last night on the Late Edition Marcus Brigstocke spent sometime talking to one of his guests about green issues. The fundamental question was: Is man really having a significant impact on the world climate?

From where I stood, and walked, this morning it is pretty obvious that man is having an impact on the local weather here in Cardiff. There wasn't a natural cloud in the sky. All of that condensation was the result of aeroplane con trails.

Having spotted the trails shortly after leaving the house there wasn't a time on the half hour stroll into work when I couldn't look up and spot at least 2 aircraft overhead. I think that counts as an impact on my environment. I wonder if I could sue the airlines for my loss of amenity due to the reduced enjoyment of my morning?

Well, I suppose I should be grateful that we don't have any of these smoke ring blowers in the city creating further havoc with the atmosphere.

Time to practise solitude for a month or so

2006-10-31T23:45:00.000Z

National Novel Writing Month starts in about 15 minutes so I'll probably be getting a litte more time on my own than usual for the next 30 days.

The idea of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel in a month. To slap down 50,000 words on paper or, more usually these days, to commit a quarter of a million bytes of information to some kind of digital storage.

Claire has signed up this year, she's even been getting sponsorship and met up with a few other participants from Cardiff. So, in 15 minutes or so, and for the next month, she'll be tapping away on her latest novel and I'll have plenty of time to myself.

I wonder how many blog posts it would take me to get to 50,000 words?

Review: Scripture and the Authority of God - N T Wright

2006-10-31T13:50:00.000Z

My book reading habits have changed in the past few years. I used to read fiction in serial mode, pick up a book and hardly put it down until it was finished (which included eating, and sometimes cooking, with one hand whilst a book was being read). I've move to reading a lot of non-fiction recently and that method didn't work for me so I've switched to parallel mode. I have a load of books on the go at once and just dip into a chapter here and there when I feel like it.

One little book which suited the chapter dipping mode was Scripture and the Authority of God by N T Wright.

Tom Wright is currently the Bishop of Durham and he is a well known and well respected biblical scholar and author of Christian books. He has been extremely prolific in his writing, which leads to one of the few annoying parts about Scripture and the Authority of God; he regularly introduces an idea and, instead of developing it, points you to another of his books where it is explained more fully. On one hand I'd like to have had a more complete exploration on some of these ideas, on the other the way Dr Wright sticks to his subject does ensure the book remains quite short.

The book examines one of the doctrines of the modern church, that of the authority of scripture. N.T. Wright is being completely honest and upfront about how he sees this area of doctrine as his view is pretty well summarised in the title of the book, all authority rests with God alone. The talk in the modern church about the authority of scripture is really just a shorthand.

Early on he tackles the whole idea of the shorthands that are used in church doctrine with, what I found to be, a memorable and entertaining illustration:

Shorthands, in other words, are useful in the same way that suitcases are. They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belonging in a suitcase, is that they can then be unpacked and put to use in a new location. Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another over the head with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go mouldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron.

Too often churches are guilty of this treatment of doctrine, being too simplistic in their outlook (something Caleb commented on a while ago). Scripture and the Authority of God made me think about where my own doctrines and shorthands come from and how I should be careful not to present them others without the requisite unpacking.

I found the book interesting and, in places, challenging and it has left me with a number of ideas which I want to investigate further, including Dr Wright's idea of narrative theology. Wright's writing style is engaging enough that I'll be seeking out more of his work in the future, in fact Paul: Fresh Perspectives is already sitting at home waiting for me to read it.

I'll finish with another quote from towards the end of the book:

It is fair that most churches, even those with well-developed educational programmes, have a long way to do in their teaching of scripture. It is also important to remind preachers that, just as some of the Reformers spoke of the sacraments as God's "visible words", so sermons are supposed to be "audible sacraments". They are not simply for the conveying of information, though that is important in a world increasingly ignorant of some of the most basic biblical and theological information. They are not simply for exhortation, still less for entertainment. They are supposed to be one of the moments in regular Christian living when heaven and earth meet. Speaker and hearers alike are called to be people in whom, by the work of the Spirit, God's word is once again audible to the heart as well as to the ears. Preaching is on key way in which God's personal authority, vested in scripture and operative through the work of the Spirit, is played out in the life of the church.

Having recently, with Claire, taken over leadership of the team who plan and organise the evening services at our church I hope that we manage to live up to the high standard which N.T. Wright is calling for in treatment of scripture. That the sermons, and the services as a whole, really become a time when heaven and earth meet.

Technology: Calvin and Hobbes on online gaming

2006-10-27T13:00:00.000+01:00

There's been a fair bit of comment in the news recently about the way people's real lives are being affected by the amount of time they spend using virtual worlds like Second Life, Everquest and World of Warcraft.

There are so many people are living virtual lives in these environments that they have generated their own economies, even to the point of attracting the attention of the IRS. So I thought this old Calvin and Hobbes, from eleven years ago today, was rather appropriate.

Dieppe International Kite Festival

2006-09-25T13:30:00.000+01:00

I was asked a few days ago "What are you blogging about at the moment?". Well, due mainly to the above mentioned festival the answer was not a lot.

The Dieppe International Kite Festival happens for 9 days every two years. This year we managed to find an apartment overlooking the festival site and I was organising that and the transport, hence the lack of blog posts before going. I think I relaxed so much whilst on holiday that its taken me a while to work back up to normal speed. The whole 9 days were punctuated by the market in Dieppe town centre on Saturday but apart from that I can hardly tell one day apart from another. The days were basically a repetition of a few standard tasks: fly kites, watch kites, photograph kites, read books and buy food, separated by periods of eating food and sleeping.

There will be more details, and pictures, from Dieppe soon plus reviews of the books I managed to finish during the break then I guess I'll settle back into writing tech stuff again.

Technology: Sun Delay UltraSPARC-IIIi+ Launch

2006-08-31T14:00:00.000+01:00

A slip in an online Q & A session, reported by ZDnet, has confirmed that Sun's latest server upgrade won't make much of an impact in the market because the new UltraSPARC-IIIi+ chip isn't ready.

Sun have been planning the launch of the v215, v245 and v445 servers for a long time, the names have been public since June last year. The machines were supposed to use an updated version of Sun's current low end SPARC chip. The IIIi+ will increase cache (1MB to 4MB), support more RAM of a faster type and provide higher clock speeds than the IIIi (at least 2.0GHz at launch) but unfortunately it isn't ready yet. So, the machines are likely to launch using the older IIIi chip running at its current top speed of 1.6GHz (or maybe with a slight boost to 1.8GHz)

I wonder whether Sun should be bothering with the v215, v245 and v445 at all.

Sun's ahead of schedule Niagara 2 chip will lead to systems which will be faster, cheaper, smaller and consume less power.

The recent Niagara 2 presentation at the Hot Chips conference (kindly made available by Marc Hamilton) confirms that the Niagara 2 will not only double its current integer processing capability but multiply its floating point capacity by 8. It will have faster memory interfaces, more cache and run at higher clock speeds, all whilst consuming roughly the same amount of power as its predecessor. Niagara will also gain multiprocessor capability at some point, although that's rumoured to be waiting until Niagara 3.

A single Niagara 2 chip will be faster on most benchmarks than the 4 UltraSPARC-IIIi+ chips in a v445 put together, let alone the 2 chips in a v215. The only benchmarks where the Niagara 2 won't beat the UltraSPARC-IIIi+ are those where the performance of a single application (or application thread) is important and in those areas Sun's own Opteron systems already handsomely outpace the UltraSPARC-IIIi's.

The new systems are hardly likely to make a big impact on the server market, even with its new SAS disk drives and improved PCI bus. Sun should simply abandon UltraSPARC-IIIi+ altogether, take the development effort and add it to the Niagara and Rock projects as they did when they canned the UltraSPARC-V chip.

The Perfect Birthday Present for Rob?

2006-08-24T14:00:00.000+01:00

I think I've found the perfect birthday present for Rob...

Trouble is I don't have a spare $18,499.

Review: Thecus Yes Nano N1050 - portable storage

2006-08-23T14:00:00.001+01:00

Before flying off on holiday this year we were faced with a problem - how would we make sure that we didn't run out of space on the new digital camera we were taking?

Shortly before heading off to Florida Claire bought a nice Panasonic Lumix camera. The Lumix uses SD/MMC memory cards so we could either buy a few more of those or buy some kind of hard disk device to copy the pictures to. Quite a few of the digital media players which are now available have SD/MMC slots so you can view your pictures and copy them (eg. the MSI Megaview and the Archos AV440) but I was loath to shell out close to £200 and I didn't expect that we'd want to be able to view the pictures on holiday, I just wanted a way to back them up, which is exactly what the Thecus Yes Nano N1050 does.

The Thecus N1050 (available from Scan for a ridiculously low price) is a hard disk enclosure which holds a 2.5" notebook style hard disk. It has a USB slot for attaching to a computer so that it can be used as an external hard drive, as do a number of similar devices.

What made the N1050 stand out from similar devices were two features which I hadn't seen on other gadgets.

Firstly the N1050 comes supplied with a battery power system. As well as being able to power the N1050 from a USB port a small holder is supplied which will power the drive from 4 AA batteries. The N1050, battery pack and a pair of USB cables (one for data transfer, one for power) are neatly packaged into a small protective case. The whole lot weighs around 400g so it wasn't too much trouble carting it around Florida with us.

The N1050's second trick is that it can be a USB master device as well as a USB slave. Like other storage devices if you plug the N1050 into a computer it appears as a disk drive (USB slave mode) but it can also copy files from other USB devices like memory sticks or cameras (USB master mode). Simply plug the USB storage device into the N1050, put the N1050's power switch into the Master position and press the copy button. The power light flashes for a while and when it stops flashing the contents of your USB storage device have been copied into a new folder on the hard disk inside the N1050.

My only concern with the N1050, when using it as backup storage, was that you have no way of checking what files you have on the device.

The only feedback you get is a flashing light during data transfer and an error light which appears if a transfer fails. I generated an error light twice whilst we were on holiday, once when I moved the N1050 a bit violently and once when I jogged the USB connection.

I quickly realised that I could be really paranoid about data. With a 40GB hard disk in the Thecus and a 512MB memory card in the camera I could do 2 or more transfers from the card at the end of each day, just in case a file got silently corrupted during transfer. Even with a full memory card being copied twice a day we'd be hard pushed to generate 40GB of data in two weeks.

Once I got used to the fact that the transfers do work (putting trust in technology is quite difficult for me as I've worked in IT support for years) and that I needed to find somewhere to put the thing down whilst it is transferring data the lack of feedback became less of an issue. We came back from Florida with well over 500 images on the disk, all present and correct.

I liked the N1050 enough to recommend it to a friend who has just taken one out to India for a few months. I hope it works for her as well as it did for me.

The concept has also been picked up by Jou Jye of Germany. Their Venus OTG costs about £10 more but it has a rechargeable battery built in so the overall package is smaller and presumably weighs a bit less.

Cardiff is Cheapest and Most Costly Place in the UK

2006-08-16T14:00:00.000+01:00

Lies, damn lies and statistics...

On 7th August Cardiff was proclaimed the most cost effective place in the UK for students to live. The weekly rental of £67 a week was proclaimed as one of the lowest and students were reckoned to make good money from part time jobs.

On the 16th of August Cardiff was found to be the UKs most costly place when earnings were compared with outgoings. 97% of your average Cardiffians income is committed to outgoings.

Does this make sense to you?

Maybe all the earners are supplementing their income by renting out cheap rooms to students so that they can have money to spend on essentials like food, which they then by from supermarkets staffed by students.

Technology: AMD and the Difference a '2' Makes

2006-08-16T13:30:00.000+01:00

Yesterday AMD officially launched their new processor sockets, AM2 and F. Now we get to find out what difference a 2 makes as the Opteron moves from DDR to DDR2 memory.

The launch was much anticipated, particularly in the High Performance Computing space. The Top500 list, published every six months, shows that in June 2005 only 5% of the fastest 500 systems in the world used AMD Opteron processors. Six months later Opteron accounted for 11% of the list and the latest version of the list published in June 2006 shows Opteron with 16% of the top 500 systems. Growth which was no doubt worrying Intel somewhat.

Intel recently launched the Woodcrest CPU which threatened to slow the growth of Opteron in the compute cluster space and so the HPC community have been waiting to see AMD's response. The Socket F launch doesn't seem to be much of a response. The new Socket F CPUs aren't running at higher clock speeds or consuming a lot less power. All the new CPUs provide is a new numbering scheme, some hardware virtualisation support and support for DDR2 RAM as opposed to DDR.

AMD have now published some SPECfp_rate 2000 results for the new CPUs. The results for all 4 core, 2 socket Opteron systems show the new AMD systems at the top of the list.

An AMD tested system based on a Tyan motherboard with 2 dual core 2.6GHz processors running on Socket F scores 92.6 some 20% higher than the result of 77 from a system based on the older Opterons tested by AMD in February 2006.

More official SPEC results will be available soon but in the meantime IBM and Sun have released a few unofficial results for their Socket F based servers.

IBM's result is for the new x3455 server which is aimed at the HPC market. IBM make much of their Xcelerated Memory Technology (TM) which maximizes performance for your memory-intensive environments, apparently.

Sun's result if for their new x2200 server, also aimed squarely at the HPC market, instead of the expensive 2.5" SAS disks in the x4100 its equipped with standard 3.5" SATA drives and you lose the option of the redundant power supply.

So how do IBM and Sun compare to Tyan?

IBM are reporting a SPECfp_rate 2000 of 90.3 for an x3455 using a pair of 2.8GHz dual core Opterons. For the same CPUs AMD managed a score of 96 so either IBM are doing something wrong with the software or that Xcelerated technology of theirs isn't as accelerated as they would like.

Sun are reporting a SPECfp_rate 2000 of 117 for an x2200 using a pair of 2.6GHz dual core Opterons (according to the graphic on the x2200 page - the speed isn't mentioned anywhere else). That is a huge increase of 37% over the previous best Sun score for a system with the same speed CPUs.

Recent comments from nVidia indicate that the x2200 uses the new nVidia nForce 3000 chipsets, as do the x2100, x4600, Ultra 20 and Sun Blade 8000. I commented a few weeks ago that the x8400 is scoring a little faster than I would have expected, around 12% to be precise, the use of the new nVidia chipset might explain that performance improvement.

So how much difference does the 2 make?

About 20% if you are using an AMD or IBM system but a whopping 37% if you are using a Sun system.

If you're looking for a fast 1U box it looks like you need the nForce 3000 chipset and to be running the right software, ie. Solaris and Sun Studio 11.

Technology: Sun's New Systems Preannounced by AMD

2006-08-15T09:39:00.000+01:00

The official announcement of the Leo, Taurus and Munich systems from Sun should come later today but AMD have already listed them on www.amd.com.

Systems appearing there today as Quad Core ready are the x2100 M2, the x2200 and the Ultra 20 M2. There are a number of links to information on the systems from Sun, none of which work at the moment because the pages aren't live on Sun's site.

The x2100 M2 and x2200 both use the same chassis, an interesting design with an 3.5" hard drive slot on either side of the case and a low profile optical drive in the middle. According to c|net the cheapest x2200 configuration will retail at $1,595 whilst the x2100 M2 will start at $945 and the Ultra 20 M2's cheapest option is $995.

Sun have been pushing the idea of homogenous remote management (for example with the launch of the Sun Blade 8000 series where each blade can be managed in the same way as a Sun Fire x4600 or x4100) so potential purchasers will be pleased to see the comment that the x2000 servers both have remote management facilities. Although the x2100 had remote management before it wasn't of the same type as other Sun systems.

Technology: Sun @ Linuxworld- 3 New Workstations Next Week?

2006-08-11T14:00:00.000+01:00

Well, at least the expected date for the new product launch is confirmed as August 15th, according to the Sun news pages. This is also the date that AMD are expected to finally formally announce the new x64 sockets and CPUs.

There is still some confusion about exactly what will be announced.

Ben Rockwood over at Cuddletech reckons that Sun will be showing not one but three new workstations at Linuxworld next week in AMD's booth. I guess that means they won't be UltraSPARC machines then, even though there are Sun fans who would like to see a workstation built using the much delayed UltraSPARC-IIIi+.

On the server side there are the rumoured x2100 M2 and x2200 M2 systems, about which I don't really need to say anymore.

There is also the long in gestation Honeycomb.

Sun has talked about Honeycomb as a technology for quite a while and the first hardware has arrived, sort of, in the form of the Sun StorageTek 5800 system. Each of the nodes looks a little like a mini Thumper system having 4 SATA disks an an Opteron CPU to enable you to move application logic close to the storage.

Sun did a feature on the system at one of their recent Network Computing events and have dragged it to various shows (including NAB2006 back in April) and even though there are plenty of documents, including the manuals, on the Sun web site about the 5800 it doesn't appear under the product list or on the Sun Store yet. So maybe next week will actually see the 5800 make an appearence on the price list as well.

Technology: Apple Chip Prices and Product Line Gap

2006-08-10T17:10:00.000+01:00

Having had a few days to absorb the various announcements, and the assoicated chatter, from the Apple WWDC there are a couple of things which stand out.

Firstly, despite Intel's recent move to a flatter pricing structure across its OEMs it apears that Apple is getting better prices on certain chips, or maybe that Dell is gouging its customers.

At WWDC Apple launched the Mac Pro workstation. If you want to buy one the cheapest option is equipped with a pair of 2 GHz Intel Xeon CPUs (each with 2 processor cores). To upgrade to a pair of 2.66 GHz CPUs will set you back £235, to go all the way to a pair of 3 GHz Xeons will cost you £870. Try upgrading a Dell Precision 690 from a pair of 2 GHz CPUs to 2.66 and you'll forking over £870, going up to to the 3 GHz option will set you back a whopping £1,390. The Inquirer have noticed this little pricing oddity as well.

The second thing which struck me is that Apple have a hole in their current product line.

If you want to buy a Mac you start off at the cheap end with the Mac Mini starting at around £399. The small form factor of the Mini (only 17cm square) means you can't put in a decent graphics card and you are limited to a 2.5" hard disk. Next up you have the iMac starting at £879. Being built into the back of an LCD monitor imposes simlar restrictions, limited graphics and limited expandability. At WWDC Apple launched the Mac Pro which starts at £1,699. The Mac Pro is the only machine in the line up where you can install more than one hard drive, more than one optical drive, have a sensible choice of graphics cards and a decent number of expansion slots.

Apple are missing a sensibly priced, basic desktop machine, something at least one other person has noticed.

Given the cost of making small PCs Apple could almost certainly produce a standard sized desktop for the same price as the more expensive Mac Mini configurations. Apple aren't making use of the Intel Core 2 Duo chip yet so perhaps this is where it will make its first appearance.

If Apple want a larger slice of the market this desktop shaped hole in their product line needs to be filled in.

Technology: Apple's Leopard Time Machine

2006-08-08T13:20:00.000+01:00

Apple's Time Machine

Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is on at the moment and, as usual, Steve Jobs used his keynote address to announce new Apple products.

One of the most interesting things announced wasn't the new Intel based Mac Pro system (although it does look very nice) but a nice piece of technology which Apple will be building into the next version of the Mac operating system.

When it is release in early 2007 the next Mac OS, codenamed Leopard, will have a feature called Time Machine.

You will be able to set your computer to take a backup of the current files, say at midnight every day. This is nothing new but Apple, being Apple, take a boring but useful feature and make it compelling and cool by adding a simple to understand, easy to use and pretty to look at frontend.

The Time Machine system comes with an interface which allows you to scroll back and forth through different versions of your data, seeing it as it would have appeared at the time the backup was taken. It's difficult to describe but easy to grasp if you watch the video demo which Apple have provided.

Tim's ZFS Browser Idea

Oddly enough back in May, inspired by the snapshot feature* in Sun's ZFS filesystem, Tim Foster had an idea for a useful desktop application.

Tim imagined a very similar way of navigating back through older versions of the files so that you could recover lost data.

I wonder if this is an exmaple of parallel evolution in computing or did someone at Apple stumble across Tim's idea and decide it would make a good Mac OS feature?

* ZFS allows you to instruct the computer to take a snapshot of the hard disk. A snapshot is a view of the disk as it was at a particular point in time. Having created a snapshot you can go on editing files, creating new ones and so on but the snapshot remains unchanged.

Technology: Sun Opteron Socket F Systems Due in August?

2006-08-07T09:15:00.000+01:00

If you've been reading The Register you might be expecting to find an article on potential new systems from Sun here.

Despite what Ashlee Vance speculates I didn't remove it because Sun ... seem to have convinced me to do so. Something which Ashlee could have found out if he'd contacted me (he does have my email after all). I dropped the article for two reasons:

Firstly I wasn't entirely happy with it. It sounded far too much like a Register article, too many "it seems", "it sounds like"s and "it may be"s for my liking.

I'd had the article in draft form for a few days, since seeing Robert Milkowski reference to a new Sun Workstation, called Munich. As more information became available I was updating the article and then, when the new server names appeared on the Sun web site I thought it was time to post it, before someone else beat me to it. Reading the article again before the weekend I still didn't like the large amount of speculation mixed in with the occasional fact, even I found it confusing, so I pulled it from the site until I could confirm the details and tidy up the language.

The second reason for removing the article was because I was unsure about whether I was allowed to post it.

The information came from the Opensolaris.org site (a possibility I wrote about in January). The OpenSolaris site has two different terms of use pages, one is housed on the OpenSolaris site (which appears to apply to the bugs database), one links to a terms of use at Sun.com (which appears to apply to the Solaris source code).

The limitations applied to the source code include a condition on use of Confidential Information requiring users of the site to hold confidential information in strict confidence. The terms of use associated with the bugs database has a statement that ANY INFORMATION OR MATERIAL YOU SUBMIT TO THIS WEBSITE WILL BE DEEMED NOT TO BE CONFIDENTIAL before going on to point out that other material on the site may be covered by more stringent terms.

If you consider that the bugs database is covered by the site's terms of use then the information I extracted wasn't confidential and could be distributed. If it was covered by the second license then it was confidential and should not have been distributed.

So, I pulled the article partly because I wasn't sure which license covered the data I'd found and partly because I wasn't happy with the way it was written.

I can honestly say that Sun did not contact me and ask me to remove it, if they had I'd have made sure that it disappeared from the Google cache as well.

Technology: IBM Launching New AMD Based Systems

2006-08-01T18:30:00.000+01:00

The wires were buzzing today with the news that IBM are going to be launching new machines based on AMD processors.

IBM have sold AMD based systems for some time but they've never really committed to the platform in the same which HP and Sun have. The rumours are that a couple of the new systems will be blade servers but nothing much else has leaked out so far, only El Reg managed to dig up anything.

The new systems will be the x3455 a 1U 2 socket system aimed at the HPC market, it will take up to 48GB of RAM and has an HTX slot for things like Inifipath adaptors. The x3655 a 2U 2 socket system capable of housing either 8 2.5" hard disks or 6 3.5", it also has the HTX slot and, like the x3455, has a pair of ethernet adaptors. The x3755 is probably a 4 socket rackmount, I can't find any details on that at the moment. There are also two blades the LS21 with 2 sockets and the LS41 a 4 socket blade with 4 ethernet ports, 2 SAS hard disks and up to 64GB of DDR2 RAM.

There is the vague possibility that the announcements won't happen on the date most people expect (1st August), given that AMD are rumoured to be moving back the official announcement of Socket F and Socket AM2.

It would seem a little odd for IBM to go jumping the gun and launching systems before AMD have got around to officially announcing the technology they are based on. I'd guess that the only way IBM could launch today is if they sweep the whole Socket F thing under the carpet or do a joint announcement with AMD. The latter would confirm the rumours of closer ties between the two companies and would also be a snub to Sun, who are reckoned to be the Tier 1 vendor with the closest links to AMD. A joint announcement would also steal a little thunder from Sun's expected launch of a couple of servers and a workstation based on the new AMD technology due later this month.

Pizza Hut Salad Bar Abuse

2006-08-01T08:55:00.000+01:00

I know that when I was a poor student we used to make the most of the salad bar by building up the dish a little with cucumber slices but this is ridiculous.

As the original article implies, don't be suprised if you get thrown out for trying this sort of thing yourself.

Technology: Sun and Getting the Word Out

2006-07-28T22:30:00.000+01:00

A couple of days ago Jim Grisanzo commented on a quote from Rich Green which argued that one of Sun's current problems was "getting the word out" about their products.

I think the computer press is beginning to notice that Sun, once again, has a compelling product line. I noticed in the rash of stories about the release of IBM's latest Power based systems a number of them spent some time talking about the competition including this gem of a quote from a Datamonitor Computerwire article:

And Sun's Opteron-based Galaxy servers offer excellent price/performance, attractive thermals, and run Solaris 10, which is arguably the best implementation of Unix on the market and certainly the most open now thanks to the OpenSolaris project.

That sounds like one journalist to whom Sun have "got the word out".

Technology: New Sun systems in August?

2006-07-21T16:00:00.000+01:00

I came across an interesting comment in this article commenting on the deepening relationship between IBM and AMD:

Sun, by far the most enthusiastic Opteron partner, plans to announce new Rev F-based servers soon.

Given that they've just launched the Sun Blade 8000/x8400, the Sun Fire x4600 and the Sun Fire x4500 I wonder what new systems they have left to bring out. It's more likely that the announcement will be for upgrades to the x2100 and the x4100/x4200 servers. It also make me wonder, why did they launch a 4 socket blade (the x8400) a few weeks before the Opteron socket gets an upgrade?

Incidentally, Sun have done something interesting with the x8400 blade if the SPEC results are anything to judge by. BM Seer reports that the x8400 gets a SPEC FP rate result of 182, about 12% more than you would expect from scaling up the result from the same CPU type in the x4100. Given that SPEC fp rate doesn't usually scale linearly and the information indicates that box systems are running the same software I wonder what hardware changes give rise to the extra 12% performance.

Technology: Woodcrest's speed advantage set to end rise of Opteron?

2006-07-21T14:00:00.000+01:00

Recent benchmarks indicate that Intel's new Woodcrest core outperforms AMD's Opteron by a considerable margin, so why is it that big companies like IBM and Dell are increasing their commitment to Opteron?

Back in May Dell announced that they would stop being an Intel only shop and start selling Opteron servers. That commitment was initially for 4 socket servers but has widened, with rumours of 2 socket servers and even desktops running AMD CPUs. IBM started selling Opterons into the High Performance Computing (HPC) market a few years ago becuase they couldn't compete in that market selling Xeon systems. Since then Opteron has been a poor cousin at IBM, for a long time all they sold was a single server aimed at the HPC compute cluster market. Recently they increased their Opteron range and then today there are news stories about a deeper commitment between IBM and AMD.

It appears odd that Dell and IBM are developing relationships with AMD at a time when Intel appear to finally have a CPU to compete with Opteron.

So, why are Dell and IBM getting so keen on Opteron now?

Here are some benchmark results which point to the answer.

First: GamePC's comparison of Woodcrest vs Opteron performance. The Woodcrest beats the Opteron on pretty much all the benchmarks, except the last one on this page where Opteron has up to a 40% speed advantage.

Second: SPECfp and SPECfp_rate results for Woodcrest vs Opteron. A single Woodcrest core (@ 3.0GHz) records a 51% higher score than a single Opteron core (@ 2.6Ghz). A 2 socket dual core Woodcrest only records a 2% higher score than a 2 socket Opteron (84.1 vs 82.4).

Third: This performance comparison of the new AMD AM2 socket versus the old version gives an indication of the extra performance gained from replacing DDR with DDR2 memory.

The Opteron gained a lot of market share from Intel by taking over the vast majority of the HPC market. One of the most important things to people in that market is Memory Bandwidth.

The 3 results above indicate that, whilst Intel have improved the CPU performance, they still can't get data into and out of the chip as fast as AMD can on the Opteron. What's more sometime in August AMD release the lastest version of Opterons with a new socket which supports faster memory, the third reference above gives some feeling for how much more memory bandwidth that will provide to the new generation of Opterons (as much as 30% by some estimates).

So, whilst Woodcrest can now compete with Opteron in many areas Intel still haven't managed to overtake AMD in the one area which was partly responsible for the original success of Opteron - Memory Bandwidth.

Technology: Sun's Niagara II Ahead of Schedule

2006-07-18T13:30:00.000+01:00

News has surfaced which indicates that Sun have a working version of Niagara II silicon.

The multicore, multithreaded Niagara acrhitecture is based on work which was done by a company called Afara, which Sun acquired in 2002. The first version, the UltraSPARC-T1, stunned many Sun customers by being released earlier than planned and performing better than they expected. The new version will double the number of threads each processing core can run (8 threads for each of the 8 cores), it also adds one floating point unit per core (up from 1 for the whole chip), on chip support for 10Gb/s ethernet, on chip support for more encryption methods and is expected to be released at a higher clock speed than the current chip. Presumably it will also have a larger on chip cache and support for faster RAM to keep the extra 32 threads and 7 floating point units busy.

What makes it even more interesting is that the new chip is designed to support 2 socket operation. Now it's a pity that it doesn't look like the Niagara II will support more than 2 sockets but, given that the current Niagara can support 4 banks of RAM from each chip I can imagine that a 4 socket system (16 RAM banks in all) is probably a bit of over kill.

The Register ran a story a little while ago indicating that another Sun chip project, the UltraSPARC-IIIi+, has fallen behind schedule (again - it was scheduled for delivery in mid-2005 at one point).

I'm guessing the two pieces of news are related.

Sun has limited chip development resources and the concentration of effort which has resulted in the early testing of Niagara II seems to come at the expense of effort on UltraSPARC-IIIi+.

The expected UltraSPARC-IIIi+ systems (V215, V245 & V445) wouldn't have too much impact on the market anyway (unless the delay had been to skip to a dual core version, an UltraSPARC-IVi or some such as I once speculated). They are slower on computational tasks than Sun's Galaxy systems (the x2100, x4100 & x4200) and slower on multithreaded workloads than Sun's Niagara systems (T1000 & T2000) so I can't see how it makes sense to have the V215, V245 or V445 on the price list.

Technology: Sun launches products which are "unique in the industry".

2006-07-11T15:30:00.000+01:00

Launch day for Sun's new servers has finally arrived. The Sun Fire x4600, Sun Fire x4500 and Sun Blade 8000 have now all appeared on Sun's web site.

There is a great deal of coverage of the new systems already on the news sites: Computerworld, Mercury News, Internet News, VNU , The Register, News.com & Yahoo*. Many have taken up the disruptive technology idea which fits nicely into Sun's view as this being one of their iPod moments, a potential turning point for Sun as a company and the industry as a whole.

Andy Bechtolsheim continues the rhetoric (quoted from the New York Times)

All the products are completely unique in the industry.

I can almost hear some of you tutting at the redundant use of the word completely in the quote but the bigger issue is whether being unique in the market place is a good thing or not.

In many senses the original Apple iPod wasn't unique. It was built out of the same components as a whole host of other MP3 players, it played music through similar headphones and connected to a computer in the same way. What made the iPod special was that Apple put the standard components together in a nicer package and used better software. Pretty much the same things that Sun's best products have always had going for them.

In the end whether unique is a good thing comes down to whether the customers want your uniqueness or not.

I can see that there is a market for an 8 socket Opteron system, and the rapidly increasing use of virtualisation will help drive demand there. I can see the benefits of a cheap, large, reliable storage system and I have a feeling that there will be developments on the software side which make the x4500 an even more useful box soon. I can also, almost, see the benefits of the Blade 8000 box, a Blade server which communicates over a passive backplane so your investment lasts longer, reducing lifetime costs in purchase and maintenance. Whether there are enough customers for these new machines or not will be decided by how many companies out there agree with another statement from Andy:

We believe they bring value to customers.

* The worst coverage award goes to the ZDnet article which can't get the x4500 and x4600 straight, confusing the two models and claiming the x4600 is another storage box.

Technology: Sun x4600, x4500 Launch Rumours

2006-07-07T13:55:00.000+01:00

As usual the Register is trying to scoop the rest of the IT press by releasing details of the systems which Sun will be launching on July 11th.

Most of the information has already surfaced on other sites on the web (particularly the Sun Fire x4600 and Sun Fire x4500) but there are a few new items including sketchy details of the upcoming Sun Blade x8000 server systems. The x8000 is Sun's re-entry into the blade server market. Its a chassis into which you can plug a variety of servers. Opteron systems will be available at launch, apparently with 4 chip sockets, and Niagra based (the Reg said UltraSPARC based) systems will follow, codenamed Montoya. The Register neglect to mention any specific details of the x8000, like the probability that it will have native support for Infiniband connections between the blades as well as Ethernet. The Sun Fire v215 (boston) and Sun Fire v445 (seattle) should also appear next week, these are updates to the existing rackmount UltraSPARC IIIi servers. The v215 and v445 first surfaced as potential product names back in January.

The machines mentioned by El Reg leave me with one question: Where's the 4 socket rackmount server?

In quite a few places over the past the name Sun Fire x4400 has cropped up with the assumption that it will be a 4 socket Opteron system and I've been wondering where its got to. It seems odd that Sun will be launching an 8 socket system next week when it should be easier to get the 4 socket system working.

Maybe, though, there is some method to this madness.

The AMD Opteron CPUs support "glueless" operation in 1, 2, 4 and 8 socket systems. However, the current HyperTransport connections on the chip have trouble keeping up with all the traffic required to ensure cache coherency as you add sockets. (This is why people like Newisys have been working on ways of getting more Opterons working together, their Horus/Extendiscale solution allows for 32 socket systems.)

The trouble is that using such solutions such as Horus on a 4 socket server would make it too expensive.

4 socket systems have to compete with relatively cheap 4 socket Intel Xeon systems from other Tier 1 vendors like IBM and Dell. A 4 socket Horus based Opteron would be too expensive to compete in that market.

I believe Sun are waiting for the next generation Opterons which use a new socket with improved HyperTransport links, then they'll introduce a 4 socket rackmount server. The costs will be lower because there'll be no need for Horus or anything similar to get the chips working at sensible speeds and that will allow Sun to compete head on with IBM and Dell in the 4 socket space.

Mind you, that doesn't explain how they are managing to launch a 4 socket blade for the new x8000 blade chassis. Maybe it'll be one of those old Sun launches where the product is announced and ships 3 months later.

Technology: Deepening Collaboration Between Sun and AMD?

2006-07-06T14:50:00.000+01:00

The Inquirer have a (very short) story today claiming that Sun and AMD are going to share a common [cpu] socket in 2008.

It isn't entirely implausible, Sun's chips have sat on a switched connection to the system since the introduction of UltraSPARC, AMD's have since the introduction of Athlon and Opteron. It isn't beyond the realms of possibility that Sun simply swapper the UPA and JBus connections for HT ones. Sun have also pooh-poohed the idea of the HTX mechanism for plugging in co-processors and so on, maybe that's because they were looking to plug straight into the CPU socket itself.

People have had trouble builing large Opteron systems, the performance doesn't scale on the current solution even though it can theoretically support 8 CPU sockets. Sun have a lot of experience in that area, but they've had trouble making a cheap enough machine at the one and two socket end where AMD have most of their experience.

So, if the rumour is true, it would look like a good solution for both companies.

For Sun it would also be a return to their roots of taking commodity hardware and bolting it together to make something a little better than the sum of its parts.

On the other hand someone from The Inquirer might just have got hold of the wrong end of a stick somewhere.

Personal: Learning from Convent Life

2006-07-04T17:00:00.000+01:00

I watched another episode of The Convent last night (it has appeared on NTL's On Demand service again).

I'm watching The Convent because I was really impressed by The Monastery when it was shown last year. The Monastery took 5 man from varied backgrounds who were mostly people who were struggling with the idea of faith and what it meant. By the time the Beeb filmed a programme about the 5 men around a year later one had become a prison visitor and preacher, one had been accepted for training in the priesthood, one regularly visited the monks as he could clearly point to an incident during the filming of the series which had profoundly changed his life and one had given up his high powered job to work in music production simply because he enjoyed it. Only one out of the 5 appeared to be largely unaffected by the programme.

Which made me wonder, what would happen to the 4 women selected to join the convent of the Poor Clares of Arundel?

The nuns live their lives according to a strict timetable which leaves little room for the usual pattern of modern life, doing what you want to do when you want to do it. Then nuns get up at a particular time, have 7 services a day at fixed times, eat, meditate and work - all to a strict timetable. But, as the nuns explain, by submitting their lives to such a strict timetable it gives them the freedom to concentrate on God and what he wants to say to them.

What seems to be very difficult for the women who are attempting to live the convent life is not just the strict timetable but the silence. For large parts of the day they do not communicate with each other and modern distractions such as TV, Radio and the Internet simply aren't there. The controlled timetable combined with this enforced silence appears to force all involved to think about who they are and what they believe in a way which simply did not happen outside the Convent.

I can see that the experience is changing the four women but I think watching the programme is also teaching me something as well.

Technology: TSUBAME not Running Solaris

2006-07-04T16:00:00.000+01:00

Well, it seems not only was I misquoted by I was wrong too.

Sun's own press release about the huge Tsubame cluster at the Tokyo Institute of Technology states that:

Rapid deployment of the system was made possible through NEC's system integration expertise and the use of Sun's N1 management software running on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS)

The press release goes on to say that the system can support both the Solaris 10 OS and the Linux operating system. Well, it seems that, according to information on the cluster from Tokyo, that the system is running SuSE Enterprise Linux 9 rather than Solaris. I do hope that the system ends up running a bit more Solaris and bit less Linux because I still believe that Solaris is the better OS but, given the domination of Linux in this market, it isn't suprised that there's more SuSE than Sol at the moment.

For those of you who can't wait until July 11th to hear Sun's official announcement of the x4600 and x4500 systems used in Tsubame the page above links to a couple of powerpoint slides with a schematic diagram of the x4500 and a picture of the insides of an x4600.

Technology: Sun Sandbagging on Tsubame HPC Performance?

2006-06-30T09:48:00.000+01:00

With the release of the latest of the Top 500 Supercomputers list there has been a lot of press commenting on Sun's return to the top 10.

Sun have just installed* a cluster with 10,368 processor cores (648 Sun Fire x4600 systems with 8 dual core AMD Opteron CPUs in each system) which gave them 7th place on the Top 500 list. With a performance of 38,180 Gigaflops that means each processor is roughly 3.7 Gflops each (the cluster has mainly 2.4GHz Opterons with a few running at 2.6GHz).

The thing is that this cluster is also supposed to be using the Clearspeed Advance Accelerator boards (360 according to their own press release). The Clearspeed boards use a pair of CSX600 processors each of which provides a theoretical peak of 25 Gflops of computing power. One of these cards appears in the latest Performance of Various Computers Using Standard Linear Equations paper from Jack Dongarra. The card is benchmarked in an IBM system with a pair of 2.4GHz Opterons, instead of the 7 Gflops you'd expect for such a system it returns a score of 30.2 Gflops. I couldn't dig out details of the test so I can't tell if that score is using only the Clearspeed card or whether it is also using the Opteron CPUs as well.

So the worst case for the Tsubame cluster (if they can get all those cards and Opteron CPUs working together) is an extra 8,280 Gflops (360 cards each contributing around 23 Gflops). Clearspeed's own benchmarks suggest that increase the problem size can push the performance into the 40 Gflops per board range, potentially adding 14,400 Gflops to the cluster's performance. That would be just enough to put Tsubame into the 50 Tflops range and give it 5th spot on the list. Maybe they'll have them all working by the time the next Top 500 list is produced in November...

* Actually it was NEC who did the installation, Sun provided the kit but NEC are the local integrator.

Technology: Intel finally ready to compete for HPC with AMD

2006-06-27T15:54:00.000+01:00

The wires are full of the news that Intel have just launched their Woodcrest chip, a product which should restore their fortunes in the HPC market after a few years in the wilderness.

AMD has been pretty much the only sane choice for HPC clusters for some time, partly because of a series of mistakes which Intel made.

Firstly Intel designed the Pentium 4 architecture with the expectation of high, and rapidly increasing, clock speeds. Unfortunately they, like the rest of the chip producing industry, got caught out by some unexpected problems in silicon manufacturing. Every 2 years or so the guys making silicon chips manage to make the individual components of the chips (the logic gates and the wires that join them) that little bit smaller. Throughout the 80's and 90's this process shrink not only meant you could use more transistors, making the chips more complicated and able to achieve more in each clock cycle, but it also meant the clock speed (number of clock cylces per second) of the chips increased. As Bernie Meyerson, IBM's chief technology officer put it:

Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice. Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue.

Secondly Intel made a big mistake with the memory architecture on the Pentium 4. There wasn't really a problem when you had a single processor in a system but when you put 2 CPUs in a single machine they had to share the RAM. By the second generation of Pentium 4's (and the Xeon branded version which Intel sold for use in servers) a single processor could pull data from the system's RAM as fast as the memory system would allow. If you put two processors in a system they had to share the memory system so if they both wanted data at the same time they would each only get half as much data per second as they were capable of handling.

Thirdly Intel didn't realise the importance of multicore processors quickly enough, which is related to the first problem. For 20 years Intel had managed to double the performance of their processors every 18 months to 2 years. When you can no longer do that they only option, if you want a computer which work faster, is to give it more than one processor. Intel didn't catch on to this early enough and when they did their solution was to use a multichip module, they had to manufacture two silicon chips then package them together so that they could plug into one socket on the motherboard.

All of these mistakes were probably related to the whole Itanium mentality which Intel had at the time. Intel realised that 64bit chips were the future, they also realised that the x86 architecture was a massive cludge and they could do with starting from scratch, so they did. Intel concentrated a huge amount of effort on the Itanium 64 bit CPU and so didn't worry too much about the short comings of the Pentium 4. That allowed AMD to catch Intel on the hop with the launch of the Opteron CPU.

The AMD Opteron was designed with the assumption that it would become a multicore CPU, it was designed with a different memory architecture which increases the available memory bandwidth as you add more CPU sockets and it was designed to do more work in a given clock cycle. So, over the past few years, the Opteron has garnered the lions share of the High Performance Computing cluster market. It's faster, uses less power and has higher memory bandwidth (which is very important in a lot of high performance computing applications).

Now, with the launch of the Woodcrest family of CPUs, Intel finally has a processor which can compete. If AMD don't have a few improvements to the Opteron up their sleeves they could find it hard to maintain their current dominance of the HPC market.

Radio: The Very World of Milton Jones

2006-06-14T13:50:00.000+01:00

BBC7 are rerunning a series of The Very World of Milton Jones.

The series was originally broadcast on Radio 4 and is a classic example of Radio 4 comedy. A surreal half hour crammed full of some of great, and terrible, puns.

The premise of the show is that, each week, Milton is facing death in some way or another and his life flashes before him as he awaits his fate. I love the way Milton isn't ashamed of basing half an hour of comedy around a collection of puns. If you are a pun fan you can still catch the show on the listen again page for Tuesday.

Technology: Trend in University Clusters is towards Sun's Solaris

2006-06-14T13:16:00.000+01:00

Well, that isn't quite what I said.

I had a chat a few days ago with a journalist (James Brown) on Vnunet's Computing magazine. He was looking for comments on a cluster project in Southampton University which is using Microsoft Compute Cluster Server 2003 as the cluster O/S.

Dr Kenji Takeda from Southampton is quoted in the article as saying:

Using Windows solves a traditional barrier to entry for new users because it takes the use of the cluster out of the hands of Unix and Linux hacks.

which I sort of agree with. There are a lot of people with Windows skills who may find it easier to start using a cluster running a Windows based O/S than a UNIX based O/S.

Towards the bottom of the short article (titled Windows selected for cluster project) is this line:

The trend in university clusters is towards Sun’s Solaris, which has the tools to deal with cluster problems, says Fayer.

which doesn't really represent what I said. I pointed out that some clusters are moving to Solaris instead of Linux or offering Solaris as well as Linux. I was thinking of the huge system which Sun are building in Tokyo at the moment. In a market (high performance compute clusters) which is totally dominated by Linux a single high profile installation of a cluster using Solaris is hardly a trend and I wasn't intending to protray it as such, but maybe it will be an indication to others that such a thing is possible. (On the other hand it could just be an indication that Linux doesn't run, or Solaris runs better, on the 16 core, 8 socket Sun Fire x4600s which are rumoured to make up a large part of the cluster.)

On the plus side he did include something close to what I said on relative performance of Windows, Linux and Solaris:

If you look at benchmarks on similar server platforms, Linux or Sun’s Solaris operating system will run significantly better than Windows

It's a shame there aren't more direct comparison benchmarks to prove that statement but you can google up quite a lot of supporting evidence (Windows 2003 vs Linux File Server Benchmark, Redhat vs Solaris OLTP benchmark, SPECjbb results for the same hardware running Solaris, Windows and Linux) .

James did promise to send me a copy of what he was going to attribute to me so I could check it, a reminder that the only journalist I can really trust is Dave...

Books: Redeeming Creatures by David Williamson

2006-06-12T12:50:00.000+01:00

Hurrah!

I just had notification from Lulu that Dave's new book, Redeeming Creatures, has shipped.

I'll have to get Dave to sign it, maybe I can persaude him to follow the tradition of another author named Dave and embelish the signature with a sketch - even if its a reproduction of the infamous Taxi for Williamson! picture.

Technology: Sun Niagra Blade Arriving Soon?

2006-06-09T11:15:00.000+01:00

A couple of days ago The Register reported that Sun is going to be re-entering the blade server market again with Opteron systems codenamed Andromeda.

It looks like Sun will also be rolling out an UltraSPARC-T1 based blade as well. The Open Solaris source code is starting to pick up references to a montoya code name which is a sun4v architecture (ie. UltraSPARC-T1) blade system called the CP3060.

From the various files knocking around it looks like it will have 4 network ports - 2 are listed as ethernets, 2 as serdes connections. I'm guessing the serdes reference indicates that the ports are a little more flexible than standard GigE ports, maybe something like Infiniband for connecting the blades to each other.

You can assume it will then have the usual Niagra stuff, multiple memory banks, SATA/SAS disk connections etc.

Science: If you want to convince someone take them out for coffee

2006-06-06T11:30:00.000+01:00

Caffeine Molecule

The New Scientist has an article reporting on a paper from the European Journal of Social Psychology indicating that coffee can make you more open minded.

Scientists seem to like studying the effects of caffeine so there have been plenty of previous studies which point to the idea that coffee can enhance your mental faculties. The article reports that 200mg of caffeine (a couple of cups) are about the best amount to improve your mental attention and enhance cognition.

The researchers, led by Dr Pearl Martin of the University of Queensland, go on to argue that

Moderate doses of caffeine can also make you more easily convinced by arguments that go against your beliefs ... because it improves ability to understand the reasoning behind the statements.

So now I know that, next time I'm trying to convince someone of something, I need to get them to drink a couple of cups of coffee first.

Technology: Drat, wrong code name

2006-06-01T08:16:00.000+01:00

Reading Jonathan Schwartz's weblog this morning I realised I made a mistake yesterday.

Jonathan has a long post today covering items from yesterday's quarterly conference call. Near the middle of Jonathan's article a few new and upcoming products were mentioned which made me realise that I possibly tagged the right hardware with the wrong codename.

The upcoming Sun Fire x4500 really has the codename Thumper, not Honeycomb. Jonathan comfirmed that it is a 24TB NAS box in a miniature package running Solaris and ZFS. Other rumours indicate that it is a 4U rackmount box with 48 x 500GB SATA disks, a pair of Opteron CPU sockets and 4 x GB/s ethernet ports.

Yesterday I linked the x4500 with the Honeycomb project. That may still be possible, as Honeycomb appears to be a software framework rather than a physical entity, but the real internal name for the new NAS box from Sun is Thumper. We'll have to wait until June to see whether Sun have another successful product on their hands.

Technology: Sun x4500 also looming

2006-05-31T13:24:00.000+01:00

It looks like Sun's much rumoured honeycomb storage system may have acquired a name, the Sun Fire x4500.

Back in January I commented that Sun's open source initiative, and particularly the OpenGrok based OpenSolaris source browser, is going to make it more difficult for them to keep secrets about upcoming products. A nice example has just surfaced, the Sun Fire x4500, probably the first hardware to come out of the Honeycomb project.

If you wander on over to the OpenSolaris source browser and type in x4500 or sfx4500 you'll see various operating system source code files relating to the new system. From those it looks like the system has 48 SATA drives and, given its in the x86 part of the source tree, Opteron CPUs.

Of the various rumours which are floating around as to why this piece of hardware is so late the most plausible seems to be that it needs ZFS to work and ZFS only recently made it into the officially supported version of Solaris.

Technology: Sun x4600 getting closer to launch

2006-05-27T21:16:00.001+01:00

It looks like Sun are doing one of their stealth product launches again.

I have a Google alert set up to email me if it spots certain rumoured to be released products on the web (sad, isn't it?) One of those products being the long expected Sun Fire x4600.

The alert emailed me today with details of a file which details a number of configurations and expansion options for the new x4600 servers, on a price list which is supposed to be valid from 24th May, 2006. The machine has appeared on a UK academic price list from a Sun reseller as well.

The x4600 is listed with 4 CPUs (Opteron 856 or 885) or 8 CPUs (885 only), the smaller configs come with 8x2GB RAM, the larger ones with 16x2GB. Memory is sold in 2x1GB or 2x2GB upgrade options and from the CPU options it appears the processors plug into some kind of expansion board.

I have a theory about why the x4600 has taken longer to launch than expected - they needed all the production capacity to supply the 10,480 processor system recently installed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. That would be 655 servers, if they were all 8 processor x4600. Such an installtion would also help to expain the fact that Sun's last quarter saw a higher growth in revenue than in units shipped (compared to their competition) as the x4600s certainly aren't the cheapest way to buy Opteron CPUs.

Personal: Back from holiday

2006-05-18T13:43:00.000+01:00

Last Friday at about 4am we landed back in Cardiff after a two week trip to Florida - which is why I haven't updated this thing in a while.

Claire has started writing up our travels and I'll be doing the same, once I've caught up with 2 weeks of not being at work. My write ups might have to wait for a while as my camera is still old technology which means I have to send the films off for developing, I still haven't managed to find a digital I'd swap my Ricoh for.

Technology: Dell service. They came, they diagnosed, they fixed.

2006-04-26T19:35:00.000+01:00

Well, the engineer arrived as promised and replaced the laptop screen. I now have a working Latitude again, just in time as we're off on holiday tomorrow.

What's more I even had the promised phone call from the nice Dell lady with the irish accent who I spoke to yeserday, she was just making sure that everything was OK.

I think the moral is that if you want Dell to come out and fix something don't report it with the email system, phone them. They respond more quickly and you get to speak to people with reassuringly lilting accents.

Technology: Stony silence from Dell on the laptop

2006-04-25T16:30:00.000+01:00

So, having submitted an email support call for my busted Dell Latitude I get an email back with a reference number promising a response within 24 hours.

75 hours later there's been no response to the email and I finally have a few moments to give them a ring.

Having negotiated the usual "Press 1 if it is a Home system, Press 2 for a Business system" malarky I get through to the automated queuing system. A nice voice comes on over the background music to inform me that I am a Position Zero in the queue.

Position Zero?

The first thought that enters my head is that there must be something wrong with the queue counting mechanism, then it dawns on me: they actually got someone to record the number Zero to be used in the system! Were these guys C programmers or something? Who records the voice over for the option which shouldn't actually happen?

Having got through (it took a couple of minutes for me to get from zero to talking to the help desk) the process of reporting the fault was painless enough. Suprisingly, given the fact that its on a 90 day return to manufacturer warranty, Dell are actually sending an engineer round tomorrow to replace the screen. Within a minute or two an email confirmation had arrived confirming all the details. What's more 5 minutes later I get a call back from the help desk with more details and a promise that the engineer will phone before they come tomorrow. What's more they also promised to phone back tomorrow evening to make sure that everything has been properly sorted.

So, they lose points for shipping a laptop which broke in the first couple of days, they lose a few more for not replying to the email but I reckon they might quite a few back with the quality of the telephone service, and all for a measly £350 order.

Update:
So, within about 10 minutes of the confirmations coming through I have another email from Dell.

I note that since sending the email you have been in contact with a telephone agent who is now handling the issue.

Ho hum.

Technology: Jonathan Schwartz becomes Sun's new CEO

2006-04-24T22:04:00.000+01:00

Well, the rumours had some germ of truth in them, with the Inquirer being on the button as usual. Scott McNealy isn't leaving Sun but he is stepping down as CEO. Scott has been replaced by Jonathan Schwartz.

Over the past year Sun's shares have been creeping up from their dreadful post dot com boom performance. They bottomed out at about $2.5 each in late 2002 having sat at around $70 in early 2000. I think the change of CEO news will accelerate the recovery.

Update:
Investors must have liked the news because Yahoo finance indicate that Sun's shares gained around 8%. Think how much they might have gone up if Sun had actually announced a profit instead of another quarter losing money. The last time I remember seeing Sun's shares spike like this was when they staged a press conference with Google. That time it was only a 7% spike, so Jonathan must be more valued than Google by the investors.

Technology: HP may be bulletproof but Dell certainly isn't

2006-04-22T14:57:00.000+01:00

Hardly fair to compare a £350 laptop with a £500,000 storage system but I just had a brand new Dell laptop give up the ghost on me.

I've been sorting out a laptop for a friend, just something cheap to do basic stuff on and maybe pay a DVD or two. Dell had a ridiculous offer on a Celeron machine, the Latitude 1300, which was going for £329 including VAT and delivery which fitted the bill nicely. It was a bit short of RAM but £30 to Scan sorted that out.

I ordered on line last week and Dell, with their usual efficiency had the laptop on our door step within a couple of days. Last night I'd just finished setting it up (having deleted all the rubbish that Dell pre-install and installed a load of freeware like OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird etc) and the screen died. Part way through a boot the image froze, though it was obvious that the machine was still running, and then acquired some interesting vertical colour bars.

A bit of diagnostics confirmed that the machine is fine, an external monitor works happily, its just that the built in TFT has decided not to play. The backlight is on but there are no pixels at home.

I know I shouldn't much from something so cheap but I suppose its a good job it failed that quickly (given the price is achieved by having practically no warranty - only 90 days). I should have taken more note of the fact that the Dell outlet store has a large number of Latitude 1300's; the outlet store sells reconditioned machines that have been returned for some reason, maybe the large number is due to their unreliability?

Ah well. We'll have to wait and see how bulletproof Dell's support system is.

Technology: What does bulletproof reliability really mean?

2006-04-21T14:25:00.000+01:00

The Inquirer is reporting that HP Storageworks arrays really are bulletproof, sort of.

To demonstrate the reliability features of their Storageworks array HP decided to shoot one whilst it was running. The test, detailed on the HP web site, was to see if the system could continue to stream video to its clients without any hiccups whilst the bullet was making its way through the system. Apparently it worked.

I wouldn't really call the system bulletproof, as the whole point of the demo was that the bullet goes all the way through, breaking a fish tank on the opposite side from entry just for show. (Don't worry, animal friendly HP removed the goldfish before firing the bullet.)

Given that HP managed to keep the video streaming whilst being punctured its a shame that the mention of the story on The Inquirer means their servers can't stream the video of the test; 20 minutes after clicking on the link and I still only have 35% of the 3 minute video (a measely 2kbytes per second).

Radio: John Humphrys on good form

2006-04-21T13:14:00.000+01:00

John Humphrys was on good form this morning on the Today programme. He came out with some interesting nonsense statements, one of the perils of working on live radio. The one that stuck in my head was when he was introducing Micheal Ancram.

John stated that Micheal Ancram was the former shadow foreign secretary

I wonder how he managed to stop being the former shadow foreign secretary?

Was there some sort of complex time travel involved, or maybe he had to loan someone a lot of money to achieve such a status? Could he share his technique so that we can all stop being something that we were and rewrite our own life history?

Book: Peopleware Productive Projects and Teams

2006-04-21T13:10:00.000+01:00

This little gem arrived in the post from Amazon a few weeks ago, written by a couple of consultants (Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister) it contains a series of short essays on various aspects of team and project management.

That might not sound very interesting or readable but it is. Tom and Tim manage to keep each of the essays informative and entertaining by drawing heavily on real world experience and simply telling the stories of things which work and things which don't. The book has a down to earth style which isn't full of management speak, the basic summary seems to be:

If you want to create a succesful business or project:

Hire good people.
Give them a good working environment.
Let them get on with it.

A lot of the book is about how large corporations, usually in an effort to save money, create a working environment which is almost designed to prevent work occuring. Shared offices, phones which must be answered within so many rings, emails, instant messages and myriad other interruptions - all of which break the state of flow. Flow, which appears in the chapter titled Brain Time Versus Body Time, is something which is by a strange coincidence related to things I was writing about this time last year. To quote Peopleware:

During single-minded work time, people are ideally in a state that psychologists call flow. Flow is a condition of deep, nearly meditative involvement. In this state, there is a gentle sens of euphoria, and on is largely unaware of the passage of time: "I began to work. I looked up, and three hours had passed."

Peopleware reports that it typically takes 15 minutes to get back into flow state so any and all interruptions are costing the employer at least 15 minutes of decent work.

One other interesting point the book raises is the issue of background music. The authors theorise that people who listen to music whilst working are actually occupying one side of their brain with the music and, therefore, depriving their work of that part of the brain's input. The theory is based around the old left brain logic, right brain creativity idea. Although most of the work they are describing is logical (and so using the left of the brain) you occasionally need those creative leaps of genius (which involve the right of the brain). If the creative bit of your brain (whether it's on the left or right) is busy humming along to the music it isn't paying attention to the task at hand and so you miss those eureka moments.

Having read Peopleware I can heartily recommend it (and other people seem to agree). It was quick to read, entertaining and informative. Although specifically targetted at the computing world, and programming in particular, I think Peopleware would be a useful book for anyone leading or working in a team. I'll have to get more of Tom and Tim's books (and anyway, how can I resist a book called Walzing with Bears?)

Review: War of the Worlds live in Cardiff

2006-04-19T13:20:00.000+01:00

Sunday evening saw the touring production of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds arrive in Cardiff.

We bought tickets so long ago that we didn't realise the significance of the date; it was a bit odd to be heading off into town on Easter Sunday instead of heading into church. Town seemed pretty deserted, until we arrived at the Cardiff International Arena and joined the throng of people waiting to get in, not quite a rout of civilisation but enough to get us into the mood for the show.

Jeff Wayne wrote the music for War of the Worlds back in the 70's after his father, also a composer, gave him a copy of the classic H G Wells novel and suggested he might want to write a musical of it. Jeff had a few contacts in the music industry from his work as a producer including David Bows and arrows against the lightning Essex and Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues. The record was a big hit, helped in part by the voice of Richard Burton as the narrator and the quality of the recording cast.

Sunday's show saw the return of Justin Hayward playing the singing voice of The Journalist. The Journalist's speaking voice was provided by the original recording of Richard Burton with an odd projection onto a giant disembodied head; it didn't really work. I think Jeff would have been better off finding a new narrator, or even getting Justin to do it so we didn't have the journalist being played by two people. The rest of the singers were very good. The Parson didn't quite match the madness imposed on the role by Phil Lynott (of Thin Lizzy fame) in the original recording but that isn't suprising. The Artilleryman did a good job too, unlike the amateur version of the show we saw a few years ago he managed to hit all the high notes and not sound like a bad impersonation of David Essex.

The star of the musicians had to be the harpist/percussionist. Hidden away at the back of the electric section on the left of the stage she seemed to be the only one who was actually enjoying the music. The line up of guitarists seemed to be entirely preoccupied, it didn't help that their music was on short stands and they each had an array of effects pedals. The result was that they all seemed to spend the whole show looking at their feet instead of getting involved in the music.

The show augmented the music with a massive screen across the back of the stage showing various animated sequences and occasional glimpses of the artwork used on the original album. The animation (which may get turned into a film one day) was engaging enough but you wouldn't really call it spectacular. I'm guessing that most of the audience were like me and would have happily say through whatever effects they felt like throwing at us for a chance to hear the music live. The only thing which spoiled that was the dreadful accoustics of the CIA; sections of the back wall do a lovely job of reflecting high frequency sound so it sounds throughout like you have a slightly tardy cymbol player sitting at the back of the hall.

War of the Worlds is still on tour but, thanks in part to the recent rerelease of the album and the publicity spillover from the Tom Cruise film, all the venues are sold out. Shame, because I would have recommended you get a ticket.

Review: Millenium Actress

2006-03-30T21:20:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago I had some spare cash floating around as a result of a birthday so I decided to increase our collection of anime. Millenium Actress was a really good addition to the collection.

I picked up Millenium Actress because it was written and directed by Satoshi Kon. I knew the name because Satoshi Kon directed one of my all time favourite films, Perfect Blue. I first spotted the connection when playing with liveplasma, a sort of film connection browser.

Perfect Blue is a psychological thriller where some of the action takes place on the set of a TV series. In the middle of the film there is a wonderful sequence where the action jumps from reality to the filming of the series to nightmare. The jumps are reasonably obvious at first but then you start to wonder exactly which parts are reality and which parts aren't. You get more and more confused until the sequence resolves itself leading into the final act of the storyline. The same concept is used in Millenium Actress only for most of the film instead of a short section.

We are in a world where you aren't sure what is real and what isn't. The film starts with a documentary film maker called Genya Tachibana and his assitant recording material for a programme about the demolishion of a once great film studio. Genya searches out Chiyoko Fujiwara, one of the studio's most popular actresses, who has been living the life of a recluse since quitting the business many years before. Chiyoko agrees to be interviewed and from that point on things get interesting. We find out secrets from the past, we see clips from Chiyoko's old films and we learn all about Chiyoko and Genya.

Each frame of the film is a work of art, as you would expect from anime. The style of animation alters as the various films are potrayed, taking us on a rapid trip through Japanese history and the history of Japanese cinema. There are a few shots of city scapes and a couple of short interior shots which look like real film more than animation. This look is contrasted with the stylised feel of a sequence set in the 1940's where Chiyoko is the only character who is coloured in and moving set against various backgrounds which look a bit like faded sepia photographs.

Satoshi Kon and Sadayuki Murai (who shares the writing credits) have created a film which tells the real story of Chiyoko Fujiwara's life (the Actress of the title) through the unreality of the films which she starred in during her illustrious career.

Don't be fooled by the fact that it is a PG; this is not a children's film. This is the best kind of adult film, one which makes you think.

If I didn't already own a copy of this I'd be rushing out to buy it straight away. I'm sure I'll be watching it again soon and many more times after that.

Technology: Virtualisation for Windows Software Installation

2006-03-29T13:50:00.000+01:00

Altiris have released a free for personal use version of their Software Virtualisation Solution.

SVS allows you to install individual applications on Windows 2000, XP and 2003 into what Altiris call Virtual Software Packages. The SVS program controls the installation of the applications, tracking and recording all the changes they make to your PC. This information is stored in a layer which can be activated or deactivated at will. The ease of the whole SVS process is demonstrated in this video over at Lifehacker.com.

We use a similar tool provided by Novell to install applications on the networked PCs at work. Novell's Snapshot tool records changes made during application installation so it can duplicate them on other machines but it can't undo the settings in the same way SVS can. Neither can it distribute the installed application in such a simple way. SVS is so easy to use for application distribution that someone has already set up a download site for pre-built SVS applications. The list already includes Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Audacity and Gimp.

This free software release from Altiris has real potential to shake up the market, in the same way that VMware's free release of VMware Player did. Altiris are taking a leaf out of VMware's book in other ways too. Contribute to the Altiris Wiki and you could earn yourself $100. Not quite the $200,000 which VMware are giving away but still enough to encourage a little bit of community participation in SVS.

Next time I install a PC at home I'm going to be using SVS to install all the software. Not only will it mean much tighter control over the registry (meaning fewer problems with running Windows) but it also means when I do have to do the yearly reinstall of XP it'll be much quicker to put all that software back on again. I'll probably do it on my work machine too, I have to reinstall that every 3 or 4 months.

Why didn't Microsoft build something like this into Windows years ago? It would have made my job, and the job of other computing support people, so much easier.

Internet: Even Google makes mistakes...

2006-03-28T09:26:00.000+01:00

Back in December I lost access to my blog after I changed the settings to make a backup, I even started using my Wordpress blog as a backup just in case I couldn't get the blogger one back. After about a week, during which I failed to get any response from the Blogger support people, I was able to reclaim the address and carry on as before.

Today the official Google blog admits that they made a similar error. You see, once you change your publishing location in the blogger software it frees up your blog name for anyone else to use, which is exactly what someone did to the official Google blog address yesterday. It was briefly replaced by a message which started Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! (the page was at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-fix-your-blog-pleeasssee-3-p.html which now just returns an error).

The official explanation of the problem includes:

Update: We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

It is nice to know that even experts make mistakes. Maybe now Google will be encouraged to fix the problem properly?

Update:
Dave Walker of Cartoon Church fame (and now We Blog Cartoons) drew this rather appropriate commentary on Google's little mishap.

Review: Mirrormask

2006-03-17T13:55:00.000Z

Last night Claire and I meandered over to Chapter to catch Mirrormask, a fantasy aimed at young adults.

Once we'd found the place (I seem to have a blind spot with navigating in that area of Cardiff) it was obvious that the film wasn't attracting its target audience. I'm guessing that the typical Neil Gaiman fan isn't a young adult becuase the average age of the crowd was a decade or two older.

The film is about Helena, a juggler and popcorn sellers who works in her parent's circus and spends her spare time drawing oddpictures which are stuck all over her bedroom walls. Whilst her mother is in hospital, Helena finds herself dragged into a strange fantasy world. She hooks up with a juggler called Valentine and they attempt to solve this new, and very wierd, world's problems by location the Mirrormask.

The plot revolves around Helena so its fortunate that Stephanie Leonidas does such an outstanding job of playing the role and keeping it completely beleivable. The way she presents Helena suits the film's tagline of Enter a world where dreams are real. Though we are in a fantasy setting all of the actors manage to present some kind of reality, you don't really notice them, just the parts they are portraying; even Gina McKee who plays Joanne (Helen'as mother), the Dark Queen and the Light Queen.

There were quite a few nice cameos from well known brits. I was suprised to hear the voice of Robert Llewellyn (Scrapheap Challenge!), as the easy to confuse riddle asking Gryphon, and Steven Fry as the Librarian. I was even more suprised to see how they'd managed to typcast Andy Hamilton as a spiny dwarf thing.

Mirrormask was very entertaining. It had good dialogue throughout, effects that concentrated on potraying the world instead of leaping up and shouting "Look at me, I'm a special effect!" and an understandable, if a little predictable, plot. The pacing was a little slow at the start but improved as soon as Helena entered the fantasy world. The director, Dave McKean, also had the sense to end the film at the end. Instead of doing the 5 minute, explain the plot to people who haven't got it, hollywood style ending.

All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable film. Not quite good enough to rush out and get a copy of the DVD but I'll definately watch it again sometime.

Church: James, Money and Justice by Dave @ Mack

2006-03-16T13:55:00.000Z

Sunday was another good day at church, Mack has 3 Sunday services and they were all pretty enjoyable.

Unfortunately Claire wasn't feeling too well, which meant that she missed Dave's sermon from our second morning service.

Fortunately Dave puts his sermons up on the web, on his Faith and Consequences blog, so Claire was able to read the text of his talk on James, Money and Justice whilst Dave was delivering it at Mack.

Unfortunately reading a sermon isn't quite the same as listening to it, something which Martin Luther King commented on in his collection of sermons titled Strength to Love.

Fortunately, the sermons at Mack are recorded and are now being put on line for later listening. So you can now get closer to the experience of being there by listening to Dave (there are also a couple of talks which I gave from earlier in the series). If you're wondering about the odd noises and laughter at the start it was because Dave managed to dismantle the clip on radio mic whilst trying to attach it to his shirt, it took a while to put it back together again. Funnily enough we'd been discussing the previous evening how intelligent people are often clumsier than is normal for the population at large.

Technology: Sun should buy ClearSpeed

2006-03-15T13:55:00.000Z

Never mind all the speculation about Google buying Sun. Sun should be making an acquisition of their own, namely a little company called ClearSpeed.

The two companies have products and technologies which mix really well together, they are both trying to save the same problem; getting a large number of processing elements to work efficiently in a single chip package. Sun have the UltraSPARC-T1, a 32 thread integer CPU. ClearSpeed have the CSX600, a 96 thread floating point processor.

The two companies already have a relationship, they are both currently promoting their involvement in the shipment of a huge cluster to the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

In addition a rumour published in Electronics Weekly reckons that AMD are talking to ClearSpeed about producing a closely-coupled co-processor, spurred on by news of the performance (up to 250Gflops) of the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell processor. The article quotes Jeff Underhill, Business Development Manager for 64-bit applications at AMD as saying:Cell was a wake up call. Absolutely, things are underway at AMD as a result in looking at future products. Sun already have a close relationship with AMD so I'm guessing that if AMD incorporate ClearSpeed technology Sun will end up using it.

A buy out of ClearSpeed by Sun would give Sun access to engineers who have expertise in getting 96 processors running on a single piece of silicon (very useful given current work on Niagra, Niagra-II and Rock). ClearSpeed would get access to Sun's silicon partner, Texas Instruments, so could probably produce faster chips on a more advanced process. The combined company could work with AMD to produce a closely coupled accelerator chip, which I guess would connect into AMD's HyperTransport links. All these things would combine to give Sun a higher share of the growing HPC systems market and all for an outlay of around £100M, pocket change for a company the size of Sun.

Technology: Rumours of Sun's Rock

2006-03-14T21:29:00.000Z

The Register have done their usual trick and dug up some information on Sun's long distant Rock CPU.

The replacement for the UltraSPARC range (and the Fujitsu SPARC64 chips) is due in 2008 and will power the new APL range of systems. According to the information El Reg have found each chip will have 4 cores which each have 4 processing engines. The chip will also have 4 FGUs (floating point/graphics units).

In the past Sun haven't had a great record for delivering processors on time. They bucked the trend with the delivery of the UltraSPARC-T1, if they manage the same feat with the Rock CPU they should be able to regain some ground in the performance race, maybe even jump to the top of the pile again.

Review: Festen

2006-03-14T15:30:00.000Z

If you ever get the chance to see the play Festen - don't bother.

I should have followed my instinct and left after the first ten minutes rather than waste another hour and a half waiting for the end. Unconvincing characters who move around the stage without ever making any kind of connection with each other, a ridiculous plot and no sign of even a single believable line of dialogue.

The worst play I've seen in a long time. In fact, probably the worst play I've seen ever.

Personal: Memory Challenge number 6

2006-03-14T14:00:00.000Z

A Guardian science article about a BBC programme called the Get Smarter in a Week reminded me that we hadn't done a memory challenge for a while.

The premise of the programme was that doing simple things like brushing your teeth with the wrong hand, getting more exercise, changing your daily habits, memorising things and so on can improve your mind.

So, in honour of International π day (becuase 3/14 represents the 14th of March...) this week's memory challenge is to learn the first 100 digits of π. It might sound odd but quite a few people have done it before, there's a club for people who've managed it and web pages dedicated to helping you memorise the sequence (a practise known as Piphilology).

The first hundred digits look like this:

3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679

π is an wierd number which has an infinite number of non-recurring digits. It crops up in formulae all over the place, odd for something which is just the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. In theory you can find any pattern of digits somewhere within the digits of π, for example my birth date is at position 93,279,939 counting from the first digit after the decimal point (as found by the π search engine).

My favourite π related story is of a friend of ours called Ed who decided to celebrate his 10π day - why stick to celebrating the day of your birth only once every 365(ish) days after all. Ed had the wonderful idea to celebrate by eating nothing but pies that day, so he then spent ages working out which 10 different pies to eat.

Humour: Pearls before Swine

2006-03-08T17:00:00.000Z

I can't quite remember how I stumbled across Pearls Before Swine but it's become one of my favourite cartoons (along with Alex, Citizen Dog, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and occasionaly Dilbert).

Like all the comics hosted at Comics.com you can buy stuff with your choice of comic emblazoned across it. I'm really tempted to get a T-Shirt made up with today's comic on:

Some days my state of mind closely resembles that of the Dog O'Abject Despondancy.

On the other hand I think this one might be a better option:

Technology: Virtualisation as a software distribution medium

2006-03-03T10:20:00.000Z

One of the current hot trends in IT is virualisation. Virtualisation has been around in the server world for a long time, now its moving down to the desktop and starting to be used as a software distribution mechanism.

Virtualization is a framework or methodology of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments (a very general definition pinched from Kernelthread.com's Introduction to Virtualisation article).

Virtualisation has been used in the mainframe business for decades where special hardware was built into the systems to allow administrators to divide up the resources of big, and very expensive, computers. The technology has been moving down market and now features in smaller systems from companies like Sun. Software like VMware or Virtual PC brought virtualisation to the desktop. Soon Intel and AMD are will add support to their processors which will make virtualisation even easier and more efficient.

In Novemeber 2005 VMware (now a division of storage giant EMC) started giving away VMware Player, software which can run environments created with other VMware products (and also Microsoft's Virtual PC and Symantec's LiveState). People have been quick to realise the possibilites created by this move from VMware.

If you want to try out a version of Owl, Bugzilla or Twiki you can now download and install a working image, instead of having to build the software from scratch for yourself. Want to have a look at a version of Linux? Just go to the VMware Community Virtual Appliances site and download one from the growing list you'll find there. No more installing, no more configuring just download and run. The list of applications is going to continue to grow, helped along by VMware's Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge, a competition to create innovative appliances with a top prize of $100,000.

Vitualisation is following the trend of many computing innovations; having appeared in the mainframe world it is now on the verge of becoming a ubiquitous technology. I predict (for what its worth) that virtualisation is going to be an important technology in the next few years. I wouldn't be at all suprised if in 5 years time over half of servers and probably a large percentage of desktops are running at least one virtual machine.

Review: The IT Crowd Episode 5

2006-03-01T13:00:00.000Z

I think The Haunting of Bill Crouse continues the upward trend for the IT Crowd. (You can watch a few highlights on the Channel 4 web site.)

The characters have bedded in a little following the hiccup of Episode 3 and where they use those characters to derive the humour it works very well. Occasionally they go off a bit into slapstic and farce which is OK but sometimes they drag in previously unseen bit players to liven up the proceedings. The Haunting featured a few such characters so whilst Bill himself was OK the cleaning lady who was chasing Roy and the short mailman created for the Jen's Head scene didn't quite work as well.

Once again Moss was the main driver of the humour and plot with the main storyline being created by his problem with telling lies. It's a testament to the creation of the character of Moss that when he pulls on a plastic visor to peel an orange you don't think he's behaving perfectly normally, for Moss.

It's a shame UK TV companies don't seem to commit to sensible length series. I get the feeling that the IT Crowd could develop into a mini-classic, along the lines of Black Books or even Spaced, if it had more time and if it concentrated a little more on the IT side. I know I'm a techie but there isn't enough humour based around the unique situation of the IT department, the "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" joke is wearing extremely thin.

Review: The IT Crowd Episode 4

2006-02-18T14:28:00.000Z

Hmm. A slight return to form after the dip of last week's episode.

The premise of the out of favour with the boss goth locked in the server room worked quite well. He was suitably off this planet to convince you that he might be a goth. The script was a little better this week as well with some good lines from everyone ("Even goths are people Denham"). The small scenes set in the upper levels of the company also helped (they were missing last week) to reinforce the idea of the poor IT group stuck in the dingy basement.

I still think that Moss is the best character, he doesn't get many funny lines but his behaviour is what drives a fair bit of the better parts of the comedy. I love the scene where he has to sit down at his computer before Jen asks a question, only to be told by Roy "No Moss, don't Google the question."

If next week's episode continues the improvement the series might yet recover to be worth watching again.

Church: Interview with Desmond Tutu on the Today programme

2006-02-17T14:00:00.000Z

I caught part of an interesting interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the Today Programme this morning.

Fortunately, thanks to the beeb's listen again feature I was able to go back and listen the whole thing over lunch. Archbishop Tutu was being interviewed about his views on the detention of people in Guantanamo Bay and also about the proposed new anti-terror laws currently going through parliament in the UK. (See Tutu calls for Guantanamo closure for the BBC's write up of the interview, or listen to it here.)

I'm always impressed when I hear people like Archbishop Tutu.

Today he was forthright in his criticism, calling the situation in Guantanamo "horrendously disgraceful". Yet he didn't descend into anger, presenting instead a rational and reasonable critique. When asked general questions like "Do you agree with the UK policy which would detain people for 90 days?" he responded that South Africa used to have a similar policy "in the bad old days". When asked for direct comments on the current UK proposal allowing 28 days detention he asked the interviewer to imagine how they would feel if they were arrested and locked up for 28 days with no reason given and no charge being brought, "you tell me if 28 days would be too long".

I was struck by the Archbishop's humility and gentleness throughout the interview, when pressed on the 28 days issue and directly questioned on whether he trusted the British justice system he replied:

I'm looking on having learned a little bit about human rights and a little bit about the human capacity for misleading, the human capacity for trying to justify the unjustifiable. You see you can't say the end justifies the means. That is a perverse ethical position, to say the end you are looking for is the security of our people and so it doesn't really matter ultimately how we ensure that security is attained. That's frightening. That's frightening.

Having learned a little bit about human rights, talk about understatement. If you listen to the audio you'll hear that that line was delivered without any hint of amusement or sarcasm.

I've been trying to prepare a talk for church for this Sunday morning, it's on the second part of James chapter 3. I think I've just found a good example to illustrate verse 13:

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.

Technology: The real benefits of AJAX

2006-02-16T15:30:00.000Z

Tim Bray has written an interesting little piece on the real benefits of AJAX
real benefits of AJAX.

AJAX (it stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is the current hot technology in the trend known as Web 2.0. Tim points out the rather obvious, and therefore overlooked, benefit the technology can have in that it shifts some of the burden of processing for web applications from the server to the client.

Technology: Interview with the creators of C, C++ and Java

2006-02-16T13:55:00.000Z

I found this interesting interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling* via Reddit.

Dennis Ritchie (along with Brian Kernighan) developed the C programming language, they also wrote the definitive C programming book. Bjarne Stroustrup wanted a language where he could write programs "as elegant as Simula programs, yet as efficient as C" so he invented C++. James Gosling is the man behind Java, developed because he was looking for a more reliable, secure language which could be more easily distributed.

If you are into computer programming languages the interview is worth reading.

Even if you aren't into programming you mightlike the following quote from James Gosling. In trying to describe how features got into the Java language (and why some were left out) James draws the following analogy:

There's this principle about moving, when you move from one apartment to another apartment. An interesting experiment is to pack up your apartment and put everything in boxes, then move into the next apartment and not unpack anything until you need it. So you're making your first meal, and you're pulling something out of a box. Then after a month or so you've used that to pretty much figure out what things in your life you actually need, and then you take the rest of the stuff -- forget how much you like it or how cool it is -- and you just throw it away. It's amazing how that simplifies your life, and you can use that principle in all kinds of design issues: not do things just because they're cool or just because they're interesting.

Sounds a lot like my filing system. Every now and then gather all loose papers into one place, next time you have to tidy throw away the first pile of papers because if its still in the pile you obviously didn't need it.

* The original article appeared in Java Report, 5(7), July 2000 and C++ Report, 12(7), July/August 2000.

Church: Congregations celebrate Darwin's birthday

2006-02-14T10:45:00.000Z

It seems that the church is waking up to the whole Christianity vs Science debate.

In October last year Dave wrote an interesting piece on the whole religion vs science debate titled Evolution, the Battle We Shouldn't be Fighting. Whilst I agree with him that the fight is potentially distracting from what is important in the Christian faith it is time that the moderates in the church should involve themselves in the fight. At least we should stand between the extreme opposing views and try and bring peace instead of conflict.

The Clergy Letter Project is trying to do that, by representing the views of those who trust both science and the bible.

The first aim of the project was to collect 10,000 signatures of Christian clergy in support of a letter proclaiming that faith and science are not mutually exclusive. The letter contains the following statement:

We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.

Spurred on by the Clergy Letter Project a variety of churches celebrated Darwin's birthday this week with a Darwin Sunday when congregations could hear about and discuss the issue of science and religion.

It's also good to see the issue being raised in the Catholic church. There have been a few arguments but now the Pope has made his own statements about the issue. The pope stated that faith and science (or more specifically Chirstianity and Evolution) are compatible. This isn't a new idea for the Catholic church (as detailed in Evolution and the Pope) but with all the publicity surrounding the Intelligent Design wing of the church its a statement which needs repeating.

Technology: Web 2.0 will get unified authentication

2006-02-14T05:00:00.000Z

I must be getting better at this technology prediction lark.

A couple of days ago I wrote about why the new Web 2.0 trend needs some unified authentication mechanism. Yesterday various news sources have reports that VeriSign have managed to sell an identity system to eBay and Yahoo.

Details are a little sketchy but at its heart is the use of VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) suite to enable customers to use one authentication credential across VIP-enabled sites. The system uses an open standard from the Initiative for Open Authentication (aka Oath).

I'm a little surprised that Yahoo didn't try and create a system of their own but I still expect Google to give it a try sometime soon. For Google it would fit quite well with their current test of Google mail on your own domain.

Review: The IT Crowd Episode 3

2006-02-11T18:50:00.000Z

After a pair of good episodes this week's effort (called 50/50) was a bit of a let down. If this was the first episode I'd seen I wouldn't be going out of my way to watch any more.

Although there were a few funny moments - "If you were a murderer what would your nickname be..." - they were a little thin on the ground. The action also moved outside the basement, and the company, which didn't really add anything.

From a quick glance at the next episode (The Red Door) it doesn't look like things will improve in a hurry.

Technology: Web 2.0 needs unified authentication

2006-02-08T15:45:00.000Z

With all these new Web 2.0 services changing the face of the software market it has become apparent that there is something missing from the current web experience. Unified authentication.

This isn't a new problem. Microsoft tried to solve it a while back with the introduction of the Microsoft Passport Network. The idea is that, instead of providing a username and password to each web site (Amazon, eBay, Gmail etc) you need to access, you login once to Microsoft Passport and participating sites let you in without extra login screens. This is what is usually called Single Sign On (SSO).

Microsoft Passport hasn't really taken the world by storm. If you look at all the new service web sites which are springing up (Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Backpack, Digg, Writely, Flickr etc.) you see that they all implement their own user authentication. Obviously the barrier to using Microsoft Passport for these new companies is set too high. If you want to use all these new services you end up with a plethora of usernames and passwords. Not only that but you can't create links between services. For example there is a Yahoo Group discussing Kite Aerial Photography (KAP for short), there is a also a Flickr group with pictures taken by KAP enthusiasts. Flickr is owned by Yahoo, you can login to Flickr with your Yahoo ID, but there is no cross connection between the groups, nor any mechanism to make such a thing available.

A recent startup, Agatra, has tried to help out with this problem by running a service which remembers all these different accounts for you then logs you into your sites. Of course all this is controlled from a single username and password on the Agatra site.

While the Agatra solution is neat I still think there is space in the market for a better alternative.

What we really need is for someone to shake the throats of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and get them to agree on a lightweight standard which could be incorporated into web pages. They'd need to provide some simple code which could be included on any web site you fancy which would authenticate you to your existing Google, Yahoo or Passport type account. Heck, they could even charge for it, a few pennies per authentication once you got past some threshold number of users.

It benefits the users, if you want to try out the latest Web 2.0 site you'd be able to hit a checkbox which allows you to use one of the accounts you already have available instead of having to create a new one from scratch. It also benefits the companies providing authentication, people like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft would gathering a little information on usage levels so they'd know which startups to buy! It would also make integrating them easier once they have splashed at the cash for the acquisition (Flickr, which was bought by Yahoo last year, is still running two sets of user accounts, Del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo a month or so ago and hasn't yet started to transition accounts across).

There are other people who think this sort of authentication will happen. An interesting blog post on the use of something called X-GOOGLE-TOKEN analyses an authentication method used by the Google Talk program. The conclusion the article draws is that it is a hairs breadth away from being an implementation of some kind of single sign on method from Google.

[ Spell check rant revisited. The Blogger spell check still doesn't know how to spell Blog, Google, Gmail or even username, ho hum. ]

Technology: Web 2.0, the new software model

2006-02-06T16:00:00.000Z

Diagram from www.weiterbildungsblog.de

The latest web trend is Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly provides a pretty good explanation of what Web 2.0 is in an article cunningly titled: What is Web 2.0?

The whole Web 2.0 thing seems to me to be a continuation of the evolution of the computing software market. There is a shift away from selling people software to providing services. The classic suppliers of software are Microsoft, the current huge service providers of software are Google.

There's a nice explanation of why this shift is successful in a talk called What comes after open source? given by Greg Papadopoulus at the 2006 Sun Analyst Summit. One of the simple points Greg makes is that instead of developing a product, selling it to a company who give it to users you can now cut out the middleman and deliver your software ideas directly to the users. That means you get better feedback which means you produce a product which is closer to what the users want and you produce it faster than in the traditional model.

A couple of examples.

Example 1: I signed up for Blinklist when it appeared a while ago. They provide a web based bookmark service in the same mold as Del.icio.us, but the interface looked as if it might be more useful. Knowing the market they were in the Blinklist people provided an import feature for bookmarks created in Del.icio.us, which I used to import my own bookmarks. The import died. An odd tag, my O'Reilly one had killed their import script. I removed the ' from the tag and reimported, which worked only it duplicated the few bookmarks which had appeared before. So I emailed their support people, within a few days the ' in a tag no longer caused a problem, the duplicate issue had gone and they'd implemented another suggestion I'd made - a delete all my bookmarks option.
Example 2: Yesterday Metcheck introduced probabilistic weather forecasts. A fellow kite flyer from Fractured Axel emailed them and asked if they could do probabilistic wind speed forecasts as well. Within 4 hours he had a reply informing him that it was done.

In contrast to these speedy responses if I have a problem with Windows or Office I have no direct connection to the company to get the problem fixed. Of course, the direct connection isn't the only reason I'd not get a quick fix from Microsoft, the main reason would be the complexity of their software. This is another thing the whole Web 2.0 meme addresses.

Instead of huge monolithic software structures each Web 2.0 company is concentrating on filling niches, giving you a simple, well defined service. It sounds like the original UNIX model of having a large number of simple tools which together created a sum which was more powerful than its parts.

All over the web new products are cropping up which hope to cash in on this continuing trend, funded by advertising or charging for service provision. For examples have a look at The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 and More Great Web 2.0 Software. I hope this trend towards service provision instead of purchase continues. And if you think that there are some applications which could never work with this model have a look at the One True Media site where they are even experimenting with a online service based video editing.

Review: The IT Crowd

2006-02-04T18:00:00.000Z

The latest sitcom to hit the UK started last night, the IT Crowd on Channel 4.

Written by Graham Lineham (known for Father Ted, Black Books and Big Train) it is set in a dingy basement where a pair of misfit IT guys are assigned a new, female, manager who knows nothing about computers. Two episodes were shown on Friday, both had been available from the website for the week before. Oddly Channel 4 have now removed them from the site so you can't go and catch up if you missed them.

I really like the character of Moss, played by Richard Ayoade who co-created, directed and starred in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. In The IT Crowd he's playing pretty much the same character which is a good thing because he does it well. Moss is the standard caricature of an IT whiz with no social skills. I love the section in Episode one where Roy is trying to impress the female who has just walked into the office, "Why are you giving me the secret signal to shut up?"

Roy, the other techie, is played by Chris O'Dowd and seems to a slightly lighter version of Bernard from Black Books. He's a bit quicker on the uptake than Moss and is from the "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" school of IT support.

If the rest of the series is as good as the first couple of episodes it'll be well worth watching. Not quite as good as Spaced (yet) but still good enough to make sure I set the video every week.

Update: The IT Crowd video download page is still available, its just that no other pages on the site link to it at the moment.

Church: It was a morning for forgetting not remembering

2006-01-31T21:30:00.000Z

We started our Sunday morning service with a few more laughs than usual, mainly the fault of Claire and I.

Mack, our church, has deep roots in the Brethren tradition. One of the surviving aspects of this tradition is our communion service, it's what's known as an open service because anyone can stand up and take part. There's a rota for who starts the service, welcomes people, introduces some thought and chooses the first song, that sort of thing. Now who ever does this introduction usually wanders over to where me, Claire and the rest of the music group sit before the start of the service to warn us what song we are about to sing. Occasionally we sit there and no one tells us a number which usually sets me worrying that perhaps I'm supposed to be starting the service.

Last Sunday no one came to give us a number.

5 minutes to go before the service started and I spotted Mike, who organises the rota. "I know", I thought, "I'll go have a word with Mike and see who's opening."

I'd got halfway down the, short, aisle when Mike gave me the thumbs up and mouthed "You OK for opening?"

A quick about face was executed and I dashed back to the piano and found my Bible.

Now for Christmas Claire had bought me a new Bible because the old one was falling
apart. The new one is nice but it's missing one vital thing, a collection of bookmarks which I shove in when I find something interesting that might come in useful for, say, opening a Sunday morning service with.

After a few minutes frantic page flipping to try and find some passage, which was lurking in my grey cells just out of reach, Claire turned round.

"Who's opening?" She asked.

The look I shot back meant that she didn't need an answer. The rest of the music group started laughing.

We're now a minute or so past our usual start time. The music group are trying to supress their laughter, only they aren't making a very good job of it. I'm about to stand up and start when Claire turns with an "Oh no!" look on her face. The communion bread, which we'd picked up this week becuase the usual collectors were away, is still sitting on the kitchen work top at home.

Now, there are two important physical parts needed for a communion service, wine and bread. We were somewhat lacking in the loaf department. As I stood up to walk to the front Claire, and two other people who had just realised the absence of wheat based produce ran out of three separate doors with worried looks on their faces.

It was an unusual opening to the service. One of the regular themes of our service is that it is a time of remembrance, remembering what God has done for us. So my admission of a couple of major cases of forgetfulness at the start caused quite a bit or merriment. Fortunately, there was a spare loaf in the freezer which arrived on time for the appropriate bit of the service, it was a bit cold inside but mostly defrosted.

I think it was a service that people won't forget in a hurry and I think people will be checking to make sure I've remembered things for some time to come.

Books: O'Reilly launch book preview service

2006-01-31T10:50:00.000Z

O'Reilly have just added a new service giving people online access to books prior to release.

The new Rough Cuts site provides electronic copies of book chapters as they are being prepared. Users are also allowed, or rather encouraged, to send feedback on the material to improve the final version. In computing terms its sort of like a book beta test.

The Rough Cuts service has itself just gone into beta with four titles available for preview. The service provides three options:

Pay for an electronic copy, you can then download PDF files of the work in progress, up to and including the final version.
Pre-order the final print copy.
Pay a combined price for the electronic copy and get the final print version as soon as it is available.

It's an interesting experiment from a company which seems to like playing with new business models (Safari, SafariU begin a couple of examples). In the fast paced world of computing where new technologies arrive all too frequently this idea might catch on.

Technology: People don't understand dual core

2006-01-28T19:45:00.000Z

I've maintained for a long time that computers are too complicated for most people. The problem is that they keep getting even more complicated.

A few stories have come out in the last few weeks which illustrate this, both of which are related to the release of a new Intel processor. During development the chip was codenamed Yonah now that it is released Intel have chosen the wonderfully bland name of Intel® Core™ Duo.

What makes this processor different from a number of its predecessors is that it contains two independant computer chips, usually called cores or sometimes processing elements. Now, computer performance is a complicated enough thing, throwing two cores into the equation makes it even more complicated. In theory the new processor could be twice as fast (ie. process twice as many instructions) as if it had only one core. The trouble is that it is only faster if it is trying to do more than one thing at once, a program will only run faster if it can make use of both of the cores at the same time. To use a car analogy, if you want to get from A to B you won't do it any faster if you have two cars than if you have one.

So the first story, by Macworld runs with a header stating Intel-based iMacs are fast, but gains don’t match Apple’s claims. They run a series of speed tests on the machine, and claim that the processor isn't as fast as it should be. No analysis is carried out to see if the programs can even use both of the cores in the processor, or even to work out if the processor is the limiting factor in the speed of the program.

Then Mac Speed Zone weighs in with an article which proclaims The Intel iMac Is Almost As Fast As The Quad Core Power Mac. Their tests show much greater speed increases, but even then they don't quite get it. Some of the tests look to be the sort of programs which is limited almost entirely by the speed of other components of the computer, like the hard disk or the RAM or graphics card.

Your average computer user doesn't understand how different clock speeds or memory types alter their user experience. The whole dual core issue is only going to make things even more confusing.

Personal: Memory challenge number 4

2006-01-27T10:40:00.000Z

I was very late this week with deciding on something to memorise because I couldn't think of anything. I was just about to use one of Rob's suggestions from a few weeks ago when thought of Rob and Sarah triggered a dim grey cell.

So this week's memory challenge is a traditional gaelic blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be ever at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and, until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Personal: Are your beliefs consistent?

2006-01-25T13:50:00.000Z

I stumbled upon this little online quiz yesterday.

The quiz was created by The Philosophers' Magazine and it tries to work out if your beliefs are internally consistent. Watch the questions, they aren't designed to trip you up but the wording is sometimes a little odd to create the exact logical conclusions they draw.

You won't understand this until you take a look but I avoided any direct hits and bit one bullet. What about you?

Technology: Graphical passwords, an emerging trend

2006-01-19T16:35:00.000Z

Researchers are working on visual passwords to increase computer security, as reported by ZDNet yesterday in a section titled Emerging Technology Trends.

This is a daft idea for so many reasons. Not only would it be slower to enter than a typed password it would be easier to observe as well. My main problem with the idea is that it is a visual system. So what are you supposed to do if you are blind, visually impaired?

The problem of having to cope with visual verification systems is already widespread on the internet. Many sites (Blogger included) now use CAPTCHA's (supposedly it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).

In the current generation of internet captchas letters are delivered to your browser as an image which you have to type in order to prove there is a human trying to access the site. Blogger have an option to use such verification for blog comments, they also force you to use the same mechanism if they think your blog is a spam blog. For some reason they though my blog was spam for a while and I was forced to type verification letters in from a hard to read graphic, I reckon I only got them right about 60% of the time.

The W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) who develop web technologies and standards think the current Turing test verifications cause major problems, as do other groups. They aren't even very secure, people find ways around them, including one using the lure of free pornography to get people to solve them.

Fortunately there are other solutions (the W3C article has quite a few), it will just take a bit of effort to implement them.

It probably won't help much but the Blind Access Journal has setup an online petition asking Google to tackle this accessibility issue, 1663 signatures so far. Maybe if enough people sign Google will use some of their financial and intellectual resources to implement a better solution because this is one technology trend which should go away rather than emerge.

Technology: Opensource makes it more difficult to keep trade secrets

2006-01-18T13:30:00.000Z

The story which broke yesterday about new machines due from Sun reminded me of a comment from one of the many blogs which cover Open Solaris.

Someone, and I can't seem to track down the reference, commented a few months ago that Sun's release of their source code under an open license would make it a lot easier for people to track down what used to be trade secrets. To make matters even easier the OpenSolaris site has a handy search tool called OpenGrok which makes searching the huge Open Solaris code base fast and easy.

Yesterday's rumours talked of Sun Ultra 40 and Ultra 45 systems which may be due soon. A little digging on the web quickly turned up V215, V245 and V445 as possible names for more machines. Search with opengrok and you quickly find out which platform they are and the internal codenames for the systems (useful for digging out more information if you have access to Sun's online bug database). The fact that the machines are listed in the code would suggest that they are close to release, probably in the hands of alpha and beta testers already. A bit more code browsing also confirms the codename (Serrano - reported last year) of the new UltraSPARC chip which will (probably) be in the Ultra 45 and the Sun Fire V215, V245 and V445 servers.

Information seems to be easy to find for SPARC based systems but AMD based ones are a different matter.

I don't know whether Sun did it on purpose but the x86 compatible code has very few references to codenames and a different directory structure which makes platform types a little more fuzzy. Searching for references to Ultra 40 and Ultra 20 will prove fruitless, for example. Maybe it goes along with their cunning idea of using really common words for codenames (recent ones include seattle, boston and chicago) as a way of reducing the amount of obvious pre-release information in the code and the effectiveness of using search engines in hunting for information.

Technology: Sun set to launch new machines

2006-01-18T00:05:00.000Z

Sometimes companies let information slip out before they mean it to.

OS News today reported that James Dickens author of the UNIX Admin Corner blog had managed to turn up a link to the manual for the new Sun Ultra 40. Its a follow on from the relatively recent Ultra 20 Opteron based machine, this time with two chip sockets for up to 4 Opteron cores. James also dug out an Ultra 45 codename which, confusingly, will be a SPARC based machine.

In attempting to dig out some more information I stumbled across two more potential system names, V215 and V445, both Sun Fire servers. Now its time for some wild speculation born out of optimism.

Maybe Sun have pinched a naming convention from AMD. The Opteron dual core processor code numbers end in 5 so perhaps the new V215 and V445 servers are replacements for the V210 and V440 but with dual core UltraSPARC CPUs. By Sun's old naming scheme that would imply UltraSPARC-IVi chips.

Sun recently announced the UltraSPARC-T1 chip, which is a whole new line for them but I'd still expect them to be working on a dual core replacement for the aging UltraSPARC-IIIi found in the V210 and V440. A dual core version would fit the bill nicely and tide the product range over until Sun can generalise the appeal of the UltraSPARC-T1 family with the addition of better floating point performance and multiple chip support.

Of course its far more likely that the V215, V445 and Ultra 45 will just have an enhanced UltraSPARC-IIIi chip, probably with more cache and a higher clock speed.