General

An commentator at this article stated, that you don´t have redundant I/O servers. My colleague Martin Mueller pointed me at the Immersion Week to a fact that i wasn´t really aware of (albeit it´s obvious when you read the documentation, i just didn´t really thought about this topic): It´s perfectly possible to configure a redundant I/O domain with LDOMS (albeit there it´s not possible on every LDOMS capable server)

Most of the UltraSPARC T-class based systems have multiple PCIe busses. It´s a valid configuration to boot up two I/O domains and giving both of them one of the PCIe busses. When one of the I/O domains fails, it´s still capable to use services reachable by the other domain. There is even a good blueprint about such configurations - LDOMs I/O Best Practices: Data Reliability with Logical Domains

PS: This is one of the two things i´ve learned in Jena. About the other thing i´m not allowed to talk ... the "Stay tuned" in Jonathans talk at CEC makes much more sense now ...

I wasn´t ill last week nor i´ve lost the drive to blog last week.

I was really busy with listening at day and create/pimp presentations in the evening. Last week was the Immersion Week of Sun Germany. Immersion Week (iwsungy) ? The iwsungy was an event for the technical people in presales. 5 days full of presentations and workshops. Information exchange galore. I think, we have to thank Winnie and Detlef for this event. It was really great. I´ve learned a thing or two, and i hope the listeners of my presentations learned a thing or two, too.

I´m on my way home now.Major blogging activities will resume tomorrow morning ...

Mit einem freundlichen Gruss an die Schweizer Kollegen, die eine Reihe vor mir im "Emerging Technologies"-Track sitzen : Der Präsident der Sicherheitskommission des Ständerates hat vorgeschlagen, das man das Air Policing der Schweiz an groessere Länder (beispielsweise Deutschland) outsourcen koennte.

Eigentlich eine gute Idee, wenn man bedenkt, was moderne Kampfflugzeuge in Anschaffung und Unterhalt kosten sowie der Unwahrscheinlichkeit in zwischenstaatlichen Konflikten genutzt zu werden. Die Realitaet ist: Man bekommt nicht mal eine einheitliche europäische zivile Luftraumüberwachung hin .... wo Raketen im Spiel sind, geht das natuerlich noch viel weniger ...

Bryan Cantrill put together some thoughts and anecdotes about the development of Fishworks in Fishworks: Now it can be told. He writes in regard of the dtrace based appliance analytics:

So not only does analytics bring the power of DTrace to a much broader spectrum of technologists, it also -- thanks to the wonders of the visual cortex -- has much greater utility than just DTrace alone. (Or, as one hardened veteran of command line interfaces put it to me, "this is the one GUI that I actually want to use!")

ACK!

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

Dieser Tage ist die c't 25 Jahre alt geworden. Auch aus meiner Richtung ein "Herzlichen Glückwunsch!" nach Hannover. Ich bin zwar immer noch der Meinung das die c't nicht mehr den Glanz alter Tage hat, dennoch muss ich mich bei dieser Zeitschrift eigentlich bedanken: Ich habe mir meine erste Ausgabe der c't vor vielen, vielen Jahren (über 20, um genauer zu sein ... ich war damals 14) in Oldenburg gekauft. Tagesausflug mit der Klasse. Ich glaube Aufführung im Staatstheater und anschliessend Auslauf in der Fussgängerzone der Stadt. Meine Erinnerung ist da ein wenig verwaschen. Aber an eines erinnere ich mich noch genau ... in dieser Ausgabe wurde ein System getestet, das auf einem Prozessor der 680x0er Baureihe von Motorola basierte. Der Hersteller: Sun Microsystems.

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

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

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

Also irgendwie muss die Bahn noch ein wenig an ihrem CRM System arbeiten. Ich habe meine Nachfolge-Bahncard im Abo erhalten:

[...] natuerlich mit allen exklusiven Vorteilen, von denen nur unsere besten Kunden profitieren. Denn ab sofort geniessen Sie den bahn.comfort Status"

Hmm ... find ich ja auch toll das ich in die Lounge darf ... aber ab sofort ... ich glaube ich bin schon seit 2003 in diesem Frequently-Delayed-Programm ....

The good thing ... we´ve still more than enough money to get through the financial crisis and i wouldn´t wonder, if we still have positive cash flow .... (besides of effects like stock buy backs)

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

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

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

TPM wrote an article about some comments of Sun and Fujitsu executives and enriched it with some speculations - Sun and Fujitsu hint at Sparc futures:

As part of the launch of the Sparc T5440 midrange server this week in San Francisco, top brass from both Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu spent some time assuring customers that the companies' chip and systems partnership going strong and that both were working away on Sparc processors that would end up in future systems.

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

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

und

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

(via: Egghat)

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