Had a great Christmas.. my sister came in from Los Angeles and my mom flew up from Orlando.

Here's what I got..

1. xbox
2. grand theft auto 3 and vice city double pack
3. joy division 4-cd kit, "means to an end"
4. "24 hour party people" dvd AND soundtrack
5. smiths, the queen is dead
6. cure, disintegration
7. cure, standing on a beach
(yes, i am 33, that's all music grew up with but never bought - except joy division)
8. binary clock from thinkgeek
9. mini maglite for the car
10. 3 pairs of business socks
11. very warm land's end sock/slippers
12. a video about adopting from china
13. flight simulator 2004
14. david cronenberg's naked lunch dvd

and best of all..

15. a discovery flight and 30 mins ground school at a nearby flight school!!! w00 h00

Hope everyone had a great christmas, and have a great new year!

7719437

WTF is up with Sourceforge? I just introduced a Windows user to Gaim yesterday, and its a good thing, too, b/c SF is down for maintenance.

I was on the way to New York City this afternoon when the massive power outage hit. New Yorkers never fail to amaze me. They gave an exemplary performance today.

One line summary:

"The two things the first Matrix were not missing were a rave scene and a sex scene."

I bought a 14 hour TiVo off EBay back in February. It needed a new remote, power cord, and IR transmitter. Once those arrived, I powered it up and tried to run a system reset. Well, it hung for three days on something that normally takes about an hour. I bought a new 120GB Maxtor drive for $100 a few weeks later. Finally, a few weeks after that, I sat down with a friend while we restored an image that we downloaded to the new disk. The docs unfortunately missed a command to recognize the expanded capacity, so it came up as 14 hours even with the 120GB drive.

Then we bought some TurboNet adapters. He found out the hard way that that TiVoWeb does not work with DirecTiVo units. So last weekend I installed the TurboNet adapter, but didn't mod the case to route the cable out. I also ran the command to expand the space, and it jumped from 14 hours to 144 hours. This weekend, I modded the case to route the cable outside and zip tied it to the fan grate. I also yanked the drive and started the telnet server and installed the ftp server. Finally, I installed TivoWeb.

Was it worth it? Eh, I guess. So far, the only real good thin that has come out of it is that it now uses ethernet for the daily update and with a Linksys WET11 wireless bridge, I'll be able to put the TiVo anywhere in the house without the need for a phone line anymore. Other than that, the process for extracting video for the purpose of burning VCDs or SVCDs is still wayy too manual.

That's all for now.

Oh, I read some new postings of a couple of my foes... they're still assholes and I'm leaving them automodded to -6.

Hope everyone is having a nice holiday season. I'm staring down the barrel of the 2nd snow storm to hit the Philadelphia area already. Right now, they're saying 5 to 8 inches of snow by tomorrow night's rush hour. Great.

But anyway, I recall reading a study someone did regarding moderation, and I'm beginning to think they were right. Once a comment gets modded up it seems to accelerate. Perhaps the folks who browse at 3 really do "focus on promoting".

I have said in the past that the feds should create a modified distributed.net client to let regular pc's help out in parsing fingerprint data coming in from crime scenes.

Now I want to volunteer my cpu cycles to help out in the sniper investigation. But there are no takers.

There's no VMWare logo, so I put it under IBM. :) I attended a technology demo today showing off IBM's x440 highly scalable server running VMWare ESX server as a high-density consolidation platform.

It was pretty damn cool. ESX uses RH72 to boot up, but then runs directly over the hardware. It was very manageable by a web browser, and all the virtual machines were very responsive, although she didn't put it under any real load. The funniest part of the demo was an app that she got from IBM internally that is called "bluscrn.exe" or something like that and when you launch it, it blue screens an NT server or Win2k.

She did it intentionally to show the isolation and independence of the virtual servers. We all had a good laugh. I was happy to see how many people were disgusted with Microsoft's licensing practices and how many have begun to deploy Linux in their environments. Made me very happy.

I'm going to have to design an automated install routine for about 400 of these x440's running VMWare ESX for my current customer, so I put in an order for one of the units to get shipped to my house. 4-way 1.4GHz with 4GB RAM and 2x36GB hot plug with ServeRAID. I'll let you know how it goes (starting with the approval when they see the bottom line!)

First, a hello to my journal commenters. I panicked when I saw that I in fact was not just talking to myself in here :) Great to have you guys around..

Anyway, I wonder how many people noticed (knowing full well it will be a *lot*) that the latest sniper victim in the Washington D.C. area worked for the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC). CNN is saying she worked in the intelligence wing. She was also battling breast cancer.

My submisions get dropped like flies, but I thought someone else would like to discuss it.

I only reply to ACs after we both identify ourselves once. I despise AC snipers... they come along and post only once to say "You're wrong." and then disappear. But anyway..

Now, you're not, realistically, going to get 10,000 hosts in a rack, with reasonable performance on each of those hosts.

Depends on the workload. A great many of them will be very lightly loaded. And a few will run IRC fserve bots. YMWV.

Yes, Test Plan Charlie got 41,400 in a box, and a later test, 97,900 (both of those, btw, were on the 31-bit System/390 architecture;

I know. Unless you are David Boyes, STFU.

those were, in fact, stress tests, not practical environments. The work I've done suggests that you could fit about 5000 lightly-loaded machines onto a full-up zSeries with acceptable performance

z900? z800? IFL? VM Guest?

Also: 5 to 10 minutes? You're doing something wrong.

No, I was being modest. I have scripts for cloning and booting new servers in 90 seconds. I didn't want to post best-case numbers. Granted my 5-times multiplier of the worst case may have been a little too conservative, but I actually stake my name on my posts.

If you have either DASD that [blah blah blah] then the time gets down to about 45 seconds. If you're willing to live with statically assigned [blah blah blah] to get your [blah blah blah]. That's the time from when you click your "build me a server" button on the web form to the time you can ssh into your new server.

You can tell all that to someone who needs one of your lessons.

Instead of stopping by to say, "Yeah, I guess you could run a small to medium-sized ISP out of an apartment using hardware that brings five 9's to Linux", you instead chose to pick apart my idea, saying that I was wrong in that I can only replace 60 racks with 1 instead of 120. Instead of saying, "hey, I work for IBM, too, let's hook up on w3", you instead choose to say, "you're wrong." Here's hoping we never work together.

I'm actually pretty impressed by this system. Once I got over the fear of publicly labelling someone as an enemy, its been pretty fun. I have labelled 7 people as Friends.. generally people who impress me or own projects that I'm most impressed by. Only 1 of my friends has reciprocated the label and also shows up as a fan.

The real shock came in when I looked at the fan page. I mean, I had been labeling people all along as friends when I truly agree with their opinions, but for some reason I couldn't even fathom that someone could be so impressed by my comments that they label me as a friend. So thanks to all my fans, I'm touched.

And only one of the 3 people who have pissed me off and have been permanently modded -6 have reciprocated that assignment, although I can't tell if they too have metamodded their foes down by 6 like I have. (I know, I'm viscious.)

That's all. Thanks for reading my journal.

Just started seeing "Foe of a Friend" tonight. At first I thought I recognized someone I marked as a "foe" who may have in turn marked me as a "friend". Which was strange, I thought. Then, I checked to see how I had that person rated, and I didn't.

Scrolled down a little further and there it is again.. this time for a different name. Don't know how to check besides reading comments, but I think someone I've got marked as a friend pissed off a few people. And pissed them all off enough to mark him as a "foe".

Oh well, such is life.

Don't have the text of the original submission, but IBM is introducing a new offering called e-Business On Demand. They run thousands of virtual Linux servers on mainframes and lease the servers to clients who want to outsource their entire IT infrastructure.

I thought the /. community would be interested because this is an effort by IBM to help companies toss their server farms out the window and replace them with Linux servers running offsite by IBM. IBM even offers all levels of backup/restore and system monitoring for the servers, too. Several different server configurations are available, too -- from web to database and file.

What's key is that customers pay for this just like they would any other utility. They pay for what they use, from processing power to network utilization, and the a-la carte service add-ons. According to C|Net, prices start at $300/month for the approximate power of a 333Mhz P-II running Linux.

A small office with 10-20 users would just get a T1 to the hosting facility, put together a server configuration with IBM, and not have to worry about managing servers in-house anymore. If you're concerned about network latency, I've worked with a customer that was large enough to house the mainframes in-house but still only pay for what they use. Plus, there is a product out there that acts as a Samba server caching engine, provding local LAN-speed access to frequently/recently accessed files that are actually stored on a remote Samba server.

I may be jaded since I'm an employee in the e-business group, but I think it's pretty cool.

I can't believe it. I actually got the BOFH -> newbie treatment in efnet/#linux today. I wanted to see what people were saying about the Apache DoS vulnerability published today. #slashdot on efnet was blocked with a keyword.

So I've been helping out a LOT on #linuxhelp lately, and was starting to feel comfortable with the crowd. I popped into #linux and asked, "does anyone have the keyword for #slashdot?" That f/face cog_ replied instantly with "no. go away." and, "if you were wanted in there, you would have it already."

Man I have never been so pissed at someone on irc before. I was speechless. All I could do instead of cursing him out was to sit around and answer questions. I've been helping people learn Linux for years, and have never been treated like that before by anyone in the community. I guess I'm just lucky I didn't run into that asshole early on.