Forgive me, Hector, for I have sinned.
Monthly Archive for December, 2006
This web server uses a Tyan S2462 motherboard, and thus requires an oddball ATX GES power supply. Near as I can tell, ATX GES was some kind of stopgap standard used primarily (solely?) by older AthlonMP motherboards.
Today I installed a new Seasonic M12. The new powersupply conforms to the EPS12V spec, but this is easily converted to ATX GES by way of a $20 adapter. The Seasonic bears an 80 plus sticker, indicating that it will exhibit 80% or greater efficiency. I’m hoping this will lower my electric bill.
Check out the sweet JoCo box set that Kassidy got me:
If you haven’t heard of Sun’s ZFS file system, here are the two important summary bullets:
- It is freaking bad ass
- OSX Leopard will support it
For slightly more info, check out these screencasts, this slide deck, or this set of vids.
I can’t even begin to describe how much I lust for Linux support (currently difficult due to CDDL incompatibility with GPL). With a little effort, one could combine ZFS and something like S3 or rsync.net to get easy off-site backup on the cheap.
Update:
Much of the power behind ZFS comes from its copy-on-write philosophy. The parallels with software transactional memory are stark. One outstanding question re transaction size: are they limited by free disk space? Traditional file systems use in-place modification, but it sounds as though ZFS may require additional free storage proportional to the size of the change.
Update 2:
I just learned about the clone ability in ZFS and my eyes just about fell out of my head. I mean seriously, this is constant time file copying. I’d have half a mind to alias cp zfs clone.
Update 3:
Man the ZFS hits just keep on coming. I’ve got a RAID-5 at home, but I’d never heard of the “RAID-5 write hole” until I read Jeff Bonwick’s blog article. Don’t miss this war story featuring ZFS’s end-to-end checksumming.
Two weeks ago, Rob and I spent a couple hours at the very excellent Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I can’t get over how awesome it was. We saw some core memory, a PDP-1, a German Enigma, part of ENIAC, an IBM 360, an Apple I, an Altair, a Xerox Alto… so much amazing antique tech. We spent the entire time in the Visible Storage exhibit, but there are many others including Mastering the Game, the history of computer chess.
Here’s a picture of me standing inside a Cray-1 (serial number 001, originally at Los Alamos). 
Many elements of the museum’s collection are available online. For example, check out the Cray-1 Manual I just found, or this picture of Seymore himself.
The museum is located in the old SGI building just off 101 (on N. Shoreline Blvd.), and is totally free — although donations are welcome and, naturally, accepted in powers of two.
Postscript:
On our way home, we stopped at Halted Electronics, which served as a kind of surrogate gift shop for the museum. HSC is like Noah’s ark for electronics and computer parts: they have two of everything. I picked up a killer AthlonMP motherboard for $20. Great store, don’t miss it.
Intel Research Berkley has been host to a whole slew of nerd gods lately, and they have been foolish enough to post the seminar videos. Ha, suckers! Now I will become smarter on your dime!
But seriously, Intel is awesome for doing this.
Past speakers include: Hans Boehm, Herb Sutter, Greg Morrisett, Guido van Rossum, Guy Steele, Martin Odersky, and Alan Kay. You’d better get to work watching all of those, because still to come are: Martin Rinard, Bertrand Meyer, Bjarne Stroustrup, Charles Leiserson, and Philip Wadler.
Update: The Alan Kay talk is tremendously good. Go watch it. I mean now, really. I’ll wait.
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