Saturday, May 15, 2010

this oil spill is getting scary

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/gulf-oil-spill-photos-video-50051410

lots of links - very worrying - what state are we leaving the planet in to our children and the other living things here

Im sure BP are playing the size of this down

How Shazam Works

I got that shazam on my iphone and started right away with the most obscure songs I could think of, It gets the old flyingnun kiwi 80's stuff but it did not get Dr Demento Kinko the clown.

What I needed to know is HOW it matches so fast,one bit of a song across so many - its all here, the algorithm uses a spectral frequency fingerprint hash

"Big O 1" [constant time O(1)] which is why its so fast!

How Shazam Works

Friday, May 14, 2010

why criminals love big pHaT BanK NoTES!!

BBC News - 500 euro note - why criminals love it so

Was it a deliberate ploy by the eurozone chiefs to make a bank note that criminals would surely use to help support the currency in the beginning?

And now that the currency is established - get rid of the big notes!!!



'Give me control of a nations money supply, and I care not who makes it’s laws.'
-M A Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

GFS: Evolution

GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward at ACM Queue:
Q: GFS was already good, so what do Google do in addiction to GFS's evolutionary improvements?

A: They do revolutionary improvement to GFS2


-I like that!

Eucalyptus -- an open-source implementation of cloud computing that can emulate Amazon's EC2

Eucalyptus | Your environment. Our industry leading cloud computing software.: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud: Unlocking the Value of IaaS

ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud: Unlocking the Value of IaaS: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Made in IBM Labs: IBM Researchers Develop Energy Efficient Method to Analyze the Quality of Data at Record Speeds - Yahoo! Finance

Made in IBM Labs: IBM Researchers Develop Energy Efficient Method to Analyze the Quality of Data at Record Speeds - Yahoo! Finance



Uncertainty quantification in risk analysis has become a key application. In this context, computing the diagonal of inverse covariance matrices is of paramount importance. Standard techniques, that employ matrix factorizations, incur a cubic cost which quickly becomes intractable with the current explosion of data sizes. In this work we reduce this complexity to quadratic with the synergy of two algorithms that gracefully complement each other and lead to a radically different approach. First, we turned to stochastic estimation of the diagonal. This allowed us to cast the problem as a linear system with a relatively small number of multiple right hand sides. Second, for this linear system we developed a novel, mixed precision, iterative refinement scheme, which uses iterative solvers instead of matrix factorizations. We demonstrate that the new framework not only achieves the much needed quadratic cost but in addition offers excellent opportunities for scaling at massively parallel environments. We based our implementation on BLAS 3 kernels that ensure very high processor performance. We achieved a peak performance of 730 TFlops on 72 BG/P racks, with a sustained performance 73% of theoretical peak. We stress that the techniques presented in this work are quite general and applicable to several other important applications.

HP's Memristor tech - better than flash? • The Register

HP's Memristor tech - better than flash? • The Register: "Memristor technology to equal the switching speed and endurance shown by current NAND flash cells.

The Memristor or memory resistor is said to be a fundamental electrical circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor. Its electrical state remains unaltered between a device being switched on and off - just like flash memory, for which it is a follow-on candidate. In this it competes with Phase-Change Memory (PCM)

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Forget the GPad - is Google building a server chip? • The Register

Forget the GPad - is Google building a server chip? • The Register: "ese servers need chips. But the thing to remember about the ever-expanding Googlenet is that it's designed to process tasks that are broken into tiny little pieces. Google isn't interested in running the fastest processors on the planet. It's interested in running efficient chips that suit its pathological obsession with distributed computing.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

This Changes Everything - Chuck's Blog

This Changes Everything - Chuck's Blog: "
EMC's global storage cloud plans

High Court rules software liability clause not 'reasonable' • Channel Register

High Court rules software liability clause not 'reasonable' • Channel Register: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Nice power7 vs the rest rundowns from The Register

Power7 v Power6 - its all about the cache • The Register Forums

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Latest Articles from Cheat Sheets | silicon.com

Latest Articles from Cheat Sheets | silicon.com

Nice way to package up new technology topics

DBMS2 Database management and analytic technologies

DBMS2--Database management and analytic technologies in a changing world
One of the best sources of information I have found about all aspects of high-performance analytic data processing/BI/DW/DSS etc

Greenplum Single-Node Edition — sometimes free is a real cool price | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Greenplum Single-Node Edition — sometimes free is a real cool price | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services: "free, terabyte-scale data warehousing software

Oracle to Postgres Conversion

Im not getting a good feeling from what's happening at Sun since Oracle took over,lots of good people seem to have left, Solaris now needs a support contract to use after 90 days(read the download T&Cs)who knows how open MySQL will be? oh well there is always open Solaris and hopefully ZFS will go into more OSs likse it did into freeBSD
I personally get a bad feeling from ALL CLOSED STANDARD COMMERCIAL PROPERTY software.
At the end of the day Oracle's #1 job is to make money, databases ,applications,hardware ,software and services are all tools to achieve this

postgeSQL looks like the likely candidate due to is support in apache hadoop and even a variant in commercial products like Greenplums data warehouse cloud

anyway here is a spot to put Oracle to postgreSQL links, I think downreved ORA to latest PG is a doable migration. Just a straight DB is good, PLSQL makes it harder but there are conversion tools

Oracle to Postgres Conversion - PostgreSQL Wiki
Orafce Project - Oracle functions
Oracle to PostgreSQL

Achieving Near-Linear Scalability Using Solaris OS on NUMA Architectures

Achieving Near-Linear Scalability Using Solaris OS on NUMA Architectures: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Monday, May 10, 2010

Softskills

Articles written

Mostly common sense, career related I guess

Good electronics

semifluid.com

Instant Python

hetland.org : Instant Python
Good Python 101

I know I should use python more but I keep using perl
I know I should use perl more but I keep using shell script
I know I should automate more but ....

Randal L. Schwartz's page

Randal L. Schwartz: "Randal L. Schwartz

Perl'n stuff

Avenger's handbook

The Avenger's Front Page: "The avenger's handbook

Never really had it in for anyone enough warrant using this stuff, but its funny none the less ;P

Good ideas for practical jokes perhaps

BC NUMBER THEORY PROGRAMS

BC NUMBER THEORY PROGRAMS

The UNIX/LINUX BC program is actually a pretty useful calculation tool

Electronics Lab - Home

Electronics Lab - Home: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Circuit Cellar - Digital Library

Circuit Cellar - Digital Library

Lots of good circuit and PIC examples

Fun With Prime Numbers

Fun With Prime Numbers
Great C programs for primes
Basically works through better and better divisor methods up to a Eratosthenes' seleve in a memory array then bits

Pretty old page but would be great to compile and see how fast this goes on modern hardware

Sunday, May 9, 2010

RH Fedora core (lucky) 13 and Cirtix on FC 12

Fedora Core 13 is out soon, I use fedora on my laptop to keep current with the RedHat way of doing things as most tasks,commands and file locations are also the same in RHEL/CentOS etc
And there is always RDP (rdesktop) or ICA for visio/trim/exchange and other windows stuff
http://webmail.scatterpated.net:10080/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5

Nice guide - lets see if it works on FC13 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Fedora_13_Install_Test_Plan#New_features_of_Fedora_13

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Wolfram|Alpha

Happy 1st Birthday, Wolfram|Alpha Blog!

Wolfram Alpha will come of age IMO when it can answer this kind of question

How many people are in the air at any given time
At any given time how many people are in aeroplanes
On average how many people are airborne
.....

From info on the net and some basic arithmetic it should be able to estimate this

Monday, May 3, 2010

Oracle Security Whitepapers

Oracle Security Whitepapers
Oracle Security, Hardening of Oracle Databases and Oracle Application Server.

Backtrak Oracle info too

Reverse-Engineering a Quantum Compass

Reverse-Engineering a Quantum Compass

How birds (possibly) use the quantum mechanical effect of entanglement to migrate

cooltst: Cool Tools at OpenSPARC T1

cooltst, "CoolThreads Selection Tool", is a perl script that observes a running workload and applies various heuristics to assess whether that workload may be suitable for OpenSPARC ( http://www.opensparc.net/about.html ) and Oracle/Sun UltraSPARC T1, T2, and T2 Plus based servers.
The purpose of cooltst is to help you determine suitability of a Chip Multithreading (CMT) processor for a workload. Its recommendations should help you judge how much effort to put into a feasibility study which might include porting, prototyping, and/or performance measurement of your applications. cooltst is not a system sizing or capacity planning tool, and the rough approximations used internally in cooltst should not substitute for detailed performance analysis. cooltst runs on Solaris 8 and later, and on many Linux versions. cooltst is a system workload tool. It looks at the workload being executed by the system by all processes. It does not currently look at any particular process

Ref and more here.....
cooltools: Cool Tools at OpenSPARC T1

Download here
https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_SMI-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=COOLTST-3.0-SP-LX-G-F@CDS-CDS_SMI

EMC AIX Linux HP-UX Oracle etc

Datacentre Support Reference Guides from PCS Computing

Lots of Un*xy doco goodness in one place

Build Your Own Oracle RAC Cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux and iSCSI

Great detailed step by step to build a good RAC cluster from commodity hardware

Build Your Own Oracle RAC Cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux and iSCSI: "Build Your Own Oracle RAC Cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux and iSCSI

by Jeffrey Hunter

Learn how to set up and configure an Oracle RAC 10g Release 2 development cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux for less than US$2,700.

The information in this guide is not validated by Oracle, is not supported by Oracle, and should only be used at your own risk; it is for educational purposes only.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

SSH passwordless ssh trust

YouTube - passwordless ssh trust: "establish passwordless ssh trust between Linux host a3a and aix(aka busen) for user chris

[chris@a3a ~]$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/chris/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/chris/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/chris/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
bf:10:c1:a7:3b:8a:78:32:20:44:48:65:2b:14:dd:d2 chris@a3a
[chris@a3a ~]$ scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub chris@aix:.ssh/authorized_keys
chris@aix's password:
id_rsa.pub 100% 391 0.4KB/s 00:00



[chris@a3a ~]$ ssh aix
AIX 5.3
[chris:busen]/home/chris$

TA DA! (need this to NIMOL an AIX box from a Linux box)

Solaris 10 zone clone

YouTube - Solaris 10 zone clone

My video of a Solaris 10 zone clone - only took 36 seconds on a crappy ultrasparc2 450Mhz

Art Vs Science & Evidence Based Design

a bit interesting....

EA whitepapers from sparx

http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/resources/whitepapers/

One of the best articles Ive read on ICT design

We tell ourselves its a methodology applied with constraints but there are not a lot of degrees of freedom really and in most cases its just tradeoffs - you know the drill : fast,-cheap,reliable-choose any two

http://www.itworld.com/application-design-nlstipsm-080520

Good Zachman EA HL diagram

Posted here so I don't have to look for it on the interwebs ;P

x86 Hypervisors and non hypervisors

Although I spend most of my `virtulsation and consolidation` time in the high end Unix/storage land (IBM PowerVM,VIO,WPAR,WLM- Oracle/Sun LDOMs,Containers/zones... USP-V HDP)

I do also use and keep an eye on developments in the x86 arena and run liveCD images such as network security toolkit ( http://downloads.sourceforge.net/nst/nst-vm-2.11.0.i586.zip ) or f5 BIG-IP ( https://www.f5.com/trial/ ) its a good quick and dirty way to get tools on your work PC without perverting it from its SOE image

For a good free hypervisor based virtulisation have a look at Xen(Ctrix xenserver) ,VMWare ESXi, Oracle Virtual Box and Microsoft Hyper-V

VMware options considered.....
ESX Server vs. ESXi ( http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi )
http://www.vnotion.com/?p=56
http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1380354,00.html
And there is always VMware player!

XEN
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1686939

MS Hyper-V
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-main.aspx

Oracle(Sun) Virtual Box
http://www.virtualbox.org

I also like some non hypervisor (ie emulators) eg QEMU www.qemu.org and bochs.sourceforge.net and www.winehq.org

Ive used QEMU quite a lot(in Windows to run Linux and via versa) and I would like to get an AIX POWER CHRP image working in it one day.
Some people are having a crack eg http://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg11382.html

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Whats the difference between Software, hardware or Platform as a service - is it up in the clouds?

Nice cloud computing facilities overview

http://wso2.org/library/3634

TOGAF 9 method overivew

http://www.enterprisearchitects.com/WhatWeDo/Training/tabid/70/language/en-US/Default.aspx

Nice quick overview vid of TOGAF9

Get an overview of the TOGAF 9 method and framework given by our Chief Architect, Craig Martin. This exclusive online video will take you through an hour and half of intensive overview of enteprise architecture seen from the TOGAF perspective.

radar tracking of planes getting back in the air after the ash from Eyjafjallajökull clears

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6BKdHEPmFA

flightradar24.com 's airspace rebooted!

....there are variants that overlay the ash clouds too

AIX 6.1 TL5 and 5.3 TL12 and Systems Director 6.2

I see AIX 6.1 TL5 has just come out and AIX 5.3 TL12 has too - it will be the last Technology level for 5.3 with AIX 7 coming out soon.

IBM Systems Director 6.2 is planned to be GA June 25.
6.1 to 6.2 agents (same agent as Tivoli ITM) can be pushed out but upgrading from 5.x is a fresh install.
5.x is fat client, 6.x is all web and jpnl (has issues with MS IE but sweet with Firefox)

POWER7 SAPS

power7 SAPS test results coming in eg 202180 for a p780
ER4 ERP6

http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd2tier.epx

http://download.sap.com/download.epd?context=40E2D9D5E00EEF7C7B45573E5B04DE54A1B2DDE76E02CDB6CA5FF04ACD659743