The Shining freaked my out as a young child. My best friend’s mother, Bev Davies, took myself and her son Keif to her friends house and we watched it on…well it was either VHS or Beta. The movie itself was scary but the part that really, really got me was when either her or her friend said, “I know that hotel, it’s just south of here in Oregon.” They then proceeded to take a coffee table book from the shelf and find pictures of the hotel. That sent me over the edge for the next few years. I managed to overcome those childhood fears and watched it a few times since, but this will forever make it easier:
West coast tech entrepreneur, founder/owner of 2Paths
Archives for the month of: August, 2007
We interviewed Mik when he was moving to Vancouver. We had an accepted offer but at the last minute he took one from MAKE instead. I don’t hold it against him – Mik’s an intelligent guy, always interested in new horizons and I’d welcome the opportunity to work with him. It’s always fun to hear what he’s up to.
-Why mainframes are cool
-virtualization things we’ve heard before about IBM porting linux onto their mainframes and running them virtualized
-lots of processors all in one unit – low, low latency
-wasn’t sure about # of spindles
-so how do the mainframes handle tons of IO, how do you add storage
-lots of scary looking code
-Mik seemed to be just having fun playing with things – not a bad life!
This talk was quite close to some of the work we’ve been doing for the UN. It’s an example of something we could do by using google maps as the map server. To me the cool part comes when you can take arbitrary data sets and start to do drill down analyses/data exploration.
BC Electoral boundaries commission
http://www.bc-ebc-spike.dev/google_maps/
http://bc-ebc.ca/
-type in address, hit go, google returns a point and then they figure out which polygon you’re in and display it.
-this is b/c we’re switching from single member plurality to single transferable vote, and the regions change and become much larger.
-gpolygon method of the google map API
-view the JS source to get the boundary data
-do a mashup with historical voting and our software to show expected voting patterns.
-election BC
-boris – mybcgerimanding.com
-mashup with other data sources
-heat maps of crime
Timely talk as we’re moving our dev and staging environment to be Xen-based. My major questions are scaling databases that weren’t setup for this infrastructure and production stability of the existing services. My raw notes:
- Virtualization – gave a quick overview of the state of virtualization.
-linux OS guys pushing back that hypervisors just putting overhead between kernel and user. “We can do buy you 95% of what Xen gives you right in the kernel, and do alot of cooler stuff.” Reminds me of what MS used to say about embedding IE into their OS.
-discussion revolved around this
-package management – virtualization makes it easy for you to get into a bunch of VM, then you enter into the normal package management problem. Versus baking it into the OS, and you’re just updating the one OS.
-these are the same problems that anyone who has ever scaled before has to face. The problems should be well understood.
-traditionally hypervisor (HV) considered more stable. But getting more and more complex so bugs in the HV are more and more likely.
-writing off hardware 5 yrs to move it off your books in US, 3-5 yrs in Canada depending on industry. VM allows you to skip the entire capital outlay.
-Baking it into the OS vs Vendors again – have to wait for the Vendors to release drivers, eg VMware only X number of SCSI drives.
-EC2 – how often do their IP leases last? Downtime two blocks of 7 hours in the last two years.
I recently took a trip to Toquart Bay, a forest service campsite I hadn’t been to since about 1992. Fifteen years, I am getting older! When I was last there my wife and I had a great time – a beautiful location, not too many people, no RV’s (a few trucks with campers on the back). One of the truck campers had gathered some oysters and gave us some. Ok a bear did come sniffing around at night, but it was a beautiful, quiet, peaceful spot. Here’s a picture to capture the essence:
This time we went back and it was quite a bit different. Wall to wall RV’s blocking the view in what felt like 15 foot bays. Concrete walls. Two sets of out houses. Quite different. We turned around and left. Apparently in the 15 years things had changed quite a bit. (Due respect to the people running it now it sounds like there is a reason it has changed – it was becoming a party place). But a picture does speak a thousand words….
Actually – if you goto their website the picture there does it justice. The lady we spoke to there said it was going to be privatized soon.
I had a similar experience going to Pulau Tioman in Malaysia. I was there in ‘84 and back again in ‘94. It had built up substantially, lots of docks, rows of huts going up the hillside.
It begs the question – if you go somewhere year after year you won’t see the change as much. If you wait a long time, hoping to reclaim some of the original magic, is it worth it?