Category: Technology

Tam thinks “Y’know, if only this vapid, content-free crap was more crisp and colorful, I’d totally watch it?”  I have been pondering dropping cable TV for a long time because I never watch it, and it’s horribly expensive.  There are only a few programs I watch, but I’m not sure I like them to the tune of 80 bucks a month.

From Tam:

This Google Analytics thing is the shizznit. It’s got more graphs than a Congressional subcommittee hearing and more buttons than a waiter at TGI Friday’s. I even know what some of them do.

I think pretty soon Google will know more about me than I do.

The big problem with using hydrogen for fuel is that it’s a gas. The combustibility of the gas is of little matter when it comes to using it as a transportation fuel. The problem is that in order to have enough of it to get anywhere, you have to liquefy it. There are two ways to do this, temperature and pressure.

The space shuttle uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel source, but stores it cryogenically, which is why the fuel tank has to be insulated with foam that likes to occassionaly fly off and damage the heat shielding. Cryogenic storage is expensive and impractical for use in earth bound transportation. It’s really impractical and too expensive for rockets too, but the alternatives kind of suck.

The other option is to pressurize the hydrogen to such a degree that it becomes a liquid at normal atmospheric temperatures. The first trade off in this kind of scheme is that it takes about 30% of the energy stored in the hydrogen to get it to a liquid state. The other major disadvantage to storing hydrogen in liquid state is that it has to be stored at about 10,000 psi, which is essentially bomb. And not just any bomb, a bomb that will spew cryogenic liquid everywhere.  There’s also the issue with the tank material needing to stand up to wide temperature fluctuations as you start to draw off hydrogen, thus cooling the liquid down to a cryogenic state.

The other solution is to store it as a gas a very high pressures. This still has the problem of creating a bomb. It’s not the combustibility of the gas that’s a problem, it’s the energy stored up as pressure.

I got tied up in this mess for more than two hours yesterday morning.  I saw the accident scene.  I have to say, the fact that there were only a few injuries from such a horrific looking scene is a testament to what automotive engineers have accomplished in terms of vehicle safety.   The cars on the road today are far safer than they’ve ever been, and a lot of people owe their lives to that.

The Chemistry Set

I wish there was more stuff going up today.  I’m quite busy trying to convert my employer over to a nice, fast GigE network.  We are already in awe over the increased speed of loading simulation data.  We’re also discovering which cable drops in the building are marginal.  Not much I can do about those without spending a lot of money for people to snake cable, so my strategy is to throttle those back to 100Base-T and hope none of the people who really need 1000Base-T have bad drops *cross fingers*.

I also have to do purchasing today.   If there’s one aspect of my job I hate, it’s purchasing.  You’d think I’d like to shop for technological toys with someone else’s money, but that wears off pretty quickly.  After a while you just get tired of dealing with the vendors.  Even the ones who are easy to deal with.  Everyone always wants this or that.

I usually won’t argue with people over what they need to do their jobs.  Too many IT managers seem to take sadistic pleasure in denying folks basic things they need to do their jobs.  I don’t do that.  Whatever I can order for that person is pittance compared to what we’re spending on their salary.  If a trackball mouse increases productivity of a six figure salary earner 1% it pays for itself.

Sorry for the lack of posts.  I just got back from work.   I bricked one of the switches I’m installing trying to update the system image.  I had to restore a copy from the boot prom, which takes a long time with xmodem over a serial port.  Normally I’d leave that problem until the morning, except I had already installed the switch at great frustration and much swearing.

But once all this is done, we’ll have a gigabit network.  I know our scientists will appreciate the fast loading times of the rather large amount of simulation data our Linux cluster generates

A few people have requested that I simulcast the GBR. I think I can probably do this, since I plan to take my MacBook. It appears that Google Talk can handle AV if I use iChat. If anyone wants to give it a try, I’ve set up a GTalk UserID snowflakesinhell. The webcam is on, and we can give it a try.

Appearances can be deceiving. Google Talk can only do it with a special plug-in. I’m giving Skype a try. My ID there is SnowflakesInHell. Feel free to connect if you’d like to help me test out whether this will work for GBR.

UPDATE: Skype seems to work pretty well for one on one, but not so well for broadcasting.  Given that Kevin says wireless coverage at Circus Circus is spotty, I’ll keep looking, but will keep Skype in mind.

Any data center server move from one rack to another, while the server is alive, is a potentially hazardous undertaking.   It went something like this:

Me: OK, we have to be careful with this part.
Intern:  Right
Me: OK, ease it up a little more.  WAIT!  Something’s caught
Me: Oh crap!

Things are all fine now, but that was an unpleasant and unexpected emergency.   Moving servers live is always fun, but it’s definitely safer to take them down first, but on servers that are downtime sensitive, sometimes you have to try it the risky way.

Glenn Reynolds got Windows XP for his wife’s computer, instead of Vista.  I agree with this move wholeheartedly.  Professionally, I am a Systems Manager for a small pharmaceutical research company.  I run everything IT for it, including a fairly sizable Linux based compute farm.  I use MacOS, both at home and at work, in the form of a MacBook Pro I carry back and forth.  It works well for me, since most of our infrastructure is Linux based, which inter-operates well with MacOS.  But all the scientists’ desktop PCs, and a few of our servers, are Windows.   At this point, I have no plans to upgrade them to Vista.  Some of our scientific software isn’t even certified to work on it yet.  I know, at some point I will have to upgrade, because Microsoft will force it.  I am starting a few pilot users, non-scientists who don’t require the non-certified software, with Vista.  Their experiences will determine whether I upgrade anyone else.  I have evaluated Vista myself, and wanted to throw the machine it was running on out a window after 10 minutes.  I’m not too happy with Office 2007 either.

So I’m glad to see Glenn joining the ranks of people just saying “no” to Windows Vista.   Now, all we need to do is get him to say no to Windows Vista by getting a Mac :)