Counting down the days til I leave this job . . . . many conversations with sympathetic people, being reminded there are some good people here . . . .
Month: October 2003
letting the smart people run things this time
As Silicon Valley Reboots, the Geeks Take Charge
The valley is populated with people of various talents, but its essence begins with the software and hardware engineers. They create technology tools that then find investors and users in the marketplace. It is, first and foremost, a high-tech tool shop.
That fundamental truth was forgotten in the boom years. The short-lived dot-coms were just marketing plans lashed to the Internet. They had no technology edge; they were run by marketers and M.B.A.’s. But most of the young companies that survived the crash – and the start-ups that have risen since – are based on innovation and are run by people with deep technical skills.
“The failure rate was highest for the start-ups that were Internet bets on a business model,” said Peter Currie, a partner in the Silicon Valley office of General Atlantic Partners, a venture capital firm. “Others, with a large technology component, have often found a way for the technology and the company to go forward.”
“The short-lived dot-coms were just marketing plans lashed to the Internet” is a great depiction of the various flashes in the pan . . . . .
Panther migration gotchas
Coupla things I found out today in my first day with Panther.
1. SNMP monitoring stopped. As far as I can tell, the /etc/hostconfig file now specifies
SNMPSERVER= - YES -
and the startup script was looking to match SNMP= - YES - . An easy fix.
2. I had stored all my music files in /Network/music. This was just a directory, pre-Panther. Now it’s a magic file, invisible except by the name pink.paulbeard.org:Network:music which is a link with a sticky bit set.
lrwxr-xr-t 1 root wheel 512 25 Oct 22:52 pink.paulbeard.org:Network:music
In short, it exports to other systems but is no longer accessible to local users. I’m not sure how useful that is: if you’re sharing files, you would want to be able to access them yourself. Perhaps there’s some clever loopback mounting that’s supposed to happen. My solution is to mount the directory on another machine, move all those files, clean out the exported directory and find another place to keep my music files.
Not a big deal, except it’s several gigs of disk I can neither access nor free up for other uses.
Panther impressions
It’s just that fast.
It’s actually quite zippy on my elderly Blue & White G3, so on the 500 MHz iMac, it should be quite nice. Opened windows drag around more smoothly, things just seem to pop where they didn’t before.
I miss the CPU monitor, even though it has been replaced by a more full-featured system monitoring tool (yeah, I could show some screenshots, but I’m not on that machine right now). Perhaps someone at Apple will make that available again: I liked having my utilization displayed in the Dock.
I like the networking panel in the new brushed-metal Finder, as well. Since the systems on my network speak every protocol I know about — AppleTalk, samba/CIFS, NFS — I have a couple of choices to share files. But I found browsing them to be fast and easy. The shared volumes don’t mount but display their contents in the panes of the network browser: not a big deal. AppleTalk volumes do mount and appear on the Desktop as one would expect.
One feature I want to try out is the Fax server: it will received FAXes and can print and/or email them. I see that as being very useful to mobile types (like realtors) who do a lot of business by FAX. What I would like to be able to do is print to the FAX server as if it were a printer: should be possible, but I haven’t looked into it yet.
Sadly, I’ll never see it on my 2 * 1.25 GHz work machine, since I’m leaving in two weeks and I’ve already given it away (I was asked “if there was any way to get any value out of it, would anyone want it?”). But perhaps if I can find something else I can finally snag one of those 12 inch iBooks, expecially now that they’re G4s.
what we suspect of others may be true of ourselves
I gave my two weeks notice to the Superior Professor today, to no discernible reaction.
In the course of a conversation a little later, it came to light that she thought I might not ever come back, that my one sick day might just be extended indefinitely. That illustrates our working relationship, that she assumes/suspects I would just walk without so much as logging out of my computer or saying a word to anyone. Obviously, someone with guaranteed lifetime employment, as she frequently describes her situation, doesn’t understand the basic rituals or protocols of how people leave their jobs. Given the bad faith I have seen so far, this shouldn’t surprise me.
the secrets people keep
I just found out today that the payroll coordinator where I work is a writer, which she had never mentioned. When I asked where I could find some of her stuff, she wouldn’t tell me, daring me to see if I could find anything. Google found her in about 2 queries, and now I know why she wouldn’t come clean. For one thing, she writes under a pseudonym sometimes, but mainly, she writes erotica, specifically for women, not the kind of thing you talk about in a stuffy institution like ours.
I’m amused: it’s refreshing to be reminded there are real people in such an unreal place.
Panther sighting: almost
My advance order of OS X 10.3 was delivered today, but no one was at home so all I ended up with was a crummy FedEx doortag. Someone on a mailing list I’m on found his on his doorstep today, so I just lucked and got the persnickety delivery driver.
Oh, well, I’ll just pick it up at the depot tomorrow. Better a day late than not at all . . .
the iPod, extended
Apple cracks open the iPod, slightly | CNET News.com
Apple has also posted on its developer Web site some instructions that allow the device to be operated in a “museum mode” in which the iPod’s interface can be customized for use as part of an audio tour. For example, a text note about a Van Gogh exhibit could link to audio files that offer a guided tour of the paintings.
Hmm, a electronic museum exhibit guide has been done but my experience wasn’t all that wonderful, and I’m guessing an iPod would just as good. You could bring your own and “install” the museum’s information, then scroll through to the right bits as you walk around. That was one of the problems I found with the MEG system at EMP: if there was crowd around an exhibit, it was hard to point the infrared sensor at it and get MEG to do it’s thing. If the control was at the device, rather than requiring interaction with the space, it would work better.
salvation
The mother of my children, my best friend and supporter, organized a vote tonight: “raise your hand if you think Daddy should stop working and stay at home?”
The vote was unanimous: 4 to 0 in favor of more involved meals, fresh bread, home-made pasta, and all the other benefits of having someone at home during the day.
So tomorrow, we call an end to this charade. And one suggested script goes like this: I go explain to the Superior Professor that I was hired to be an Administrative Assistant, a job for which I have no qualifications, experience, or aptitude. And she is the manager, for which she has no qualifications, experience, or aptitude. There’s only room for one of us, so I leave it to her. I’ll give them two weeks tomorrow, and call it quits.
I married well, in many ways: if love were edible, we’d never starve in my house.
closing the performance gap
Low-Cost Supercomputer Made With 1,100 PC’s
[T]he fastest cluster machine, the Lawrence Livermore system consisting of 2304 Intel Xeon processors, is capable of 7.63 trillion operations a second, at a price estimated at $10 million to $15 million. The Virginia Tech computer makes the cost-to-performance equation even starker.
The official results for the ranking will not be reported until next month at a supercomputer industry event. But the Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 I.B.M. microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other ultra-fast computers.
A third the cost, for near-enough equivalent performance benchmarks and numbers of CPUs: and this is something you can take home with you. I’m guessing the Intel-based supercomputers aren’t made of clustered off-the-shelf units.