coreyshields.com

Today's "This Modern World" is spot on. Check it out by clicking here. Personally, I get sick at what the war is doing to our economy. Sure, one could blame the subprime market, especially since subprimes were marketed at people who could least afford a rise in their rates to begin with, BUT, one could also speculate that people would be better prepared for those rising rates in a better state of economy. Anyway.. tangent.. Americans can't afford the debt they live in as consumers, and sadly the shroud that tells us otherwise exists up in the ranks of government as well, people who I'd hope would know better. Plus it is sickening to think of all of the positive things that could have been done with all of that money (another link worth clicking). *sigh*

On another note.. This server I'm on will be taken down and moved sometime this week, so my site will be offline for a bit. I'll need to move it again a month or so down the road (soon as I find a more permanent spot for it)

*EDIT* ok, for some reason they redirect you to salon.com when you try to click the link through to the comic.. ugh.. Alright, if you didn't see the comic I copied it to my server, you can click here for it until they ask me to take it down. :P

*EDIT 2* haha... looks like CNN is frontpaging a story about this today, too. See here.

The Mozilla Firefox web browser creates a lot of buzz and publicity. This is a good thing, and there is a huge global effort behind creating what in my opinion is the best web browser available. So what of its little sister, the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client? It works. I use it for my non web-based email. But there doesn't seem to be much new innovation out of the Thunderbird camp these days.

Expect that to change.

Last week Mozilla announced the creation and funding of the Mozilla Messaging subsidiary. They have been seeded with $3mil USD, and are already assembling a team to work full time in these efforts. Like the Mozilla Corporation, it is a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, but don't let that scare you. The intention is to drive open standards and open source in messaging, much in the same way as they do for Firefox and web browsing. Leading the pack as CEO will be David Ascher, who is one of the brightest people in open source (and a heck of a good python programmer/author).

So what does it all mean? First of all, a push for Thunderbird 3.0 and integrated calendaring. So far the only combination to get this right, in my opinion, is the Exchange/Outlook combination. And even that solution sucks because it is built upon proprietary standards. I can't make it work right on all platforms. So, this team has their work cut out for them here.

Most people would agree that "e-mail is broken", and I often joke that I long for the days of FidoNet when a message round trip could take up to a day (and there was no spam). The way we communicate online needs some fixing. I see the Mozilla Messaging team as a source of hope in this arena, but it will be some time to see the fruits of their labors. Rome wasn't built in a day.

Good luck David and the rest of your team! For everyone else, if you are interested in helping or providing ideas and suggestions for your communication needs, let them know and get involved!

Other Links:
Mozilla Messaging announcement
David Ascher's blog post on the topic

Ahhh.. Lawrence Lessig in Congress, what a great idea. Whether or not he runs, and whether or not he makes it, he still has ideas worth paying attention to and supporting. Too much corruption in DC needs to be cleaned out. Check out the video below and the following sites:

lessig08.org

change-congress.org

One of the huge successes of Mozilla Firefox is the ease at which people can write and find extensions. A developer does not need to know all of the internal Firefox code to start adding to its functionality, and the users could find, install, and rate extensions easily at addons.mozilla.org.

Now, I'm not saying that this is the end-all model to propelling an open source project into popularity with the general public, but it is one that works well to spread the rapid development of features, some of which get pulled in to future versions of the mainstream code.

About a year ago, a bunch of us from the Open Source Lab (OSL) were talking with some OpenOffice.org developers who mentioned that there was a rather complete extension API for OOo. (the API is what allows developers to easily make extensions for a program). In fact, there is an API available for most of the popular programming languages. Nobody in the lab knew about this. It was documented but not very easily found or published. Even worse, there wasn't a good way of publishing, distributing, and promoting extensions that did get written. The cool thing was that there was an OpenOffice.org team around developing such a platform, and work was underway.

It was then that Alex Buchanan and I were looking at the requirements of such a site, the features that made Mozilla's site popular, and figured we could have a working proof of concept site up within a couple weeks of work with Drupal. So we just went and did it. Figured if the community didn't want it, it would be a good experience with Drupal for the both of us anyway. The cool thing is that they liked it, took the reigns, and continued to build upon and polish it up. Today, a year later, it is a fully functioning extensions site for OpenOffice.org, and found at extensions.services.openoffice.org

The site is very clean, easy to navigate, and functional. The idea is simple: Allow developers to promote their extensions and make it easy for users to find them.

The cool thing about OpenOffice.org extensions is that they can be more than just extending the application to do different things. A picture gallery can be an extension, as can a pack of templates, macros, you name it. An organization could publish their logos, artwork, letterhead, and presentation templates all as an extension pack. This is a simple yet impressive feature. Users can now extend OpenOffice.org with content. As an example, I've added the extension from the screenshot above, which adds freely usable clipart and picture content into the OpenOffice.org gallery as seen below:

This is awesome. I'm thrilled to see the site take off. The next step in this process is to promote the site and the idea of extending OpenOffice.org to do what users need, and naturally more developers and users will combine to help build OpenOffice.org up to be the best (and cheapest!) office suite available. End users need to know and find out about this. Help me out by spreading the word in your blogs and forums.

I smell a banner campaign. Its just too bad I don't smell good graphic skills as well. :)

When Tristen could barely talk, I remember holding him outside as we were getting into the car, on a clear night with a full moon out and pointing up at the moon to tell him what it was. He became fascinated with finding the moon anytime we were outside at night. That fascination grew as we got him books and posters about space. He has a somewhat obsessive desire to learn about the planets, moon, stars, etc. and Nicole and I have to learn ourselves to keep up. By the time he was 2 years old he could recite all of the planets, in order... No need for "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" (whoops, guess Pluto is no longer a planet.. Don't tell Tristen that, it would devastate him)

Most kids his age play with cars, throw balls, etc.. Tristen takes the balls and puts them into an imaginary orbit and draws celestial objects on his draw pad over and over every day. Sometimes these come out very good, but by the time we tell him to stop so we can take a picture, he erases it and starts over. Well, the other night we got a good shot of his solar system:

From 2008

You'll notice that there is somewhat of a relative scale thrown in, as well as certain features in the planets (Jupiter's spot, rings on Saturn and Uranus.. Uranus spins on its side..) He has recently started adding the asteroid belt in its proper location. In this picture we interrupted him at the very end, so I think he forgot he had already drawn Pluto and added it twice. Or maybe he was adding Pluto's moon, Charon. (Kindof embarrassing, I never even knew that Pluto had a moon, yet my 4 year old can tell you the name of it)

Here we have the proud astronaut-to-be displaying his work:

From 2008

Is it a childhood fad? Will he outgrow it and decide he'd rather play basketball? Only time will tell.. Trevor, on the other hand, we can't tell quite what he will be into aside from chasing and hitting his older brother.

Weekend was fun.. on Sunday we lost both chillers in the air conditioning system for our cluster (the chillers chill the water which is then pumped inside and uses to cool the air in the room, with the warm water being sent back outside). Without chilled water, air conditioning does not work. In this cluster, we have a mix of under-floor forced air, and in-row cooling. In addition, some racks cool the exhaust air through a radiator. All rely on the chilled water.

When the primary chiller went out, the backup didn't work for reasons I won't go into here but so far it seems a human error.

We have over 1,000 servers in that cluster. Each of them has dual PPC64 processors (each is a dual core), which are especially good at floating point operations. Floating point ops are used a lot in high performance computing, hence the unit of measure being the number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Our cluster, Big Red, can handle over 30 teraflops, or over 30 trillion floating point mathematical operations per second.

The cluster is made to run calculations, and it does so on a constant basis. This runs the processors at 100% most of the time. The more a processor is used, the hotter it gets. On one of our systems, the heat of the system is enough to cause the cold air coming in rise about 10 degrees centigrade (50F) going out of the system. So, when you lose cooling, bad things happen.

Lucky for us, not too many bad things resulted from this outage. Within 30 minutes time, the ambient temperature, or the air coming in to the chassis, rose from around 20 degrees centigrade to over 52 (125 degrees F). If the air coming in to a chassis is already that hot, it does not do too much to cool the processors down. By the time we had started shutting the cluster down, individual blades were hitting their "critical" point of 105 degrees C on the processor (221F!!) and shutting themselves down.

Kudos to IBM, so far I think we've found only 2 blades that have suffered physical damage. We have had other associated parts fail in this situation (chassis parts, PDUs, power supplies, etc) but the blades themselves were shut down in time to prevent damage. I'd say this is a testament to quality engineering on their part. For a processor to run at 105C and not suffer damage, that's impressive.

In the meantime, I'm still dealing with a few oddities leftover from this outage, chassis parts not cooperating, etc. Needless to say I've been busy this week. :)

60 batteries is what I counted when I walked through the house looking for how many AA and AAA batteries we currently have in use. The actual number is a bit higher when you take into account that I didn't dig through the toy boxes, drawers, etc. Granted, we have kids and you can not find a toy that is not battery powered these days (quite annoying). Combine this with my geeky tendencies and we use a lot of batteries. This is becoming more of an issue with bluetooth computer peripherals, wiimotes, toys, etc.

Now, I've been watching rechargeable batteries for a while, waiting for the technology to solidify and the price to come down. I think that now is about time. AA/AAA chargers are out there for about $10, and the cost of the batteries are constantly falling. I just picked up a couple more packs of 4 (energizer rechargeables) for $8 a pack, or $2/battery. Name brand, non-rechargeable alkaline batteries average about $1.30/battery. They are, of course, cheaper if you buy them in bulk. I saw a pack of 100 AA batteries for sale the other day. I think that was the time that my own personal intervention kicked in.

The latest NiMH batteries are claiming a 2,000 charge life. This means that you could recharge the battery 2,000 times before it turns to junk. Let's figure a little marketing bloat there and cut that claim down to 1,500. So, each $2 rechargeable battery equates to 1,500 alkaline batteries in terms of usefulness (some of these NiMH batteries will last longer than alkalines even). Let's look at cost:

60 batteries * 1,500 cycles = 90,000 alkaline batteries

90,000 alkalines at $1.30 each would be $117,000

How much do the 60 rechargeable batteries cost? $120.

Ok, so I'm not taking into account the cost of the charger, or even the cost of electricity that will be required to charge the batteries, nor am I touching on the environmental aspect of disposed alkalines. Yet, I think that the migration to rechargeable batteries is an obvious "good thing" based on long-term cost savings alone.

Shyam, I hope you are catching this.. A French photographer, Gilles Vidal has some amazing 360 degree panoramic photos of the first Singapore Airlines Airbus A380, inside and out. (I think these are taken from Changi)

The most impressive being the cockpit picture, click here. (that's right, there is no flight yolk. they use joysticks)

The others (outside, press conference, and each of the passenger cabins) are here.

While this plane fascinates me, it has crossed that mental threshold of feeling safe in such a huge object flying through the air. I wouldn't turn down a couple of first class tickets in that cabin though. ;)

(thanks to Kurt for the link)

(disclaimer: I'm no economist, though I did win the economics class stock market game in high school by putting all of my eggs into Microsoft while everyone else bought Nike and GAP)

So, this economy scares the daylights out of me. I don't trust that our government makes the brightest decisions with long-term effects in mind. Everything is short-term, "we can pay it back later".. The same mentality fuels consumerism America. I would hope that people in power would be a little more responsible but that doesn't seem to be the case with knee-jerk interest reactions and possible tax refunds in times of war and record debt. Sure, these actions help the immediate issue but we'll pay for them in the end.

With all of the talk and news about the dollar there have been a few thoughts and discussions that I thought I would put out there.

First: I should have listened to George..

As a teenager, a good friend and mentor (George) swore on buying and saving gold and silver. That was his savings plan. He would take money from his paycheck on occasion and buy troy ounces, taking them home for safe keeping. Personally, at the time I saw this as inconvenient and pointless (my thought was "what if precious metals lost their value?").

More recently, another friend has been discussing his gold savings and how well they do so I thought I would look into the market. I don't have words for my reaction. If you look at the past 5 yrs, silver is up ~400%, and gold is up ~300%. In that same 5 yr period, the Dow Jones average had peaked up to 172%, but after nose-diving in the last couple of months it is more like just a 148% gain. Precious metals are not taking that dive.

I should have listened to George, and I'm sure that his investments from well before the 5 yr period above would be doing pretty good right now. I plan to jump into this savings plan soon, but the skeptic in me still worries about price inflation due to the sudden popularity of precious metals over the dollar.

Second: the federal reserve system sucks

I won't go into too much detail here, but rather do a little linking so the reader can get the detail if they wish. The Federal Reserve System, was created by the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 to help stabilize currency and calm fears. Fast-forward to today, it has created so much debt by injecting artificial money into the economy that those fears are now being caused by the system. (oh how we've come full circle)

Debts have to either be repaid or pardoned. I can't imagine our country being pardoned of its debts, so they will eventually have to be repaid. How will this happen without first turning off the faucet that causes our national debt to grow? Cut programs? Raise taxes? Quit going to war? I don't have the "right" answer, and I'm just a common citizen when it comes to politics and the economy so I probably don't have the full picture either. However, there were some things that were brought up in conversation recently, one was a video (9 mins) proposing and explaining why abolishing the federal reserve system would fix the problem:

While I think this is a valid solution (and possibly a good one), I don't see abolishing the federal reserve ever happening. People are too scared to make that drastic of a change. Imagine the ripple effect through the market as investors speculate on what such a change might do. But, I had to google around.. Funny, this has been proposed in congress before in 2002 by Ron Paul. Yes, Ron Paul, the same guy who is getting the cold shoulder from major media and doesn't get the amount of attention from them that other candidates do, despite the fact that he has an incredible following online and now holds the record for a lucrative 1-day fundraising campaign from individuals. I kinda like Paul. Unfortunately, I also see the reality that he doesn't have the special interest group or media backing to make him a viable candidate so I don't think he has a chance of making it. I brought him up in conversation with family last week and they had never heard of him. Granted, I don't think he is perfect. I see elections these days as "picking the least of all evils" rather than finding someone who will lead and aid our country. But, I like looking at candidates for thinking of solutions to our problems, backing them up, and doing so without mudslinging. Too often people are tied up in a candidate's religion (or ethnicity and race this time around).

The solution?

The interesting thing is that this guy (Paul) has soo much backing and support across the internet. I would go out on a limb and say that were this an internet-based election, he'd win. His support says a lot about the internet generation and Paul's left-field ideas for change. This is the generation that can accept drastic changes, and even jump behind them. Does that mean anything today? No, they are just a vocal minority.

Possibly, decades down the road as this generation grows, these desires for change will grow as well and ideas & information will spread easier thanks to technology, allowing people to understand the problems we face, the possible solutions out there, and the consequences of our choices. I just hope that it all happens before it is too late. The economy does not need a quick-fix. We need a long-term solution.

I just discovered today that there is a magazine for Ubuntu fans called "Full Circle Magazine".

This is a magazine that you can download for free, consists of work and contributions from the Ubuntu community, carries a creative commons license, and is pretty darn good. They have published 8 issues to date and are working towards a monthly distribution.

Back when I was with Gentoo, Caleb Tennis had proposed a bi-monthly publication that in my mind would have been similar. I always thought this was a good idea. Sure, this day in age news is "old" as soon as it falls off the blog reader, but seeing something prepared as a publication is somewhat refreshing.

Check it out, download the latest issue.