Author: cdwan

I met Paul Farmer yesterday. Shook his hand and talked to him and everything. Admittedly, I was at a brunch with about 300 other people, but it was still a pretty intimate setting. He was on his way from Chicago to Haiti, and stopped in to keynote the brunch. His talk was impressive, and I could stand to learn a lot about inspirational speaking from him. He opened with jokes and socializing, including a story about a student he had met recently who approached him and started with “you’re not as old or grumpy as I thought you would be.” Farmer thought “interesting opening gambit,” and asked “why would you think that?” The answer was “because I’ve read your books.”

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Today was characterized by a victory of luck over skill. We were supposed to relocate a 50TB Apple SAN from building A to building B. They’re about 3 blocks apart. Of course, moving 168 disks in 12 chassis, plus seven servers and assorted switches can be kinda tricky.

The team moved the gear on Friday, and I arrived this morning to make sure that it stood up properly.

This was made more stressful by the fact that we were doing it without a usable backup of the data on said SAN. I’m imagining the conversation: “Hey, the backup didn’t finish in time. Should we proceed with the plan that starts ‘DO NOT PROCEED UNLESS YOU HAVE A USABLE BACKUP?’ is gonna be onsite, and he’s pretty good. We should just go for it. He won’t mind.”

All the disk chassis were fine. All the servers were fine. All the networks and switches were fine, yet somehow the system couldn’t see its metadata. This is akin to having access to all of the letters in a book, but not having the ability to lay them out in the correct order on the pages. We stared at the system for a while, got sandwiches, stared some more, and were emotionally prepared for what I termed ‘plan Hail Mary,’ in which I was going to nuke the OS on the servers and hope that a clean install would correctly detect the perfectly usable data on the perfectly usable disks. This had a good chance of working, but it was also a one-way door if it failed.

Then, on a whim, I walked behind the servers and swapped two (working) cables with each other. The system sprang to life and began to serve up data again. I’m still trying to come up with an explanation for why this worked. I’ve got a decent story I can tell in hindsight, but it was really pure luck at the time.

So I guess I earned my nickel for the day.

As a reward, I got to rack and stack 11 more disk chassis for the frankenSAN system we’re building out of off warrantee and surplus gear tomorrow. I actually sort of like the physical exertion and visual gratification of rack-and-stack … though I rarely get to do it anymore.

I’m all in favor of saving the world – or the finance sector – or the auto industry – or whatever it is that we’re trying to save … but these numbers are getting stupid.

P.s: Anyone who has previously answered my complaints about the Iraq debacle by comparing our casualty count with that incurred in the first or second world war is encouraged to take a look at their 401k. Blood or money. You choose.

Kinda sorta in response to a question that technolope asked recently: I’ve developed some reasonably effective habits for keeping myself happy.

Here are a few of them

I’m a big nerd. You all know that. So I’m about to share some nerdy stuff.

You were warned

Seems that I have not much to say these days.

Spent a decent three-day-week in Baltimore, working for a genotyping lab. They’ve got a compute cluster that I built for them a while ago, and it’s been rockin’ at full capacity for some time. They added a bunch of servers and wanted some other changes. We paused the production queue, took it offline, performed a couple of experiments to find out which configuration actually works best with their apps, did the upgrade, and at about 4pm on Wed threw the switch and jobs flooded back onto the system. Everything was the same except that it’s about 4 times faster. Made me feel like I know what I’m doing.

On Monday I had dinner with my two siblings and their respective significant others. It was like a natural progression of Thanksgiving, from last weekend with friends to Baltimore with the sibs.

Hertz provided a shiny blue Mustang when I asked for “economy.” Apparently I’ve rented with them enough to get the “upgrade if we’ve got it” deal.

Last night we went to a friend’s huge house in JP for an extended friends and family dinner. There were at least 20 people there, not counting the three kids, two cats, and a dog. It was a good time. I highly recommend being around people on Thanksgiving.

Now, off to a budget meeting. I’m torn between celebrating Buy Nothing Day (aka Black Friday) and going out to get a 42 inch plasma screen TV for, like, pennies on the dollar.

I just want to mention that my friends are awesome. Had four folks over to dinner, including amnesiadust, capital_l, and technolope. Lots of food and wine was consumed.

Tomorrow, I’m going to attend an art showing by “the area’s 35 top artists.” Yeah, that’s technolope.

Check the article.

My friends rule.

This one is for redmed, justkidding_nr, and others:

23andme was nice enough to offer me a free upgrade to their “v2” analysis. Given that I bought in at more than twice what they charge these days, I think that’s awfully nice of them.

In related news, Promethease is getting downright scary in terms of very specific information about conditions, medicines, and so on.

In unrelated news, Supercomputing is, as always, an awesome show.

I am filled with geeky joy that I’ll be at Supercomputing in Austin this week. Reading through the program, I’m struck both by how far my field has come, and how little things have changed. There are sessions on reconfigurable computing, energy efficient supercomputing, yotta-scale storage, and so on. There are also the obligatory sessions on automatic parallelization and other unsolvable problems.

There is also the conference reception:

For entertainment, there will be Mariachi music and Flamenco and Salsa dancers, cowboy poetry, toe-tappin’ country music and line dancin’, the rhythms of Native American drums, and the shouts of brave SC buckaroos as they ride the mechanical bull. The menu will be just as diverse, with authentic foods served at many sites around the ranch. There will even be s’mores served up hot and gooey from a campfire, as well as hand-rolled SC08 brand “ceegars.”

I believe I speak for many of us attendees when I say: “Mechanical bull? Oh hell no.”