Blog

Bring in the ‘thopters when you see wormsign.

Love it.

Much improvement on the haircut front. On the recommendation of a very well groomed waiter at a local fish restaurant I called on Kai at the Reo Morris salon. Kay has a clue about hair. I am no longer shaggy, nor does my hair look like the victim of a tragic weed-whacker incident.

Today I get to meet with a researcher who wants to buy our software (along with a decent sized pile of Apple hardware), and his CTO (Chief Technology Officer) who has a perfectly reasonable dislike of non-standard machines and change in all its forms. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince the researcher that the CTO doesn’t support our stuff…but that’s okay because *we* support it. Hopefully, I can also convince the CTO that the researcher won’t be calling and taking his valuable support time, since we’re such an excellent company. Wheeee. At least I get lunch out of it. Sadly for the deal, the “trivial crap” threshold seems to be set pretty low today. Hopefully I won’t snap in the middle of the meeting.

Snapping: The kill-cord on the lawnmower finally gave up after a month of abuse with pliers and vice-grips. Looks like I’ll have to repair it for real. Damn.

Crab grass: Beyond using napalm on the yard and starting from scratch, does anyone know a good crab-grass cure? I’ve been doing my slow, obsessive compulsive removal of each individual plant…which is having steady progress. There’s a lot of yard left, though.

For those wondering, the reference to a group who totally ignored the “continue” button and blamed the “hang” on our software is accurate, if incomplete. In fairness, the problem involved a misconfigured monitor which was cutting off the bottom 1/4 of the display. On the one hand, it’s understandable. On the other, this stopped them cold for two weeks.

They: “The install hangs at the first screen”
Me: “Is there a button on the bottom right labelled ‘continue’?”
They: “Yes”
Me: “What happens if you click it?”
They: “Ummm, we have to go now.”

Done with the gig. Day two went much better than day one. They’re up and running and pretty happy about it, from all appearances.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go fall asleep on an airplane.

I should have listened when today started with me slicing my hand on the rack where the servers were mounted and quietly bleeding on the machines for a while. Should have called it there. Suffice it to say that we made progress, but that the OS X Gods exacted sweet revenge for every inch of progress that we made.

I’m having trouble thinking of more ways in which this install could go wrong, but I’m sure that the world will provide some nifty examples.

Fortunately, the owners / customers are super cool. Sushi dinner for me tonight! Yay!

One of my company’s partners just went live with their product. Orion Multisystems sells a “cluster in a box” made out of energy efficient processors. Up to 96 CPUs pre configured in a single chassis, and you can power it off a single 20A wall circut. You don’t even need the fancy plug.

They can ship it with our software pre-installed.

It’s been getting some media attention, as well as notice by the unwashed masses. I think this is pretty cool.

I’m sitting in Baltimore Washington International Airport.

It’s bringing back memories of working for a company called ERIM which no longer exists. I spent two summers flying in and out of this airport almost every other weekend. Good times.

The airport still kinda bites…but that’s life. Airports aren’t all that much fun by default. This one is indelibly linked in my mind with the scent of a Pizza Hut fast food kiosk.

On Friday, we had a classic consulting gig. We were brought in to advise on accelerating and parallelizing the processing of gene chips. On walking into the room it was totally clear that we were also catalyzing a conversation that needed to happen between the group who runs the machine, and the groups who use the data. Turned out that, so far as we could discern, the gene chip process involves a 16 hour hybridization (rate limited by biochemistry), a 10 minute scan (rate limited by the scanner…and by the fact that a human has to move the chip into the scanner), and 2 or 3 minutes of processing to update a database. Clearly, we weren’t going to do anything for throughput by optimizing that 2 or 3 minute process. Anybody (capital_l) know a case where parallelizing the GCOS server for an Affy chip setup was smart and necessary?

Still, I think they got value from the “wooden indian” effect. Wheel the wooden indian into the room, explain your problems to him, and suddenly the answer seems clear. Thank you, wooden indian.

I’m in PA this weekend helping my brother-in-law (Doug) and his wife (Michelle) move into the house they just bought. It’s one side of a duplex, and I’m very impressed. The neighbors seem to be young professionals, and several of them came over and introduced themselves while we were hefting desks and sofas. We return to RI tonight.

Tomorrow, I fly to St. Louis and help the Danforth Center install and configure their new cluster for two days. Should be a fun gig. The people involved seem cool and competent, all the hardware is already there, and their stated goal for the trip is to “learn how it’s set up and configured and to become self sufficient with maintenance.” Who could ask for better? My life is good.