Category: Technology

I haven’t really posted about this because datacenters haven’t been my thing for a while, but I have been following the discussion with a sort of geeky fascination.

I’d heard the google rumour for a while, then came the Sun announcement, then the Rackable Systems product. The idea is great, no need to scale out your datacenter by buying new buildings and spending millions of dollars to set them up and get all the equipment configured. Instead, buy out a whole shipping container of machines, park it next to (or on top of!) your building, hook up power, water (for cooling), and bandwidth and DONE! Plug&Play at the macro level. Need more power, add another container.

Now, James Hamilton from Microsoft has proposed a twist on the whole thing: Recycleable data centers in trailers! Pack the container to the gils, have no serviceable human parts and when the thing stops working, send it back for a new one! I kinda dig it, although I don’t know why, cause I couldn’t geek out like in that X-files episode.

[via Geeking with Greg: More on a data center in a trailer]

Slashdot | Linked List Patented in 2006

Looks like that peer review of patent applications thing happened a bit too late. So who is LSI gonna sue first? Then, who is going to invalidate the patent?

Google’s Buses Help Its Workers Beat the Rush – New York Times

This is the kind of thing that makes me love/hate google. About 15 years ago, I used to commute from San Francisco to Mountain View (at SGI, whose ex-campus now houses google). I’d sold my car, so I didn’t commute on the 101, I took the CalTrain (metro commuter rail). It would take between 75 and 90 minutes each way (including Muni bus to the station).

I would have killed for this kind of perk! If I ever move back, I’d demand this perk from whatever company I worked for.

Yeah, turns out iTunes doesn’t like symlinks. So having some folders in my iTunes library symlinked to another drive worked as long as I wasn’t adding new files into that folder (like podcasts). Podcasts would never leave the download directory and get moved into the symlinked root.

So I just got a bigger drive, which is not what we would call a “scalable” solution. I’m at 500GB now, and with me adding more and more video into my library, that isn’t going to last too long.

In an earlier post, I was complaining about how Entourage would just go away for 15-20 minutes at a time. I’d searched the net for info on how to stop it in vain. I’d cleared out gigabytes of messages without a noticable difference, but then looky what came across my RSS feed yesterday!

Macworld: Mac 911: Stop Entourage background churning

I just turned it on. Hopefully this will do the trick. BTW, when I turned off the “background” integrity checks, it said that it wouldn’t happen when the laptop wasn’t plugged in. Yeah, that wasn’t true for me.

So, I screwed up some files in my iTunes library. No prob. I grabbed them from my backup. I just dragged the whole album of MP3s into iTunes. The files got copied in and then I removed the duplicates. I had one AAC-encoded album that I did this to. For this album, iTunes only imported the tracks I didn’t have. At first, I thought that this was really cool. iTunes knows that I already have these tracks, so it didn’t bother. Then, I thought ITUNES KNOWS I HAVE THESE TRACKS. So, is there some sort of GUID in AAC? Is that GUID registered anywhere? If I encode my tracks as AAC and give them to you, can they be traced back to me? If this was some simple filename/filesize scheme, it would have caught the MP3 duplicates as well.