Petroglyphs

The only downside to Gérard Langevin’s live-saving surgery is that he no longer qualifies for entrance to Carleton University, where the ‘K’ stands for ‘Quality’! (For full humour effect, substitute the name of your own safety school and a derogatory slogan for it.)

Following a few more occurrences like this incident and a bit of debugging and analysis, I finally decided to bite the bullet and replace my motherboard. Because the processor is semi-old (an Intel P4 with Socket 478) I wound up replacing it too rather than trying to choose one of the (very small selection of) motherboards that supports it. Eight hours after placing the order with NCIX it’s been shipped, and for $50 less than anywhere else I found; both prices dropped by a substantial amount as I was browsing. That’s a pretty good deal and speedy turnaround, both of which I’ve come to expect from the company.

So with any luck grok will be not only stable but better, stronger, and faster than it was before, sometime this weekend.

There are 10 types of people in this world: people who are good at binary, and 9 others.

For a fraction of a second I thought Matt had stolen my topic. Fortunately (for him!) it turns out we’re just perusing different sides of the same coin. To wit:

Back when I started at the company, four owners and umpty-ump name changes ago, our philosophy was to do the most with the limited resources we had. There were two main reasons for that:

1. We were trying to compete with other companies for an extremely limited customer base, so we had to keep the cost of our product low.
2. We didn’t have much money.

In practise, that meant that we’d cram as much as possible into every piece of hardware and software we had. My first workstation was a 486/40DX that did triple duty as the company’s nameserver and mailserver; occasionally I’d have to run something in X Windows, so that would be running too; and it also became our first intranet webserver when I installed a just-released piece of software from NCSA called httpd. Our software ran on a single PC, then the next-generation version expanded the requirements to a SPARC/PC cluster with the SPARC handling video output, system control and applications, and the PC handling serial ports.

And it was good.

We worked that way for about five years, vastly expanding the capabilities of the software using the same hardware we’d always had. Sure, we got new machines from time to time that had faster processors, more memory, and so on, but we’d keep the old stuff running as long as it was physically possible. Our cluster grew by another PC, but that was it.

Then came the buyout by a big Silicon Valley company, and everything changed; not immediately or all at once, of course, but gradually, like boiling a frog. We heard stories about the magical land to the west where money dripped from the ceilings, there were perks and freebies as far as the eye could see, and everyone had huge racks… of servers!

And we wantss preciouss. Shiny preciousss, nice precioussss… we waaantsssss….

And we gots, to a certain extent; never as much as the parent company, but things started showing up. And as we got more, we started to do less with it, which was the fashion at the time in the west. A three-server product cluster sprouted a dedicated GUI host, a dedicated command-and-control server, a dedicated database server, and two more workhorse PCs to do some of the heavier lifting. We started ordering quad-processor SPARCs with two gigabytes of RAM and storage space measured in fractions of terabytes. Even QA got their share, two clones of production environments for stable and destructive testing. We started installing racks of our own in the server room.

Then the dot-com bubble popped, and we got more. As the parent company shed employees, the racks of equipment they had used came to us. We were swimming in servers; I got a server of my own to play with.

Things levelled off after that; the stock crashed and suddenly we were back to being the little startup that could, maybe, if we really tried hard. But the damage had been done. There were still scads of equipment around, but none of it was used to anything resembling its capacity. Instead of sharing one underutilized machine to do three or four low-resource functions, we kept using three or four servers; every new process meant a new computer. The minimalist mentality once present had been overtaken by the habits formed during our short-lived affluence.

That’s all several years ago now. Since then I think we’ve started to get back to middle ground, a reasonably steady state where we’re not straining for resources but not neck-deep in them either. We’re making better use of the hardware we already have, and limiting the inflow to stuff we actually need. But every once in a while I’ll see a desktop computer taken from an office after an upgrade and wonder why it isn’t being used as the modern-day equivalent of my trusty old mailserver/​nameserver/​webserver/​X terminal….

Earlier this evening Jimmy listed a bunch of non-search Google-icious things that he uses. For various reasons (including temperament) I don’t use most of them:

• Analytics. Tried it, didn’t like it. Because this site is hosted on DreamHost (sign up with that link and get 25% off; I also get a kickback), I get full logs that I can parse with whatever tool I like (currently Analog and Webalizer) so it’s no big loss.
• Blogger. As it says down at the bottom of the page, Petroglyphs is powered by WordPress. I do have an account, but it’s only so I can comment on blogs that require it.
• Gmail. All my mail goes through DreamHost, on my own domain, so I can do with it as I wish. As with Blogger, I do have an account; in this case it’s a side effect of using Talk to communicate with my sister and brother. (An interesting fact is that despite having never used Gmail for any mail of any sort—no personal mail, no website signups, no mailing lists—and never allowing it to be advertised or added to things like user directories, it’s full of spam! The account name isn’t something easily brute-forced, so somehow it’s been shared. Sounds vaguely evil to me….)
• Desktop. Not available for my platform of choice, and I don’t use any other platform to an extent that it would be at all useful. I’ve played a bit with Beagle but found I used it so little that it was hard to justify the resource hit it took to run.
• Google Alerts, Google Blog Search Atom feeds, and Google News Search Atom feeds. (Jimmy mentioned Gmail Alerts; these are similar features.) These I do use for a few terms of interest, although I’ve generally found (or created) most of the links that appear on it before it notifies me of them. All three have a frustrating habit of alerting me multiple times of pages that have existed for years. All in all I prefer Technorati.
• Calendar. My calendar is private; when there are public events I’m planning to attend I add them to my upcoming.org account. Everything work-related is in my PDA, and I wouldn’t publish it to a third party server in the first place.
• Page Creator. Shudder. Nothing but raw XHTML, CSS and ECMAScript for this boy, all written by hand in Vim or WordPress’s markup view.
• Personalized Home. My 100+ browser tabs and aggregator are the closest things I have to a home page, and they have most everything I’m interested in.
• Talk. As noted above, I’ve got an account that I use to chat with my siblings. For most internal discussion at work I use our IRC server, and I use an MSN account (ptui!) for my other personal contacts.
• Google Maps. I do use this one, although I primarily get to it with a smart keyword in Firefox.
• Google Video/YouTube. I’m a consumer of both—aren’t we all?—but have no need or desire to create or upload anything.
• Froogle. Nope.
• Docs and Spreadsheets. Nope. It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever start creating and editing work files on a third-party server, and I use OpenOffice.org for anything personal (which I wouldn’t be posting to a third-party service anyway).
• AdSense. This site is an ad-free zone, with the exception of a very few personal endorsements like the DreamHost links above. I did have AdSense on What’s That Song for a while, since it was advertising-based, but I think I only ever made a grand total of about fifty cents from it (which I never cashed out) before I killed off updates to the page a few years ago.
• Google Earth. Used it a couple of times, and it’s sort of cool, but ultimately not of interest.
• Picasa. I’ve got The GIMP, which does a whole lot more than Picasa, and Gallery, which does everything I need for publishing and sharing my pictures.