After a successful training (teaching) week, I’m on my way back home.
I also had a chat at AuckLUG (facilitated by the Auckland Novell
offices) and got invited to an “NZ 2.0” meeting at Galbraith’s
brewhouse by Nat Torkington. That was particularly interesting.

Airports are always good fun, lots of computers and other signs at
work. On the way in the main arrivals/departures displays were low on
virtual memory (photo attached), one the way out I saw a shop
advertising LCD tell that its Norton Antivirus subscription had
almost expired and that it had protected against 78000 viruses
already (how can that box possibly be so exposed?) and another screen
in the departure lounge displayed a blue screen of death. Not picking
on Auckland, this is pretty typical. Sigh.

There was also a sign on a garbage bin saying “no spitting, please
use toilets”. Hmm…

And one particular quarantine display cabinet actually contained a
decorated monkey skull (hello Indiana Jones! what are people thinking
when they buy stuff like that?)

AirNZ’s (Boeing 747/777) in-flight system is curious… on boot each
seat needs to load stuff in various stages, first a fairly long
Xmodem download, then some DHCP netboot magic, then a TFTP download
for the GUI. If the system crashes for some seats, the only recovery
method is to shut down while entertainment system for the whole
aircraft, wait some time, and reboot (which takes 20-30 minutes).
Surely… (oh never mind)
The captain just explained that people should pause between pressing
buttons (through the intuitive!? system) because otherwise the system
might lock up “just like your computer at home when you click the
right mouse button repeatedly”). Oh dear.

“This email already isn’t using, as far as something of necessity you have need of, so hypotenuse Your enamel on my new email address: …”

/me sighs

“Pageviews per kilowatt-hour (kWh)”

Noted by Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), they keep getting kicked out of colocation sites. I’ve heard this a lot lately, the biggest headache at highly scaled sites is the power consumption of all the server hardware. Perhaps it’s simply a side-effect of the horizontal scaling (scale-out): lots of cheaper machines, rather than some big iron (but the latter is not affordable, and might not be suitable for this kind of job anyway).

So the challenge lies with chip manufactureres (CPU, RAM) and hardware companies: provide high performance with lower power consumption. One can probably simply look at 64-bit CPUs there, with the memory addressing capabilities and relative low cost (AMD Opterons being ahead right now, but Intel is coming out with new stuff), 32-bit for this type of server won’t make much sense any more. Of course this is when talking about new hardware setups.

Re the pageviews, I think Jim said they’re currently at around 120,000 pageviews per kWh.

I’m scribbling this while temporarily stranded in Vancouver,
Washington. The train had electric trouble so the aircon and toilets
didn’t work (and it’s quite a hot day). Now go on train-sceptics,
have your laugh! But I’ve seen similar stuff happen in other
countries, and with airlines also. I’m quite entertained here, I like
watching people do whatever they do, and there’s plenty of that here.


Amtrak has been taking good care of us with lots of cold water, ice, and popsicles… the local fire rescue has come by to check whether everybody (particularly the older people) were doing ok with the heat, and just now someone from a local TV station came by with a camera – of course that’s typical of any town where not much happens (I used to live in Cairns, North Queenland in Australia – similar quietness ;-)


Update… we’ve just been informed that there’s a replacement train on the way, so we’re about to head off! I think it’s just about the time we were originally scheduled to arrive… ohwell ;-)

Pretty much everybody has been a good sport about this adventure, and that’s very nice to see; no people being cranky at the poor local employees or anything like that. It’s also been interesting to see that many people these days carry not only a mobile phone but also a charger… yes, I do that too, it does come in handy sometimes.

Pia Waugh recently wrote an excellent article on economic and social reasons for using FOSS. It’s for Australia, but of course it applies almost everywhere. You may find it useful!

As Pia says, “getting the right information to the right people in the right order to get a right outcome.” or as I generally note, “don’t try geek arguments on non-geeks.” ;-)