Category Archives: Uncategorized

Upstarta.biz – doing it differently

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I’ve found that exchanging ideas and asking questions, even with people some might consider to be direct competitors, is more valuable than risky. Enter…

Upstarta.biz logo

Upstarta.biz is the home of a group of people who run, or are interested in running, their business according to a set of Principles that make them more people friendly (both to clients and self), resilient to recessions, (potentially) better for the environment, and more. A buzzword compliant mission statement could be something like “Business strategy incubation through co-mentoring”.

While being particularly suited to on-line, ICT and Open Source related endeavours, it is by no means limited to that. In addition, the guidelines also apply well to non-profits and other organisations.

The group’s monthly membership fee is currently set at a nomimal AUD 5, sufficient to cover cost and creating a sense of commitment that a gratis service would not have. When you think about it, that’s cheaper per year than many static books! Members actively participate by contributing on the wiki (like a dynamic book) and mailing list, mentoring fellow members, and (where possible) attending live meetings for face-to-face interaction.

OSDC 2009 – call for papers reminder

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The call for papers for OSDC 2009 is open until 30 June 2009; yes that’s only a few more days. Submit your abstract and do a talk at this fab conference!

This is a grassroots style conference designed by developers for developers.  It covers Perl, Python, Ruby/Rails, PHP, Java/Grails and Open Source operating systems as well as some business aspects.  If you’d like to cover something else as well that is Open Source themed, please feel free.

The Call for Papers can be found at: http://2009.osdc.com.au/call-for-papers
The important dates are:

  • Call for Papers Closes      30 June, 2009
  • Proposal acceptance         20 July, 2009
  • Accepted paper submissions  14 September, 2009
  • OSDC 2009 Main Conference!  25th to 27th November, 2009

OSDC 2009 will be held at the Bardon Conference Center in Brisbane this year. This is a fantastic venue a short drive from the Brisbane CBD, totally surrounded by lush greenery.

When raisins and sultanas are grapes too

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Do you sometimes see a commercial for breakfast cereal (in print or on TV) showing grapes in between the flakes and other ingredients? There are no grapes in the actual product, so you may wonder why that is not false advertising. The answer is hyperbole, or in marketing/advertising terminology: puffery.

Raisins and sultanas (what you call ’em somewhat depends on where in the world you are) are essentially dried grapes (certain varieties of), and thus apparently it’s not a lie but merely “a bit out there”. Likewise, when an advertisement projects that a product is “hand-picked by bare maidens just before dawn”, and “individually cuddled by dedicated grandmothers”, you are presumed to know that that is not actually the case. But do you, really?

What would happen if one were to go out and conduct street samples to see how many people believe the various claims to be literally true? What scary percentage might come out of that? In my example above I’ve used extreme cases make the point absolutely clear (hyperbole on my part!) but today’s product communications contain so many of them and often less blatant.

Now back from cereal to our own realm of technology… when you read announcements and claims (even in blog posts), how confident are you that you can tell literal truth from puffery?

Ref: the sultana/grape example comes from The Gruen Transfer, a fabulous TV show about advertising, broadcast on Australia’s public network ABC.

What a Google data center really looks like

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Google has fessed up: apparently it looks like a bunch of shipping containers, since 2005. And it does not use the usual rack stuff or centralised backup power. See Google uncloaks once-secret server for a decent overview, plus pictures.

I think there’s quite a lof of good information in there, with important lessons. Just a few:

  • It’s not fancy-brand stuff, they’re simple Gigabyte mainboards
  • An open frame rather than enclosures.
  • 12V battery on the frame, rather than a centralised UPS. More energy efficient, and no single point of failure.
  • Heatsinks, not lots of fans (mechanical stuff fails). There’ll be airflow-creating foo for the whole container, but since it’s a single enclosed space there’s neat separation between hot/cold already. Efficient!
  • Two regular SATA harddisks

So, it’s mostly commodity stuff in a custom frame and and other minor tidbits. There’s 1160 servers per container, and by the looks of it it should work out pretty cheap to buy, build and operate.

The energy efficiency has more aspects… if you use less power, you’re also generating less heat that then needs to be got rid of. Cool machines are more reliable and live longer, and even fractions of a degree can make a significant difference.

You can see it all from a monetary perspective, but it also makes sense in terms of maintenance effort, waste/disposal and other environmental impact aspects. Of course these containers still eat a lot of electricity, but there’s a lot in there and it will be way “greener” than most data centers.

Arjen also on twitter & identi.ca

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If you’d like to follow shorter scribbles of what I get up to, like my work at Open Query, OurDelta and of course the BlueHackers initiative, I’ve got myself organised at http://twitter.com/arjenlentz or http://identi.ca/arjenlentz (you can pick one, they have the same feed).