If p is the perimeter of a right angle triangle with integral length sides, {a,b,c}, there are exactly three solutions for p = 120. {20,48,52}, {24,45,51}, {30,40,50} For which value of p < 1000, is the number of solutions maximised?
WARNING: CONTAINS MATHEMATICS
When I first heard about ZFS and its features, I was intrigued by a comment by Bill More about the possibility of having a database or other app directly consume the DMU that ZFS uses for filesystems or volumes. After I did a spot of research when editing the ZFS page on Wikipedia I noticed the “Last Word In Filesystems” pdf has been updated since I last looked, here are the 2 pages that excited me. With Suns recent acquisition of MySQL and lustre we seem to have arrived there now. Lustre support is excellent as it solves the only failing of ZFS, that it is not clustered.
The in-kernel CIFS stuff gets a mention too
See the full presentation and Bill Moore’s slightly outdated video
After me banging on for a year about how cool ZFS is, my boss is finally convinced and wants to get a Thumper (or 2). Depending on budgetary constraints we may be getting a couple of these to implement a warm backup solution for our current data and about 5 years worth from now (they are 24Tb each)
48 Drives in a 4U rackmount for 20k, great value and unbeatable storage density.
What a load of shit, she clearly cannot make a single correct statement.
Go and read Pupils to get ‘new world’ trips from the beeb.
You may think “trips abroad for kids, great” , if you are more cynical you may think “heads choose the kids, not sure I like that”.
Let us do some arithmetic, 100 kids for 6 weeks each for £1.4M.
£1400000/100 = £14,000 per child
£14000/6 = £2’333 per week
Assuming a 40 hour working week, £58/hour
Of course its not that simple, the kids clearly don’t get all the money as if they had a 6 week job. I think a few marketeers in the UK, all the necessary admin by the British Council will do away with some of the money too, but I can’t imagine any way this is good value for the country or any organisation involved (I am not cynical enough to suggest that for the BC the point is to administer it.)
Hows about giving 1000 kids £1000 spend in a country of their choice, you could get them to bid for the money and report back with diaries and photos etc. All the £500’s the government paid into child trust funds for children with low-income parents could become a good jolly fund for them when they hit 18, or they could get driving lessons and a car - not a bad deal, particularly if their folks contribute anything else to the fund along the way. That or 18th birthday parties become 5 day benders in estates around Britain.
As some of you may know I am unusually interested in filesystems. After sending John a link about HAMMER, a new FreeBSD clustered FS and joking about starting a tomFS project, his reply offered some help deciding on features it should have and marketing it.
tomfs can process a huge number of operations in parallel, just not necessarily the operations it should be processing, and it might get bored with some of them and forget about them sometimes.
tomfs stores redundant copies of anything it detects as documentaries or spoken word.
tomfs is very easy to port - a couple of bottles should do.
Cracked me up.
PS: Only perhaps 5 of my friends would get this, but I know at least 3 of them read this so no bother.
See the flickr map view or the album.
I walked all over New York yesterday, went along the east side all the way to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum. The place is amazing. Not quite as good as the British Museum in my view but still a great place, perhaps the architecture is better, I wish I had longer in there.
Macbeth was amazing, same director who did The Tempest that I saw in Stratford. It had very sinister nurses as the witches and Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth was incredibly erotic. Patrick Stewart was not great actually, his monologues - particularly the dagger speech - were not as good as hers. Go here and here for 2 more detailed reviews.
Landed at 2.30pm yesterday, went straight to our Wall St office and got on with helping them move office. Went and got a bit drunk to help with jet-lag (Being bladdered and knackered in 2 time zones is better than one… or something)
Got tickets today to go and see Patrick Stewart in Macbeth tomorrow. I saw him in Stratford in The Tempest as Prospero a couple of years ago, he was superb. It’s at BAM, I am looking forward to it.
Got the weekend to myself so I will take in the sights and go to the Guggenheim. I was not excited about being here till on my commute this morning I saw a real life NYPD car.
You are walking home late at night and two girls run past, one turns to the other and says “this is the millionth time I have ran today” and you cannot help but say “You would have to start and stop running 10 times a second, while you said that you would have to have done it 30 times”
You know its real bad when you get home, do the calculation and and are disappointed you did not say 11.5 and then blog about it.
I have run Linux systems for about a decade, but not always as my main OS though. Whereas I used to enjoy the learning curve linux forced on you, at some point it was both more interesting and easier to use than windows. The selection of packages in Ubuntu is superb and there is no show-stopping apps that I need to run windows for. With all the compiz niceness we are winning the eye candy wars, and of course it increases my productivity… marginally. The installer is unbeatable, people who think windows is easier are mad or deluded by the fact someone else did it for them. Hardware support is brilliant in Linux in general and particularly in Ubuntu; even if you dont like binary drivers, having stuff work is what you want.
I have been amazed at how well Ubuntu works on my laptop (a Dell D430), every device works, I have Compiz on my Intel graphics card, the USB DVD-RW works, the docking station works, all the function keys work, everything works. The only slight niggle was attaching a projector the other day, I had never done dual monitors and Fn-F8 seemed to work but I had to change my screen resolution to match the projectors, I could not get it to work in dual monitor mode (I only tried a few mins as the pressure was on to get an image up)
Ubuntu is Debian. I have said this to people before, possibly to be controversial but I think there is a point to be made. Ubuntu is Debian at least in the way Debian is GNU + Linux + X.org + …, it would not exist without the work of the Debian developers. It is distinct enough that I will never state that identity again, I was over egging the pudding. I like the idea of them selecting a core of packages from Debian testing/unstable, QAing them, adding apps not found in there and tweaking the settings. I spent an awful long time trying to do that single handedly in the past, using apt-pining and loads of 3rd party repos, and it was a pain and certainly not as stable as Ubuntu is. I like that they recompile Debian packages and make them available in Universe and Multiverse, but think they are a bit coy about saying where they come from, “a snapshot of the free world” or something I think they say. I think people perhaps need to be a bit more thoughtful when giving credit, hard work by Debian, the kernel guys, Gnome and pick_your_favorite_app will make Ubuntu look better, as of course will all the good work the Ubuntu guys do. I think I will continue to use Debian stable for servers for some time though, Ubuntu LTS does not seem as safe a bet to me.