blackbox is a video star!

Jonathan announced Project Black Box at the end of last month. Its a Data Centre in a shipping container and expanded on its unique value in his blog article “A picture’s worth…. Jonathan said that customer reaction has varied with equal measures of a) nervous laughter, b) incredulity, c) profound curiosity …

Sun CEC 2006

I returned from Sun’s West coast training events today; my trip started last month and the original articles can be found here…. Potentially worth revisiting are my articles on system/data centre density and the dichotomy between M&E management and the management of the IT payload. I wrote a bit about managing the backstage technology but in retrospect, from reading the notes, a downbeat trip. On the flight home, for once, I left the movies alone and finished Jennifer Government by Max Barry …

Building a Yahoo MapApp

This article is a pointer to my original one on the sun/oracle blog. I wrote up how to build a Yahoo maps application. The idea was to build a map showing the approximate location of members of a group for the purposes of planning meetings. The date should be noted and that using Yahoo didn’t seem that odd at the time; it’s been replaced in market and mind share as the programmatic map application by google and privacy implications are much higher. This item is as much a technology diary as anything else.

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in April 2016, the screenshots are missing from both, if I wish to restore them, I’ll need to put them on the wiki. …

Is Web 2.0 relevant to a systems architect?

On my old sun/oracle blog, I wrote a piece reporting some thoughts about whether Web 2.0 was more than a marketing slogan, and Sun’s decision to market its first storage appliance as web 2.0 server. On re-reading the original article, what comes through is my confusion about the then web 2.0 syndrome and the need and role of systems like the x4500 aka Thumper. This version of the article has been edited; some words about my experimenting with Yahoo’s 1st generation PaaS has been removed. I obviously thought this was part of the future but the reality was that (for that type of application) it fell through the gap between IaaS on which I host this blog, and SaaS, (flickr, google maps and wordpress.com), the first two of which I integrate into the blog, and the latter is a competitor technology. …

Rethinking the ‘Labs visit

Rethinking the ‘Labs visit

On my sun/oracle blog, I reprised my recent visit to the Sun Labs open days firstly by pointing at Ashlee Vance’s article; he had also visited the Labs at the beginning of June, and wrote up his findings more rapidly than me. The link is still live here…. The article covers some stuff I didn’t follow through on, and offers a segue into games serverplex designs. The article is headlined “Sun Labs edges toward practicality”, and suggests his interests were more short-term than mine.

I had delayed the write up and publication, I had a lot to say and these things take time. The original articles in June reflect what I thought at the time. I have since spoken to both colleagues and customers and recognise that some of my priorities were a bit awry and I may not have given some subjects sufficient attention, in particular, I didn’t visit many of the “Virtualisation” projects available and haven’t reported on those I did visit such as “Project Crossbow”, a network interface virtualisation and resource management project. …