Deduplication & Write Once, Read Many

It’s probably sad that I see this and think about deduplication & WORM. This fellow achieved a 27% deduplication rate, though. Think of all the extra letters he could tattoo on his back now! For those of you who don’t speak English natively I assume he was going for “Mississippi.”  

The Canonical List of Hypervisors That Suck

A recent, uh, discussion on Twitter reminded me that, just like operating systems, all hypervisors suck in some way. Or, at the very least, people complain about each one, and how they cost money, or that they’re free, or that they require support contracts, they don’t require support, they have no support, their support has no clue, they’re fragmented, they have no ecosystem, all they have is an ecosystem, who needs an ecosystem except idiots who can’t code and if you were worth anything you’d shut it and write your own long-distance replication tool instead of complaining about it, they don’t have a community, they do have a community but it’s too small, they do have a community but it’s …

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Excuses

So I’ve been writing a lot on Blame, Understanding Blame, and Preventing Blame over the last two weeks, and my thoughts have inspired some good discussion. Vendors have even gotten into it, with Xangati and I teaming up for a webinar next Thursday, February 24th to talk about blame and ways to deal with it. The focus will be mostly on different aspects of blame, and there will be a brief product demo of the excellent Xangati Management Dashboard at the end. If you liked their free version it’s a chance to see the full thing and be part of a good discussion. Lots of good reasons to attend so go sign up now!. All that aside, I feel that …

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Fibre Channel over Token Ring Presentation @ WI VMUG

I made a presentation to the Wisconsin VMware Users’ Group on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 on the Fibre Channel over Token Ring Alliance and its role in the future of the technology. It was short and it turned out pretty well, and I have to thank all the attendees, as well as Rod Gabriel, for laughing at the right spots and having a good sense of humor. We need more humor between vendor presentations, for sure. The notes for the slides are below each. I am not aware that a video was made, but if you know of one leave me a comment. Thanks! Put simply, FCoTR is the best features from two proven technologies, married into the storage protocol …

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Love For The Cisco Toolbar

Inspired by a comment made by Greg Ferro (@etherealmind, http://etherealmind.com), among others, and apologies to Fark.com, or whoever had the first one:

"Meet The Engineer"

Okay, so I work at a University, and occasionally I use a bathroom frequented by students who still believe in writing creative stuff on the walls. Today I see a quote: “I have yet to meet the person who can outsmart a bullet.” and figuring that it isn’t an original work I go looking for the source. It turns out to be the Heavy Weapons guy in Team Fortress 2, during their “Meet the Team” videos. Whoever had the idea for that is a genius. You don’t need much character development in a first person shooter, but these are just the right length, and funny as hell. If you haven’t watched them and are looking for something to kill a …

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Grandma & Grandpa

In this day and age the big bad wolf apparently just has to use Google: If you search on  “Lewon, Madison, WI” in Google Maps you get to see Ben’s bookmarks. No idea who Ben is, but I know where his grandparents live.

Why Does rnd() Keep Changing?

My friend Tom found this, I thought it was worth re-sharing: I can think of several ways of making things like /dev/random stop changing, mainly based on what my customers have done to machines.

Goodbye Kitty

Hello Kitty? I don’t think so! Thanks to my friend Bob my refrigerator door will never be the same: A friend (who had several awesome cats) used to have a sign I really liked, too: “Cat, the other white meat.”