Product Review

Intel X710 NICs Are Crap

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(I’m grumpy this week and I’m giving myself permission to return to my blogging roots and complain about stuff. Deal with it.) In the not so distant past we were growing a VMware cluster and ordered 17 new blade servers with X710 NICs. Bad idea. X710 NICs suck, as it turns out. Those NICs do all sorts of offloads, and the onboard processor intercepts things like CDP and LLDP packets so that the OS cannot see or participate. That’s a real problem for ESXi hosts where you want to listen for and broadcast meaningful neighbor advertisements. Under Linux you can echo a bunch of crap into the right spot in /dev and shut that off but no such luck on …

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iOS 5: Promise Good Despite Some Rough Edges

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I have been running iOS 5 on my iPhone 3GS since the developer release of the GM seed. I upgraded my first generation iPad today. To summarize my experiences: iOS 5 on my 3GS seems to be decent, though I’ve noticed reduced battery life even with most of the over-the-air stuff off. iOS 5 on my iPad has been a process, with the upgrade failing, the sync taking hours, and iTunes claiming that the device is full of “other” data. When I’m done with this post I’m going to go nuclear on it. I do major iOS upgrades on my devices with a particular routine. First, I make sure I get a good backup, and I go into the iTunes …

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My Questions About Project Blackbox

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I got to see Sun’s Project Blackbox today, over at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. First impression: interesting idea, obvious that it’s the first attempt at implementation. Now, my questions: 1. What would the money spent on a Blackbox get you in offsite hosting? 2. If you have the space to store a 20 foot shipping container and a chiller could you not just build a new data center in that space? 3. What keeps vandals and competitors from hijacking or severing the power, cooling, and external network connections? Is a whole new industry going to sprout up for data center trailer parks, with armed guards? It’s just a colocation facility writ large. 4. When Sun says that these …

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Yahoo! Bookmarks

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Yahoo! released what looks like a follow-on to del.icio.us in the form of Yahoo! Bookmarks. Update: Tom Chi from Yahoo! commented below on my remarks. Digg.com has his comments, and they make sense. Part of my problem is that I didn’t realize there was an old Yahoo! Bookmarks offering. I still think some of my criticism is relevant, but they know their own audience, or more specifically, both of their audiences. Thanks for adding to the discussion, Tom. My first impressions of Yahoo! Bookmarks: I agree with LifeHacker that the del.icio.us interface leaves something to be desired. You can’t automatically post your bookmarks to a blog. That sucks. The del.icio.us interface for that was turbo-clunky but it works reliably. The …

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Omea: Day One

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So I’ve spent more time playing with Omea. I love some of the details, like the setting to mark an item read once it’s been displayed for 2 seconds. I don’t know how many times I’ll errantly click something, or scroll through, and not having things marked as “read” is nice. The use of favicon.ico is nice, too — it helps me visually sort the blogs. Plus the app looks nice. Vyacheslav Lukianov from JetBrains posted a comment here yesterday, which I think is really cool. It’s now obvious to me that they’re watching to see what people think of Omea, so I thought it fair to follow up with my impressions after the first 24 hours. I was going …

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