Christmas Vacation

I’m currently in Maryland at my parents house. Unfortunately, I left my laptop power cord at home. Even if my laptop was working, I wouldn’t have access. I am currently stealing access from my brother, who has a nifty laptop card.

I am squandering what little time I have on this computer to surf the web and try to plan out my purchases for 2008. I need to buy a new TV, since my old one is getting very old. Also, I’d like to either buy or build a DVR box for home. This will lead to the inevitable need for a NAS device. And lastly, my phone is almost two years old and I am looking enviously at my younger brother’s slimmer and wireless Blackberry.

Losing Weight

I’ve been sitting on the bench, waiting for a new project to be assigned to me. Since I am not in Bentonville, I have been eating a lot healthier. Also, it keeps snowing here, so I keep shoveling out the driveway. This is how I lost three pounds in the last week.

I may be going back to Bentonville again in January. If I do, I will try very hard to eat healthier and get some real exercise.

Sun’s Red Shift

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is saying their growth will come from a change in the nature of computing, which they are labeling “Red Shift.” The video is of Sun’s Greg Papadopoulos explaining the term and what Sun believes will happen in the market.

Link to Sun’s Video

These guys obviously are pre-occupied with scale, as is Google. Google’s approach of using millions of cheap servers to achieve scale has inherit limitations, atleast that’s what the Sun Marketing folks want you to believe.

I personally think that Sun may be onto something for a few reasons. The first is that it is much easier to run at scale efficiently when the hardware “overhead” is reduced. A growing Internet startup may find it cheaper to scale up by adding small servers. However, once a certain point is reached, it is far more efficient to run a larger server with less energy consumption and a smaller footprint for the same processing power.

Secondly, with virtualization becoming a commodity and commoditizing O/S and Platforms, it is easier to manage less hardware with more horsepower. Virtualization makes it possible to fully utilize large machines.

P.S. I am a Sun (JAVA) shareholder.

Green Diamonds

I was surfing around on Ebay and I found these man-made diamonds. The seller said that they were made by GE in 1984. I was skeptical that they were diamonds, but I put them right next to some green diamonds that Tracey has that cost far more, and they look like authentic diamonds.

Now I have to give them to Tracey so she can make something from them!

Travel To Arkansas

The project here in Arkansas is coming to a close. W00t!

I had a horrible time getting here yesterday. My Northwest flight to MEM took off a few hours late yesterday. That caused me to miss my connection to XNA. The next available flight was 8 hours away, so they re-booked me on Delta. Unfortunately, I had a connecting flight in Atlanta, so I ran to catch that. Once I got to Atlanta, the flight to XNA was delayed an hour. I finally made it yesterday evening.

There was a football coach from Harvard football who was also in my situation. Only he was trying to get to Texas…so he ended up flying from Boston, to Memphis, to Atlanta, to XNA, and then to Dallas. I feel really bad for him.

I’m looking for a few weeks on the bench. Hopefully when I get staffed again it will be a local project…or a project on the east coast.

SEC FOIA Requests

My company, Novell, recently postponed our earnings release for the most recent quarter because of an SEC review. Specifically, our company received a second comment letter from the SEC on October 18th.

I am curious about the comment letters. I’m sort of a finance geek, and wonder what the SEC is questioning. Do they have questions about the way we handle Linux revenue? Is it a question about how we accounted for the Microsoft deal?

It is possible to obtain copies of the letters by filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the SEC. I thought about it, but I am not so curious as to actually file a request. If you are super curious, you can find the SEC FOIA request information here.

DARJIX adopts TXP

I finally got around to changing my blog and the DARJIX website. I was getting tired of some of the limitations of Blogger, so I decided to move to Textpattern.

You’ll notice that I have a new template. I know it is bland…but I am in the middle of modifying it. Also, you will notice some issues with the pages and the formatting. I promise to keep working on that to make this a much nicer site.

One advantage is that people will be able to comment on stories, even if they don’t have a blogger account. I am still going to moderate all the comments, but this should open it up for more people.

I managed to write a redirect rule in the .htaccess file. If you had the old page bookmarked, or were using the XML feed, you shouldn’t see any issues.