Solar Power order placed

I signed up with http://www.solarcity.com for 4.5Kw of thin film panels (60 of them). Their web site is slick, walks you through the install process, they have online monitoring of the output of the solar array and I also added the option of monitoring the house's consumption of electricity, which is integrated into the same web based monitoring and graphing package. They visit later this week to do the engineering assessment, then I get plans (provided online) and planning approval etc. follows. Should be all done in 2-3 months.

Thin film is better in partial light, and high temperatures, and it can be mounted closer to the roof tiles since it doesn't need an air gap underneath to cool it. We have a hot microclimate with no shade, at 2400ft altitude, above the morning mist most of the time, so the longer power delivery period per day should compensate for the slight reduction in peak efficiency compared to silicon. Solarcity offered both at the same price. There is a combination of a rebate and a tax credit at the moment. The tax credit is about 30% of the cost, and was added recently by Obama's stimulus package.

As it progresses I will post pictures and updates.

FLOW - a homebrew Android gumstix phone (finally)

See more here.

A few years ago the Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club (SVHMPC) formed out of frustration with the closed market for phones, and set out to build something we could program in our pocket. We made some progress but the prototype Gumstix Goliath board never made it into production, and along came the iPhone, which gave some of us the application platform we were looking for to customize. The OpenMoko project is also limping along, and Google Android is finally out there in volume. The FLOW project is open hardware running Android with a Gumstix CPU module. Nice combination for making custom devices.

Memcached 500K ops/s on Niagara T2

This is some nice work, scalability analysis to fix lock contention in memcached, then running on an out of the box Solaris T2 gets 500K ops/s or 9.6Gbits/s depending on payload size. The Niagara 2 based T2 has built-in 10Gbit network, and 8 cores with 8 threads in one chip. Sub-millisecond response.

http://blogs.sun.com/zoran/entry/scaling_memcached_500_000_ops

Netflix App Gallery

The Netflix API now has an App Gallery http://www.netflix.com/AppGallery which features my Instant Queue Add for Netflix iPhone app.

Usenix 09 - San Diego in June

I'm presenting again next month, at Usenix 09 in San Diego. I'm giving an all day workshop/tutorial on Tuesday June 16th. I have just updated my slides, combining the talks I have been developing over the years into Solaris/Linux Performance Tools and Tuning, which includes the Capacity Planning with Free Tools material that Mario Jauvin and I developed for CMG.



I have also posted the slides to http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco
.

Please come along, I look forward to seeing you in San Diego.

Cheers Adrian