Garage - Working on Saturday

The concrete team were back today, putting in more rebar and tidying everything up. Chris Ramoutar the Electrician was also here putting in a 2-inch pipe to carry power to the garage. I'm having a high spec 220V and 200Amps dedicated circuit configured so that it's ready to recharge electric cars in the future. I got a work-out clearing up the felled fir tree and chipping the small branches, and collecting large rocks that had been dug up, and arranging them around the pond.

Here's a view from the deck, you can see the apron on the right, and the garage foundation on the left, and Chris working in the trench that takes the power line.



Here's a view from where the driveway will be as it joins the apron, you can see the walkway to the left of the garage.



Later that evening some very confused deer wandered over the foundations, since it has been built over their usual path from the forest out to the front yard.

Garage Site - rebar ready

Another stop motion video at 30s intervals shows most of the day's work. The tree that was falling over was pushed back the other way and cut up, and they added the parking "apron" in front of the garage.

There is a 4ft wide walkway along the side of the garage by the house, so the main pad is 36 by 36ft. It slopes to the right by three inches over that width so it will drain. The walkway slopes away from the garage by one inch. The apron is 26ft deep, 36ft wide and slopes by 12 inches (4%). The driveway will connect to the side of the apron that is nearest the house.

Garage Site - digging the foundations

Today the new leach-field pipe was inspected, and the foundations were dug, I did a stop-motion video using iStopMotion on an old MacOS laptop looking down from the house, and most of the day's work is compressed into one minute.



Tomorrow they will do the detailed preparations for the pour on Monday of the garage slab itself (6" thick), perimeter foundation (at least 18" deep, more on the downhill side where it is on in-fill), a walkway down the side of the garage, an "apron" in front of the garage to park on, and pads for the propane tank and generator.

Garage Site - full speed ahead

Pictures taken this morning, before digging started for the new leach field pipe that's getting inspected and filled back in on Thursday. The foundation layout and trenching will be done on Thursday and Friday, hopefully pouring concrete Monday and inspections on Tuesday. Everything just went from glacially slow to full speed....

In the first picture, taken from a window in the house, the white blob is the propane tank, and you can see the leaning tree.



The second picture is looking back from by the tree. The two low black things by the house are the caps for the septic tank.



I'm setting up a stop motion camera, will try to capture the building process. The MacOS iStopMotion app seems to work fine and has a five day free trial, so we will see how that goes.

Garage Permit - now the fun starts

I went into the county office and picked up the permit, paid them some more money to cover their costs of inspecting the work as we do it. They gave me back one of the marked up copies of the final site and building plans, and the permit sheet, and I stopped off at a Fedex office to get several copies made. Next stop is Tuffshed, to talk to the foreman who gets it built, and the concrete contractor (Jose Amaya Concrete of Morgan Hill) who normally works with Tuffshed. Jose is available immediately so we may actually get going fairly quickly. First step is to mark out the foundation and pour it.

The new septic tank connection pipe is going in today and being inspected tomorrow.

The Periodic Table of Periodic Tables

The Periodic Table of Periodic Tables
Originally uploaded by ★keaggy.com

Excellent science geekery

Garage plans approved

The county turned around the final update immediately and I got a letter in the mail today! Now I just need to visit them to get the actual permit document.

I'm getting started with the first step next week...

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Solar Power - Spring Equinox Update

Spring is here, and we just had a few clear days, shown below. The sunrise and sunset are about 12 hours apart. We installed the system just before the fall equinox, so we now have a good calibration of the output levels through the least sunny part of the year, from now on it will be interesting to track the output as we go to the longest day.

Actual average output over the last 200 or so days is about 14.3 KWh/day. Yesterday was 22.5 KWh, and at the winter solstice low point it was 16 KWh on a clear day as previously blogged.

Garage Plan Resubmitted

This morning I took the requested clarifications on the building design into the county offices. We should hear back in a week or two, it's minor stuff so I hope this is the last step. We already have our permit for the leach field repair, so I'm starting on that work. We got the septic tank pumped and inspected (it was in good condition) this week, and filed the inspection results with the county, so the next step is to put in a new re-routed pipe and diversion valve between the tank and the leach field.

Garage Plan Detail

To get everything approved we had to survey the land and get a detailed plan drawn up by a Civil Engineer - we used Terry Szewczyk and he was helpful, competent and kept the costs to a minimum. The picture below is a detail from one of the drawings, which were produced at 1inch to 20ft scale, and shows the important part where the garage goes. For some reason the contour lines altitude is shown based around 2000ft, whereas the real altitude is about 2400ft, but no-one seems to care if that aspect of it is accurate.



Our first step is to replace the pipe that goes from the septic tank to the diversion valve and the remaining leach field, so we start by getting the tank emptied (which needs to be done every few years anyway). The pipe has to dive down a bit then go across under the concrete "apron" that will lead up to the garage, and it won't be buried very deep, so we will be putting down a 4" pipe that is placed inside a 6" pipe for the part that goes under the driveway, to give it extra protection from being crushed.

The final detailed changes we need on the building design plan are now in hand (the layout plan shown above is already approved), so I'm back to the county office again next week to resubmit them and hopefully get the permit.

The other details you can see on the plan are the electrical connection, which will be a 220V -200Amp dedicated circuit capable of charging electric cars one day. The propane tank will be relocated, and hooked up to a generator and the house. There is also a water connection to a fire sprinkler system.

WiFi upgrade

My five year old wifi hardware got flaky and slow, so I looked around and decided to go with the D-Link DIR-825 as my central node and a DAP-1522 to bridge to my TV etc.

They are both N spec dual frequency systems. Arrived today from Amazon for $225 for the pair.

[Update: they are working fine, I have a 130Mbit/s link speed reported on the 5GHz link between the DIR-825 and the DAP-1522, and I've shut down all the old WiFi networks].

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

sketching the new garage

While figuring out what we wanted to build, I used Google Sketchup (the free version) to create a 3D model of the house and garage. Working with 3D takes a bit of getting used to, but it's very similar to the solid modeling I was doing to make custom 3D printed parts for my homebrew phone, and Sketchup is very good at getting these kind of artists-impression images created.

The house really is a box, and the full width deck with steps going back down the side doesn't exist yet, but I was able to get the relative position and size of the garage about right so we could see if it fitted in. We then went to TuffShed and got them to draw up plans for our oversized garage. If you get a garage custom "stick built" at the site, the cost is quite high, mostly labor. Tuffshed pre-fabricate the parts, ship them in, and put up the entire building in about three days. The cost (not including foundations) is about $30K for an 1150 square foot triple wide garage (32ft wide, 36ft deep), with a 16ft wide double door, 8ft wide single door, and 10ft high ceilings. The basic cost is more like $20K, but it cost extra to go from 8ft to 10ft ceilings, and we added a bunch of other extra options.

So far, we have had a few minor issues getting the Tuffshed plans approved by the county planning department. Really just clarifications of materials and codes on the drawings, but the first two tries have failed. Everything is now approved apart from the final tweaks to the drawings of the garage, so I'm hoping to get it taken care of next week.

the garage saga, it gets complicated

We live out of town, on top of the Santa Cruz mountains. This makes a few things easier, we only have Santa Clara County to deal with, no city rules. We also have more space. The downside is that it can be hard to find people to work on the house, and it can cost more to deliver heavy stuff like gravel than it costs to buy it.

The complications start with a scenic highway. We can't build anything within 100ft of the road, Then there is a well, we can't do things within a 100ft radius of that. Then there is a septic tank and leach field. The leach field is two banks of 250ft long buried perforated pipes which occupies a lot of space, including the space that we want to put a garage on. Then a driveway has to find it's way through and have a turn around area big enough to take a fire engine. All of a sudden, a few acres of land is full.

A few years ago we got a plan drawn up for a modified leach field layout. This removed the upper 250ft field so that we could put the garage there, and added a new 250ft field below. To comply with planning rules we had to show that we could on theory add another 500ft of leach field if the first one failed. So that took up almost all the space.

After all that the biggest possible garage we could fit is a free standing building 32ft wide and 36ft deep. It will have one single and one double door and sit alongside the house about 20ft away and slightly downhill.

To prove that the space existed I got my local ground moving specialist Bob Whalen to use an excavator to dig holes and locate the leach field pipes, and made a big flat area in the right place. Along the way we destroyed the upper leach field before I got permission, we got told off but since the rest of the plan made sense we got away with it and were able to move forward.

At some point the county realized that the plan they had for my driveway bore no relation to what had been put in by the people who built the house, this raised the spectre of a grading violation and possible grading permit, which would be needed if we had to move more than 150 cubic yards to get a driveway that conformed to code.

With a lot of help from Terry and crew at TS Civil Engineering we ended up with a plan for the driveway and leach field that met code, didnt raise a violation and didn't need over 100 cubic yards of grading. With a few tweaks the county finally approved the plan.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

cars and a place to keep them...

I'm going to blog about cars over the coming months, partly because I'm about to start building a big garage to keep them in and I want to document the process.

We bought a house about 5 years ago that had a wooden shed as it's single garage. We had five cars at the time and there seemed to be enough space to build a big garage. However other priorities intervened and it wasn't until the middle of 2009 we finally got serious.

The first action was to make a large flat space, to see how big it could be, then we got bogged down in the planning process and this week we finally have the key approvals in place!

More details to come....

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Netflix Free Trial link

If you were thinking of joining Netflix, click this link to get a two week free trial - it's a new affiliate program that Netflix is starting via the Google Advertiser Network. I will update the free trial link in my iPhone app in the next version.

Bil2010 Millicomputing - The Future In Your Pocket

Here are my slides for BIL tomorrow, predictions for 2010 and 2011:

Bil2010 Millicomputing - The Future In Your Pocket

View more presentations from Adrian Cockcroft.

Book: Release It! Design and Deploy Production Ready Software by Michael Nygard

Essential reading for anyone architecting web sites. It contains clear explanations and real-life anecdotes of many of the patterns and anti-patterns that I've run into over the years, and I'm learning some new ones. Now I just have to get all the engineers on my team to read it... Here it is on Amazon.

My iPhone apps 2009

the apps that I use most frequently: Echofon, Skype, Newsstand, Instant Queue Add for Netflix, Amazon, Kindle, Pandora, WootWatch, CoPilot.

In particular I get most of my news via rss feeds using Newsstand, which synchronizes very well with Google Reader on my laptop. I don't own a kindle, but whenever possible I buy books to read on my iPhone using the kindle app.

My Music 2009

an eclectic list of the CDs that I played most: by Amanda Palmer, The Duckworth Lewis Method, Fractal, Japonize Elephants, Zoe Keating, Tony Levin, Mirthkon, Muse, Queens of the Stone Age, Neil Young.

Some of it was released in 2009, some of it was new to me in 2009, here are links to the albums.

Amanda Palmer - Who Killed Amanda Palmer
Neil Hannon - The Duckworth Lewis Method
Fractal - Sequitur
Japonize Elephants - 40 Years of our Family
Zoe Keating - One Cello x 16: Natoma
Tony Levin - Stick Man
Mirthkon - Vehicle
Muse - The Resistance
Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris
Neil Young - Fork in the Road

Solar Power - Winter Solstice and New Ducting Update

I've previously shared the first few months of output from our solar system, we turned it on at the start of September, and on a clear day we were getting around 24KWh. As the days got shorter and the Sun got lower in the sky, the clear day output dropped off, and earlier this week we hit the winter solstice, the shortest day. Wednesday was a clear day, and we generated about 16KWh, as shown in the plot below.



We have also seen the benefit of our E6-time of use rate plan. We generate electricity during the week while we are mostly out of the house at the highest rate, and use it at the cheapest rate. So we continue to be net consumers of electricity, generating between 50% and 70% of what we use, but our electricity bill is basically zero at this point. In addition, PG&E just gave us a rebate of $67 due to lower energy costs, so the standing charge of $11.50/month is zeroed out for almost six months.

We converted our gas appliances to electric, for heating water, drying clothes and cooking, and currently only use gas for the furnace that heats the house. We looked into replacing the furnace with a ground source heat pump (GSHP) but got wildly varying designs and costs from everyone we talked to so have postponed that idea. The one thing everyone agreed on was that our ducting was sub-standard, with insufficient flow for A/C and barely enough for the furnace, and it was poorly constructed using the lowest quality materials.

So we have just replaced the ducts throughout the house, changing the configuration to include separate zones for upstairs and downstairs, adding a new return path from upstairs and one extra outlet. The ducts are insulated to R8, rather than R4.2, so they don't lose heat, and they have fewer leaks and a properly designed balance of air flow into each room. This is done using something called a Manual-J calculation, and there is also an independent analysis service that verifies that everything is working correctly. The main effect of this is that we will use less propane, and have much better control over temperature upstairs. We often want to heat the bedrooms without wanting to heat downstairs to the same level, and we now have a thermostat in the main bedroom for upstairs, as well as one downstairs.

I'm planning to blog some more about GSHP options, its quite complicated....

Global Warming

Two essential books to read: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan - how the oil and coal industries are behind the denialist spin doctors - will make you angry. Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity by James Hansen - will make you scared.

James Hansen is the NASA scientist who is probably the worlds top climate expert. Industry and politicians don't want to hear the message he has been trying to get through for years, that the situation is much worse than the IPCC projections already. He provides the research background for the safe limit of 350ppm of CO2 that is being promoted by some at Copenhagen at the moment. We are already at 387ppm, and increasing rapidly, and we are seeing irreversible changes in climate as the ice melts. James is calling for a worldwide moratorium on building coal fired power plants as a first step. The oil and coal has to be left underground.

Human civilization has occurred during a time of very stable sea levels, over the last 7000 years. Before that sea levels have changed more rapidly and over a range of hundreds of feet. Human induced global warming is forcing change an order of magnitude stronger than the natural changes in climate, and is still accelerating. With very unstable sea levels, ports and coastal areas are going to flood, and it will not be possible to establish new ports on a permanent basis, as they will be flooded in turn within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. The huge numbers of refugees is an even bigger problem.

What can we do?
Read those two books.
Sell coastal property while there are still people who will buy it.
Don't invest in oil, coal and insurance companies.
Put up solar panels and switch from gas to electric appliances.
Sign up at the 350.org web site, join the 350org facebook group.

I get books via the Kindle service and read them on my iPhone, instant delivery, and always with me to read.
Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming

Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity

A good summary of the arguments is at Skeptical Science

I have read everything I can find on this subject over the last year or two, I have an Applied Physics degree and enough science and statistics that I can tell who and what makes sense and who doesn't. Every single denier and contrarian that I have heard of is backed by the coal and oil industries, often through opaque organizations and astroturf groups with innocent sounding names. They have been exposed as liars and cherry pickers, but really they are spin doctors sowing confusion. If you listen to them you are deluding yourself, and you should be investing in real estate in Florida...

CMG09 - Last Time Attendee

I presented a half day training class and a paper at CMG09 in Dallas last week. I won't be at CMG10. The conference has shrunk to a few hundred attendees, mostly mainframe oriented, a few vendors, and a bunch of independent consultants. Its main value for me was to maintain and extend my social network of capacity planning and performance people. There were some useful and interesting papers, but not enough to justify a full week long conference in a very expensive hotel. CMG10 is in Orlando FL, and I can't justify traveling to the east coast for more of the same.

A few years ago I discussed with the CMG board members what was needed to keep CMG from shrinking into irrelevancy, at the time I was at eBay, and early December is the peak business level for retail industry, so very few capacity/performance experts from retail can get away at that time of year, and I suggested they move the date. The dominant industries attending CMG have been banking, insurance and finance, which have been hit hard in the recession. The other change I advocated was that CMG should be held in the Bay Area, so that it could attract a lot more people from the major Web companies and computer hardware and software companies that are based here. Unfortunately CMG is locked into a long series of Hotel commitments for several years, and can't change its plans.

So my position now, is that I will attend CMG again when it comes to me. In the meantime, I will encourage the people I met every year at CMG to attend the Velocity Conference in San Jose next June. http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2010 - the call for papers closes in January, so we have a few weeks to come up with abstracts.

Heading to CMG09 in Dallas today

various talks on capacity planning in the cloud on Wed, then I'm presenting on Thurs. My slides are at http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco - this is probably my last visit to CMG, its been shrinking for a while, we will see how it looks on the ground.

HPTS at Asilomar

I'm attending the High Performance Transaction Systems workshop http;//hpts,ws over the next few days. I'm chairing a session on moving to the cloud. Quality crowd - Bechtolsheim, Stonebraker, Patterson, and so on, see the Agenda... Second time for me, it's an honor to be invited back.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

FREE this weekend, iPhone Instant Queue Add for Netflix

The latest version 5 of IQ+ was released this week, and it is currently Free until Monday morning.

You get your queue, recently watched, and up to 100 movies per list for new releases, new TV, the 12 top level genres, movies you'll love, and seven highly personalized sub-genre and similars lists. All the lists are personally optimized for you by Netflix and will be the same as the lists currently shown on Xbox 360 or Media Center if you have one.

It's a free update for existing users (the app has been out for over a year now) and normally 99c for new users. The app also provides searching the instant catalog and sorting the lists by title, rating, maturity, ending soon etc. Sorting the queue doesn't (yet) change it at Netflix, but helps you find titles that you can then pop to the front or back of the queue with one click.

http://itunes.apple.com/

Please review/rate the latest release. So far thousands of existing users have upgraded, iPhone OS 3.0 or later is required.

iPhone Copilot GPS navigator

this excellent app is a turn by turn talking navigator that works like a dedicated Garmin or Tomtom unit but it cost $35, with no additional subscription charges, and is amazing value. It's fast, has a very clear display and easy user interface. To mount and power it in the car I got a Belkin TuneBase FM ($89 at Frys) that plugs very firmly into the lighter socket and has a gooseneck that lets you adjust the position. The iPhone clamp works with a case fitted, and I was able to tune the car FM to hear the turn by turn directions along with the music playing. There is an output jack if you have an aux input socket on your car stereo, and a USB to charge a second iPhone on long trips or whatever else you have.

Solar Power - High and low usage and costs for the first month

The solar array continues to generate over 20KWh on a clear day, but our daily consumption varies a lot. On Sunday we were running the washing machine, dryer, pumping water from the well for a few hours, watching TV and baking/cooking/dish-washing for seven people, and we hit an all time high using almost 50KWh.



The next day, running pretty close to the minimum possible, we used about 13 KWh.



Our total generation for the month of September was about 700 KWh. The output is dropping as the day gets shorter and the sun gets lower, so our 4.2KW system peaked at about 3.4KW at the start of the month, after a rain shower cleaned the panels and the air we saw a peak of 3.7KW for a short period of one day, then it dropped back to 3.3KW and it ended the month at 3.2KW. The daily output on a clear day was 26KWh at the start of September and 24KWh at the end.

Our approximate total consumption for september was 1100 KWh, and since we are on the time-of-use E6 rate the net metering subtracted the 700 we generated and broke down the rest as -100 KWh at peak time (1-7pm), and 500 KWh mid and off-peak. We were billed $11.50 which is the base level for PG&E, and a total of $17 for 400 KWh was added to the annual accumulation.

In a year's time the net for the year is due to get settled. The very complex details are available from PG&E, but basically instead of costing us on a sliding scale of 11c-38c per KWh, the solar array keeps us at the bottom end of the scale and at the E6 rate it costs 8c off peak, 14c mid peak, and while we are running the meter backwards at peak PG&E pay us 30c per KWh. So our typical electric bill of $250 was reduced to $28.

I have been asked about the payback time for the installation. This is part of the calculation that the vendor sales-rep makes for your particular situation. In my case we made it much more complex by replacing the roof shingles, shutting down our use of propane, buying new appliances and increasing our use of electricity. However If we ignore all that and average $200/month savings, then after all the rebates the solar system installation of about $20K has a payback time of less than 8 years on a naive calculation. If we take into account a 5% interest rate on the installation cost it's more like 12 years, and if we assume that electricity costs would rise over that time it's somewhere in-between. I'm also assuming that the value of the house has gone up.

Power Usage Logging with the WELserver

Reading some forums about ground source heat pump installations, we noticed references to a logging system called the Web Energy Logger that collects data in your house and provides you with a detailed and customized view of how the systems in your house are operating. I bought a WELserver kit and have started installing some of the data collectors.

Here's the summary of what it does:

Simply put, the Web Energy Logger (or WEL) is the most economical way to monitor lots of temperature sensors, and a host of other energy related devices in your home or office. It's ideal to verify the performance or a solar thermal system, or to calculate the efficiency of a geothermal installation, or even to prove that your home really is Net Zero. Not only does the WEL give you a window into your energy environment, but it also provides a live snapshot and a range of trend charts that you can share on the WEB in real-time. Finally, the WEL records all your sensor data in monthly log files that are easy to download and import into programs like Excel. It's compact, versatile, and extremely configurable.

The minimal WEL in a Box is ideal for a DIY'er, and costs $375. In contrast, the more complete WEL Starter Kit is ready to run out-of-the-box with 10 temperature sensors and costs $525. All WEL's come with full monitoring software on the board, and a dedicated WEL logging site included in the price.

The monitors are all strung together in a daisy-chain configuration on a single twisted pair wire using the Dallas 1-Wire signaling technology. I got one of the optional current sensors and installed it in the electric hot water tank. Here is the sensor, one of the power wires needs to be threaded through the hole so it can detect current flow.




Here is the water tank. The orange wire had been installed without its protective shielding, so when that was fitted, we took the opportunity to add the sensor.


The recess in the top of the water tank has enough space to hold the sensor, with the black wire threaded through the hole.


The cover is in two parts, which gives easy access to the wiring again if needed.


At this point, I don't have the WEL configured. I need to add temperature sensors to the water pipes, and work out how to monitor the heat pump once we get it installed in place of the propane furnace. The WEL control box has an ethernet connection, and I'm not sure whether to run ethernet into the basement, or run the 1-wire cable around the house to monitor all the rooms. Spare wires in the existing telephone cabling can be used for this purpose.

GP Musumeci joins Netflix....

Adrian Cockcroft's Blog: Are any (ex-)PAE Snorclers looking for a new career?

My call was answered.... GP Musumeci started work last week at Netflix. He's the author of O'Reilly System Performance Tuning, and we worked together at Sun PAE in 2000-2002. Since then he worked on the operations side, building Time Warner AoL's video streaming service, and Salesforce.com's infrastructure, then moved to become a developer of recommendation systems and distributed databases. The perfect mix...

Solar Power - Monitoring Consumption

We finally got Solarcity to install the consumption monitor, and we are now figuring out what the various bumps in the graph correlate to in terms of appliances. The first graph shows consumption on a hot day, with a portable room A/C unit left on all day. There is a characteristic bump in the morning that seems to correlate to re-heating hot water after showers, and random bumps during the day that are probably the hot tub cycling on to filter and maintain water temperature.



Another day where we didn't leave the A/C unit on shows much lower consumption. One of the common psychological effects of measuring something is a compulsion to optimize it, so we are now challenging ourselves to try and reduce consumption...

Since we are now on a time-of-use meter, the cost of electricity at nights and weekends is very low, and the cost in the afternoons during the week is high, but that is when we are generating more than we are using, so in $ terms, the meter is running backwards at high speed, and forwards slowly. This also makes it very hard to calculate the cost savings.



Total generation for the month is looking good. We turned on the system right at the start of the month, so the lifetime total includes a week or so before the output monitoring started to log data, and you can see the last few days of consumption data. We have had typical (for us) weather, sunny from the start of the day most days. We drive down into the clouds each morning. The drop off a few weeks ago was a cloudy spell that included about 0.25in of rain, enough to make sure the solar panels are nice and clean. There is a slow downward trend in the daily output, since the days are getting shorter and the Sun is lower in the sky every day. It's around the equinox at the moment. Over-all, I'm happy with how much energy we are getting, I expected to get longer effective days than most people, and it looks as if we will be generating about 600 KWh this month, our typical consumption has been around 1000 KWh.

Solar Power - Monitoring Output

The SolarCity web based monitoring system didn't work at first, there was a problem with the data-logging board in the inverter but they were helpful and sent someone round to fix it. So now we can track how much power we are generating. The graph updates every 15 minutes, and it reports the amount of power every half hour, so when it shows 1.7 KWh that is equivalent to 3.4KW averaged over 30 minutes. So far the highest peak instantaneous output reported on the Inverter is about 4.2KW.

We are still waiting for the energy consumption metering to be added, which puts a second line on the same graph.

The day shown was a typical day up here on top of the mountain, it was cloudy elsewhere, but we had basically clear sky all day. and generated over 25KWh.

Are any (ex-)PAE Snorclers looking for a new career?

I'm looking for someone who has been benchmarking and testing web services/cloud performance to work in Los Gatos CA, no remote work, sorry.

For the uninitiated, PAE = Performance Applications Engineering, one of the groups I was in years ago at Sun that built benchmarks and did performance analysis for a living. Snorcle = Sun + Oracle sinking beneath the waves...

This is a great time to join Netflix, we are growing fast, there are a lot of open positions and we pay very well for star players.

Solar Power - "City" Inspection

We passed last week (we live outside the city, so it was actually Santa Clara County), and how have another 12 days for PG&E to put in a new time-of-use power meter and bless the installation so we can turn it on.

It took a bit of prodding for SolarCity to get the inspections setup, at least that's the way it seemed. After the install, they sent me an email saying please pay the invoice, but they hadn't sent me an invoice. I waited a few days then asked them if they were going to send me one, then they sent it. After they get paid they are supposed to schedule the inspection. They say it can take a month or so to complete the inspections. After a week or two I emailed and asked when the inspection might happen, and a few days later it was scheduled for the following week. They sent someone to wait at my house for the inspector, so we didn't need to be there, other than making sure they had access to the basement where the inverter is installed.

The ground source heat pump is taking a bit longer than hoped. The supplies have been hard to source on the West Coast, it seems that there are relatively few GSHP installations in California so far. I'm hoping to get the detailed planning approval and install done in the coming week.

Solar Power - Installation Day 4

All the panels are on the roof, the trench has been re-filled, the wiring is done, it was tested and span the meter backwards. Next step is inspections that can take a few weeks before we can turn it on for real....

I installed the Solarcity Internet monitoring system base station by plugging it into a spare Ethernet port on my DSL modem. It flashed some lights that told me that it had connected to Solarcity successfully, then started scanning to find the monitored devices. It talks to the inverter to track how much power is being generated, and I will have an optional consumption monitor that tells me how much power the house is using. I have to wait for the install to be complete before I can see any output on the solarcity.com web site.
Also, they were out of stock of the consumption monitor, so it will need to be added on later, but it doesn't affect the operation of the system.

I have also figured out the Ground Source Heat Pump, I'm going for a vertical well based installation, its a 3-ton A/C unit and heater made by Carrier that hooks up to my existing propane furnace ducting, and includes a water heater that replaces my propane hot water tank. It exchanges heat with the ground using three 200ft deep wells, and for every KW of electricity it uses, it pumps around 4KW of heat in or out of the house. This is over twice as efficient as a conventional air based A/C unit. It costs more, but there is a 30% federal tax credit on the full price, just like the solar power installation, thanks to Obama's stimulus package (this credit started in February 2009). I'm hoping to have enough solar power to zero out the running costs, we will see how that goes over time.

Classic car events in August

I go to the Monterey Historic Races every year, and this year I'm also taking my Citroen SM to a new event La Dolce Vita Automobili - it's set up to be a smaller and more fun alternative to the Concorso Italiano, which is on the same day Friday August 14th.

Here is the SM at Crater Lake a few weeks ago.

Solar Power - Installation Day 3

Today about half the panels were put in place on the roof, and a lot of wiring was put in place.

Here are the installers starting to put panels in place in the morning.


In the evening the lowest row of 20 are in place, and about half of the next row. There will be a total of 60 panels when it's done.



Here is the underside of a panel, in a shipping rack on the truck.


A closeup of the panel's specification label, as I mentioned before, its a Cadmium Telluride CdTe thin film technology panel from First Solar. Each panel is rated at 75W, and the total installation is rated at 4.5KW.

Solar Power - Installation Day 2

More mounting hardware is now on the roof, the brackets that hold the panels to the rails are now in place. Since the PG&E meter isn't mounted on the house itself, they also had to dig a trench. Tomorrow a county planning dept. inspector will come by to make sure everything is to code.

I also got an email from PG&E today, informing me that they know I have solar being installed and will schedule an appointment to do their own verification and turn the system on, once the hardware is in place.

One subtlety, since I also want to connect a generator for when we get power cuts (I'm on top of the Santa Cruz mountains) we had to decide what order to wire everything together. The sequence is

PG&E service meter - Solar Power system - Generator - House breaker panel

The generator is only wired into a subset of the house circuits, so it is looped into the house breaker panel. When installed, it will have a sensor that can tell whether there is any incoming power from PG&E, and if not, it fires up after 20 seconds or so.

The solar power system detects the PG&E power, synchronizes to the 60Hz phase and adds its own power by providing a few volts more than PG&E, to get the power to flow into the system. If PG&E goes away, the solar system also shuts down, then the generator detects no power, isolates the downstream components and takes over powering the house.

At one point I looked at having batteries rather than a generator, but it is a lot less efficient, they don't last very long and they are far more expensive. A 6KW battery system with inverter was around $10K, while I can get a 8KW propane generator for $2K, and I'm thinking of putting in a 14KW Generac 5503 that is currently available from Amazon for $3.3K delivered, since that can supply a 40A 220V circuit for the heat pump. I'm likely to need it for up to a week each year, and that will be the only thing that uses propane at that point.

Solar Power - Installation Day 1

Here's the house, showing the mounting points and rails on the roof.



Top end of conduit at the roof line.



Bottom end of conduit at the basement level.



Bottom end and A/C shutoff switch on the front of the house at basement/ground level.



A/C shutoff switch. Safety rules mandate that this is easily accessible on the outside of the house.



Inside the basement, showing the connection to the back of the A/C cutoff switch on the right. In the middle is the D/C cutoff switch that has the conduit from the roof routed to it. There will be another D/C shutoff switch on the roof itself, again for safety.



This is the inverter on the left, and the D/C shutoff switch on the right. The pipe coming up carries the phone line into the house.

Solar Power - Installation Scheduled

The plans were approved earlier this week, and Solarcity called me on the phone and emailed to setup an installation time, which I was able to arrange very conveniently via email. The assigned installation team are finishing up another job, then I'm next, starting tomorrow (Friday 24th July) for a few days.

There has been nothing to show so far, but I will be taking pictures and posting them.

Looking at the options for electric water heating led us to consider a ground source heat pump (GSHP), plans are still in flux, but I'm looking at adding a heat pump that will heat hot water as well as heat and cool the house. The ground source part is that it doesn't have a conventional air fan based heat exchanger, it runs water through underground pipes. This is relatively expensive, but there are rebates, and it is very efficient. More later...

Velocity conference summary

Steve Souders writes a good summary of the Velocity Conference. I'd like to present something next year, I have a few ideas already, and have been inspired to try some latency testing projects at work.

Solar Power - plan submitted

solarcity.com emailed me a very detailed pdf of the plan for 4.5KW on my roof, and submitted it to the County for planning approval today. Meanwhile the house is being re-wired this week for 220V and a 200Amp feed to replace the 110V/100A setup. Also putting in 220V outlets for the kitchen range, hot tub, dryer and hot water heater. Propane tank is now disconnected and I have to go shopping for new appliances...

Playing with Hadoop in the Cloud

I just finished writing a paper for CMG that is a tutorial on Amazon Elastic Map Reduce. I signed up, it was easy, and after I ran two of their demo jobs I owed them 26 cents. Very cool...

Solar Power - first step

There is a rebate for solar power systems, and the first step is that the power company (PG&E) reserves a rebate and notifies me and SolarCity that if we install a system by a deadline we will get a certain amount of rebate. I have also got an appointment on Monday for the SolarCity engineer to come and spend a whole day taking measurements and designing the system installation.

Last week we got the shingles replaced, since the old ones were getting near the end of their life, and its a good idea to put the solar panels over a roof that will last for a long time, so they won't need to be removed to fix anything.

I will be at Usenix 09 - San Diego - June 15-17

I'm attending a tutorial on care and feeding of Hadoop on Monday, teaching my own tutorial on tuning and tools tuesday, and staying for the first day of papers on wednesday. See you there...

New music: MirthKon's Vehicle

Some of the most inventive new music is coming from "unknown" bands in the greater San Francisco region. Through my connections with Fractal I have been a fan of Headshear for many years and now MirthKon have released their first full CD, "Vehicle". Fractal and Headshear have played many gigs together, and MirthKon founder Wally Scharold played in Headshear for a while a few years ago.

I have seen MirthKon play a few times, and they are currently on a west coast tour, having recently played SF and Berkeley, they are in Hollywood on June 5th and San Diego on June 6th, then Chico on June 18th, and Eugene and Portland on June 19th and 20th. They have a conceptual video extravaganza to enhance the musical experience at live shows.

So, what do they sound like? Well, lets start by saying that if you like Frank Zappa, and wished he was still putting out new music, then you will be very happy to take this Vehicle for a ride to Joe's Garage. Its impossible to really say what Zappa sounds like, since the mix of styles and influences is so diverse, but MirthKon have some of the same elements, along with their own unique character. There is a strong dose of humor, very complex rhythms and time signatures, some jazzy vocals on a few tracks, but a largely instrumental mix that combines clarinet and saxophone with guitar, bass and drums

They dub it "The first full-length CD from the Bay Area's most hyphenated thrash-jazz-prog-chamber-core ensemble", which probably doesn't help much. I have been happily playing it over and over again in my car for the last week, expand your musical horizons and support local music by getting your own copy....

miRthkon is:
Wally Scharold - guitars, vocals, composition, sound design, conceptual design, text, video, producer
Rob Pumpelly - guitars, composition
Nat Hawkes - bass guitar, vocals
Carolyn Walter - piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone
Jamison Smeltz - alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, vocals
Matt Guggemos - drums and percussion
Jarred McAdams - video, text, conceptual collaborator

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

What I did for earth day...

Update: the electric mower works well, cuts better than my old gas mower, and the drive option works very well. Since the batteries make it heavier than a gas mower, the power drive makes a big difference. Hacking through very long grass, the batteries last about half an hour, keeping previously cut grass trimmed short I think it would last a lot longer. Its enough for me]

Actually, what really happened was that I tried to mow the grass last weekend and decided that my old gas lawnmower wasn't up to the job, so I did some research and bought an electric one. Its quiet, doesn't need gas, the throttle and air intake don't need cleaning out and just starts when I want it to.

I ordered it from Amazon.com on Sunday evening, as usual, with the free 5-7 day shipping option, and it arrived on Tuesday. I guess Amazon had nothing better to do than ship stuff... but it was nice to save $67 for shipping a 100 lb package and still get it very fast.

I got the latest biggest electric I could find, the Epic EP21H 24Volt cordless self propelled 21 inch. The rear wheels are belt driven from the main motor via a gearbox. It has a high efficiency brushless motor that drives the blade directly and two 12V lead acid batteries and should run for 40-50 minutes per charge. This is plenty of time for me to get fed up with mowing and charge it overnight. Its a bit bigger and more rugged than my old 4HP 20inch gas mower, and has a side discharge option so won't get clogged trying to mulch tall grass. I'll try it out after work.

I've also been looking forward to getting solar power installed on my roof, and I'm finalizing plans to make a commitment to get it done this year. I will blog my way through the process as it happens...

Fractal iPhone app source code

I have posted the source to Fractal's iPhone app to google code. I'm hoping that other bands can replace the artwork and URLs and quickly get their own promotional apps out there. If we end up with bug-fixes and improvements, then everyone gains....

iPhone apps that don't work on 3.0beta2

Both dictionary.com and PocketFlix fail immediately after they launch with iPhone os 3.0beta2

Most other apps seem to be working, and beta2 is faster and more stable.

[Posted with iBlogger]

Fractal - free iPhone app

App store link

It's finally ready for download.... Don't forget, Hotel Utah SF Sat April 18th is the next gig.

Using iPhone 3.0 beta

So far its working well, all the previously installed apps that I have tried work. I did a cut and paste from notes to Facebook, listened to some Pandora, downloaded a new app from the AppStore. I was a bit concerned about jumping on the release so early, but haven't found any downsides yet.

I have an older Mac that my first gen iPhone treats as its home machine, I upgraded that one to SDK3.0beta and also used it to do the full backup and restore and re-sync needed to get my iPhone running 3.0. I have a newer MacBook Air that is my work machine, and I have left that with SDK2.2.1, so I can work on current apps and make sure they run on 3.0.

What's on my iPhone: Basic Instructions

One of my favorite cartoons, a collection of them is bunded as an app. Its not a live feed, but its good to be able to show people "how to wash a cat"... There is also a book out.

What's on my iPhone: GoSkyWatch

Years ago when I had a Treo, a my friend Gred Oakes introduced me a to planetarium app, and I really liked being able to look up at night, and be able to identify the stars and planets. I live on top of a mountain, and have a great view of the night sky, and one of the first apps I paid for on my iPhone was GoSkyWatch. It has a cool feature that the accelerometer can tell you are holding it upside down snd it attempts to align its view with what you should be seeing. On a 2G iPhone with no GPS it doesn't know which way north is, so that doesn't work so well.

What's on my iPhone: Fring (Skype and IM's)

When I want to make an international call from my iPhone (or from my home phone) I use Skype. There is no native Skype application for the iPhone, so I use Fring,
although today's announcement of a deal with Nokia includes hints that they are working on more mobile platforms. They support Android already, so their main missing link at this point is the iPhone.

Fring is a decent substitute for now. I mostly use it to keep up with Skype and YIM chat sessions when I'm away from my laptop.

Bill Scott's Designing Web Interfaces book - and he's hiring...

Here is a (long) slideshare presentation of Bill's talk, there is a webcast of it as well. Bill is also hiring for his group of UI engineers at Netflix, so if you are the best of the best of the best and want to work with the master himself, go for it!

Designing Web Interfaces Book - O'Reilly Webcast

View more presentations from Bill Scott. (tags: rich ajax)

Fractal CD Sequitur now available from cdbaby.com

Fractal's new CD "Sequitur" is now available to review and buy on CD Baby at:

http://cdbaby.com/cd/fractal3

'Music to tap your brain to'. Progressive rockers Fractal return with an eclectic musical trip featuring complex rhythms, style-bending and -blending, and existential musical and lyrical outcries.

Fractal Zoom video with Ellipsis

Here is a collaboration between Eric Bigas, who makes Fractal Zoom videos and the band Fractal who have provided Ellipsis as the soundtrack to this video.

Fractal Performing Monkey's Paw at Hotel Utah

All the songs in Fractal's set in SF are now up on YouTube, I also recorded the Seattle and Portland gigs but had problems getting a good quality soundtrack to the video. The short and intense finale to their set is Monkey's Paw. Fractal and Headshear will be back at the Hotel Utah in SF on Saturday April 18th, put it in your calendar now!

What's on my iPhone: i.Wund.com

My favorite weather app is actually a lauchpad bookmarked web site rather than an appstore download. http://i.wund.com/ is an iPhone optimized version of the Weather Underground site www.wunderground.com that I upload to from the personal weather station at my house. The best features are a zoomable local weather radar view, and the option to show the detailed technical weather forecast in the form that meterologists use to talk to each other, rather than the dumbed down version everyone else sees.

What's on my iPhone: apps I don't use

Last.fm, VNC, Remote, Weatherbug. I installed these but never use them. I tend to listen to Pandora, don't need a remote console, find the Apple remote inconvenient to start up and prefer other weather apps.

[Posted with iBlogger]

What's on my iPhone: eBay and Amazon

Great for looking up how much stuff costs and how easy is it to find something rare.

[Posted with iBlogger]

Fractal Performing Ellipsis at Hotel Utah

Netflix: I'm hiring a very senior engineer / application architect

Here's the details and links to apply via http://jobs.netflix.com.

Netflix really is one of the best places to work and we are hiring strongly, there are several other openings for engineers and managers in Web Engineering. We are very picky, only hire the best people and the best fit for the job...

Good luck!

The Position:
As a leading member of the Merchandising Systems development team, you will re-define the website architecture into components and services, enhancing the agility and pace of development at Netflix as we scale up and leverage cloud computing technologies to support our personalized movie selection algorithms. As an exceptionally talented and experienced architect you will hold your own among a very demanding peer group, you will learn a lot and so will we.

Netflix is scaling the company by increasing talent density in high performance, experienced and motivated teams. There is a flat organization, minimal process, and an emphasis on inter-personal over-communication to stay coordinated while keeping everything extremely agile.

Responsibilities will include:
• Architectural leadership, broad knowledge of cloud/web services and object oriented technologies and designs
• You will need to clearly articulate your design choices, mentoring and educating our engineering community
• Hands on coding of the key objects and interfaces that define the architectural boundaries of components and services
• Untangling existing subsystems using tools such as Structure 101, re-organizing build systems to create re-usable component jars
• Migration of existing SQL based persistence models to distributed forms that efficiently scale to hold billions of data items for tens of millions of customers

Qualifications:
• 10+ years of application development experience, agile methods and architectural responsibility
• Mastery of object oriented architecture and design in Java
• Experience with high-traffic, highly scaling, multi-threaded distributed software design patterns
• Deep conceptual understanding of scalability, performance, queuing, availability, coherency, caching, synchronization
• Fluency in SQL and an expert in the evolution of persistent storage: Sharding, Hadoop, Eventual Consistency, SimpleDB, Dynamo
• Demonstrated ability to publish and present your ideas via conference presentations, technical blog postings, or published books or papers
• A Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science or equivalent engineering discipline

Characteristics of Success at Netflix:
• Freedom with responsibility. A focus on effective execution
• Strong customer orientation, both internally and externally
• Strategic thinking both technically and business-wise
• Self motivated / self starter
• Personal drive to achieve world class software development
• Desire to work in a fast-paced, evolving, growing, dynamic environment
• Love of technical challenges and a sense of pride in solving them
• Ability to work well in a cross functional environment

What's on my iPhone: Currency and Light

Currency makes it easy to keep track of how far the pound has fallen so far (which makes me happy because I get more for my dollars) and Light is trivial but very useful. It just turns on a full brightness white screen that makes a good flashlight.

Fractal Gig - Saturday Jan 17th - Hotel Utah San Francisco

I'm inflicting some new music by Fractal on people who visit my blog... They have just released their new CD Sequitur, which contains a varied mix of quite unique and hard to categorize music. I hope to see people at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco on Saturday, and for those of you in Seattle, they are playing Thursday 22nd, and Portland OR on Friday 23rd. Please connect to Fractal via Myspace or Facebook or Bebo.

Capacity Planning for Cloud Computing - circa 2003

Here is a link to a slideshare upload, of a talk I gave publicly in 2003, on Capacity Planning for Virtualized Datacenters (known as N1 at the time, which can be seen as a nascent approach to cloud computing).

I think it contains some interesting ideas, and dates reasonably well. I'm going to revisit some of these concepts as I think more about how to do capacity planning in the cloud.

Capacity Planning for Virtualized Datacenters - Sun Network 2003

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: dfss sigma)

what's on my iPhone: Bloomberg

The built in stock market app just gives prices but I use the Bloomberg app to get news and more detailed information on stocks.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Solid State Disks - 1 TB in a 2.5 inch announced

Like I said... the next thing for SSD's is to have higher storage capacity in each of the form factors than spinning rust. Here's another step in that direction. http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/10/puresilicon-introduces-worlds-first-1tb-2-5-inch-ssd/. SSD's already have disks beaten on all the performance metrics. This one maxes out the SATA interface and does 300MBytes/s transfer rates.

I've also been seeing prices dropping as volumes increase for laptops with SSDs. I think the end of the line for rust will be 2010, as SSD's will no longer have a worse cost/GB and they already have higher capacity and performance.

What's on my iPhone: Easy Wi-Fi

You can get free AT&T Wifi at Starbucks, and this app streamlines the process of getting online.

What's on my iPhone: Facebook

Works better than the web site... its also my main mechanism for photo-blogging, sharing something I've seen.

What's on my iPhone: my Pandora station

Pandora is one of my favorite apps. You can listen to Adrian's Prog Radio station too.

What's on my iPhone: Night Camera

Its very simple but it works amazingly well. When its dark, most non-flash digital pictures suffer from a lot of motion blur due to camera shake. The night camera app uses the accelerometer to wait until the camera has been still for long enough to get a clear picture.

Twitter fodder

I just used twitterfeed.com to tweet when I blog (infrequently).

Capacity Planning for Cloud Computing

Capacity Planning for Cloud Computing

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

At the recent CMG conference I volunteered to lead a panel session on Capacity Planning for Cloud Computing, and these slides were the result.

Now, this was a conference full of people who already know how to do capacity planning, so they were interested in what was new about Cloud Computing (or even what it was all about from first principles), so the slides do not explain how to do capacity planning in the cloud, they talk about what changes for the capacity planner in this new world.

I'm going to be developing more material in this area over the coming year. I have a head start, in 2002 and 2003 I led projects at Sun where I researched how to do Capacity Planning in Virtualized Datacenters, built some tools, filed a couple of patents, presented papers at conferences and failed to get Sun's N1 project to implement some of it. Well, it seems I was a few years ahead of my time, so I'm going to start by digging out the papers I published at the time.

Solid State Disks - time to give up that iron oxide habit

An interesting note at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/19/sun_micron_extended_flash_life/ talks about a 2009 technology that gives flash a million write cycles at the NAND cell level. This adds two orders of magnitude to the "typical" cycle lifetime that is often used as an argument that flash isn't ready for prime time.

In any case this applies to each block on the SSD, and blocks are remapped using write leveling, and writes are cancelled using RAM based SSD controllers, and when the limit is reached, only that block becomes unusable... Some people seem to think that as soon as you do 10,000 writes to an SSD it fails totally, like a head crash on a disk.

I also see that at least one vendor has announced a 512GB SSD in a 2.5" laptop disk format package.

So to reiterate something I've been saying for a long time, spinning rust is dead, and a large number of basic assumptions about how computers behave and the best way to architect them are now wrong. In 2009 SSD's will be faster for read, faster for write, faster for sequential and much much faster for random access, more reliable, more durable, lower power, higher capacity, than discs. Give it another year or so and they will be cheaper as well.

SAN's are now a complete waste of time. There is so much reliable I/O performance available in a single drive, that it makes much more sense to put SSD's in the systems and access them directly. Accessing an SSD over a SAN adds a huge latency and cost overhead. It makes much more sense to use node-to-node replication for critical data (log scraping databases or cluster filesystems).

New tracks from Fractal are up at bebo.com

Fractalhttp://www.bebo.com/Fractal

iPhone Instant Queue Add for Netflix - get it now...

I've released a second version of my very own iPhone app. I also reduced the price from 99c to FREE for the next few days. Please check it out and write a review for me on the app store. More info at http://www.millicomputer.com.

Music - Amanda Palmer and Estradasphere

I listen to a lot of music, and the really good stuff gets played over and over again while I'm driving. I also think while I'm driving that I should write a blog post about my favorites but then I forget... until now!

My favorite new music for 2007 was "Palace of Mirrors" by Estradasphere. I found that I never tired of it, and listened to it for months on end. It helps that their music is extremely varied in style and impossible to categorize. You can find out more and listen to music at their web site. I suggest you start with "Smuggled Mutation", there is no such thing as a typical Estradasphere song as they combine just about every musical genre, usually in the same song. However this track shows off their talents very well. There is a live DVD of Palace of Mirrors which is also extremely well done. I have seen them play live several times and they are an excellent live band.

During 2008 Estradasphere collaborated with Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, and her new album "Who killed Amanda Palmer" has become my favorite pick for 2008. The web site is very interesting, giving a lot of background story details about the making of the album and videos of most of the tracks. The music is distinctively Amanda, but expanded well beyond the Dresden Dolls format, with a much fuller sound on some tracks. The key for me is that the music is very moving and emotional, and can sustain interest for a lot of repeated listening.

I'm also still waiting for Fractal to finish their second album "Sequitur", I've been listening to pre-release versions as they work towards the final cut. I'm not holding my breath, as its taken years to get this far, but its getting very close to being completed.

Gene Saunders RIP

A good friend and well respected colleague from Sun is no more...
More info on Geoff Arnold's blog

For the last few years a group of us have been keeping in touch via email, sharing thoughts and amusing web links. Gene was a key part of that conversation, and I miss him already.

Tutorial at LISA08 San Diego Nov 9th

I'm giving my usual performance tools and tuning for Solaris/Linux class on Sunday 9th Nov in San Diego.