The New Statesman, Episode 2006

alan+sarah

We, that is Mrs L & I, went to see “The New Statesman, Episode 2006”, staring Rik Mayall as Alan B’stard on Saturday. Marsha Fitzalan also reprises her role as his wife Sarah. Sadly, no new jokes, its the same old B’stard, using politics to make money, and have as much, if a bit too fast sex as possible. He’s joined New Labour and works in No. 9 Downing St now. …

Is Web 2.0 relevant to a systems architect?

On my old sun/oracle blog, I wrote a piece reporting some thoughts about whether Web 2.0 was more than a marketing slogan, and Sun’s decision to market its first storage appliance as web 2.0 server. On re-reading the original article, what comes through is my confusion about the then web 2.0 syndrome and the need and role of systems like the x4500 aka Thumper. This version of the article has been edited; some words about my experimenting with Yahoo’s 1st generation PaaS has been removed. I obviously thought this was part of the future but the reality was that (for that type of application) it fell through the gap between IaaS on which I host this blog, and SaaS, (flickr, google maps and wordpress.com), the first two of which I integrate into the blog, and the latter is a competitor technology. …

Rethinking the ‘Labs visit

Rethinking the ‘Labs visit

On my sun/oracle blog, I reprised my recent visit to the Sun Labs open days firstly by pointing at Ashlee Vance’s article; he had also visited the Labs at the beginning of June, and wrote up his findings more rapidly than me. The link is still live here…. The article covers some stuff I didn’t follow through on, and offers a segue into games serverplex designs. The article is headlined “Sun Labs edges toward practicality”, and suggests his interests were more short-term than mine.

I had delayed the write up and publication, I had a lot to say and these things take time. The original articles in June reflect what I thought at the time. I have since spoken to both colleagues and customers and recognise that some of my priorities were a bit awry and I may not have given some subjects sufficient attention, in particular, I didn’t visit many of the “Virtualisation” projects available and haven’t reported on those I did visit such as “Project Crossbow”, a network interface virtualisation and resource management project. …