What's it all about, Alfie?

Here's an interesting thing I've run into again at work. No matter where I come across it I'm amazed. Here's the story:

We have a Java process that is large - both in memory usage and in the processor speed that's required to get the job done on time. It's a real-time datafeed system so if it's not fast enough, they simply won't use it and will dub the project a failure. So we need speed and we need a good bit of memory.

The benchmark is that if this process is run on a good WinNT machine (900MHz+ and 512MB+) then the machine is fully loaded, but it runs the app and things are reasonably good. Yet they don't want to load each of the user's machines, so they want a thinner client.

So I try to run the middle tier of this application on a Sun Ultra 2 with a 300MHz UltraSPARC and 256MB RAM. This is a good test and it yields bad results. The report that loaded in about 10 sec. now takes in excess of an hour and the trashing on the Ultra 2 shows that the 256MB is too small and the 300MHz too slow. So now the question is What to try next?

Here comes the problem...

You can buy a Sun Blade 1000 with a 750MHz UltraSPARC processor and 2GB of RAM for about $14,000.00. You can get a dual Athlon 1.2GHz with 1GB RAM for $2,200.00 and run Linux/Java 1.3.1 on it. There's no comparison in the price/performance - Intel hardware wins by a wide margin. Yet you don't want to run NT on it - you need something like Linux/OpenBSD or even Solaris x86. Yet none of those combinations are allowed. Only Windows NT on Intel hardware or Sun hardware and Solaris.

So the problem becomes how do you justify the cost within these arbitrary rules? Well... it's hard. Most of the time you just give up and the users have to suffer. For no good reason other than ignorance. Linux can be made just as secure as Solaris... it can be just as reliable - given solid, reliable hardware... and yet it's banned more than it's used. I'm constantly amazed.

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Other than the hardware issue, things are going well at work. We're making progress on the app, and if this middle tier proves itself, it'll be a very nice tool indeed. I enjoy the server-side processes because that means that I don't have to deal with the GUI stuff, but that also means that my ability to interact with the user is only within the context of what the existing infrastructure will allow. Good and bad...

Well... another year rolls around and it's my wedding anniversary. Nice.

Last evening I looked for the Solaris 7 disks on eBay and again this morning. It seems as though I'm never going to get my wonderful set of disks back and rather then get the set I originally got for $18.00 that included both the SPARC and Intel versions of Solaris 7, I'm going to have to pay on the order of $25.00 plus shipping to get a SPARC-only set of the disks.

Let this be a lesson to you, Bob... never, never, never trust someone else with things that are near and dear to you. I feel like a fool for having left the disks there. I should have kept them with me as he was never going to be doing an install anyway.

Oh well... I supposed I've had more expensive mistakes in my life... this one will only set me back the cost of a good dinner with the family. I've had worse, I suppose.

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Work is thankfully quiet and that's good. In these quiet times I'm going through the code and cleaning it up, adding accessor methods and such to just clean up the code and make it just a little more robust.

One of the problems with doing this is that you really can't change anything and that means you need to be very careful about what you change and be sure to make sure all references are checked. The upside is that after you've done this it's a cleaner design and you've probably caught a few mistakes in the process.

The big downside is that you end up burned out after a few hours. Since you aren't really doing anything new it's not like there's something to look forward to. It's a do no wrong mode and that's hard to keep up after a few hours. So I have to take breaks and pace myself. It's important work to do, but it's not the kind of thing you can keep at for eight hours straight...

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FLASH! - Joel called and the Solaris 7 disks have been found and he'll be bringing them to the City Monday. Yes! Good news.

Well... I've found a place that will basically build my system from the individual components that I want. It's not going to be as sexy as the Blackbird, but it will be as nice on the inside... For about $2500 I can get a dual Palomino 1.2GHz machine with all the memory and drive space I can ever need. Also it'd have dual NICs to make it easier to bridge my two networks, and a CD-RW for those times when I want to burn CDs.

Now I'm back to wondering when...

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I'm supposed to be getting a Sun box for work soon. I think it turns out that a guy left, and it was his box, but now that he's gone, it's free to be re-used. So I put my name in and why I need it and we'll see. I think it'll help a lot in developing/debugging the middle-tier that's coming from the InfoReach guys this fall. I just hope things work out - both with the box and with the code.

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I have been searching and fiddling around on the net today because we're just so darn good! Really, the app is running well, we have to wait on others to do things for our next steps, and so all's quiet. Nice, but it can get to be a little too quite as well...

So I've done a little bit of looking, first at the system that I was looking at. I read up some more on the motherboard, and it looks very nice. This might actually be a really good system to get! I'm more impressed with the box and my ability to configure it the more I think about it. The other thing I was thinking about was the Sun box that I'm hopefully going to get in the near future. It seems as though someone else has put in a request for it, but I thought it was tagged for me... Oh well... we'll have to see how things work out.

Speaking of Sun boxes, I've tried to track down my Solaris 7 disks with Joel... I'm almost certain that I left them at his house. Let this be a lesson to me... never leave disks lying around. You never know when you're going to need them.

Anyway... when I get the Sun box the conventional wisdom is to get the machine name, any configuration information off it, and then rebuild it from scratch. Then, install what I need and properly put it back into the NIS network. Nothing that hard, but it's something that needs to be done. What I'm thinking about is GNOME 1.4 and Sawfish window manager. It'd be really nice to be able to put GNOME 1.4 on this new box and let Ximian's Red Carpet take care of keeping things up to date. The Ximian folks say that it's coming, but have no date as to when it'll be ready. The alternative is to get the sources and build them with the tools from SunFreeware and go that route.

If I go the manual build route then I'm going to have to get Sawfish as well... Also, if I want to build anything with KDE, I'll need to get that. There are a lot of details that need to be thought of, and Ximian's installer was nice in that it took care of the GNOME and Sawfish part. All you had to do from there was deal with KDE and any other tools you wanted - gEdit, etc. that weren't included in Ximian GNOME.

So... I'll first have to get the Solaris 7 CDs from Joel, then see if I actually get the Sun box, then worry about rebuilding it from the disks, then getting the essentials from SunFreeware, and then getting GNOME from either Ximian or the sources. There's a lot of work there, and it's going to take time to work through it all. No rush on the GNOME issue today.

Now that my believed Blackbird is no longer available from the folks at SpindleTop, I have to find another machine that's right up there for my next acquisition. I'm really interested in getting a new Linux box, but there's all that pesky hardware compatibility to worry about and the cost of getting a
Penguin Computing workstation is just too much for what you get. I'm not happy about the Blackbird, but I really don't have a lot of places to turn. I could try to go it along and essentially build my own box from the components of the Blackbird, but then I'm dealing with a lot of issues there that I haven't had to deal with in a long time and I'm not sure I want to get into motherboards once again.

So I'll probably scan eBay and see if anything interesting comes up.

Well... it's Monday morning again... I can't say as I'm too happy with this series of events, but that's really not a surprise. I'm sure there are entire civilizations that didn't like going to work. I just wish I liked it a little more.

Part of the reason I'm not really in a great mood this morning is that I just finished reading Nelson DeMille's The Gold Coast and I have to say that while I was never a great fan of his other books, this one was particularly horrible. While I have to admit that the humor of the main character is quite funny at times, the book itself is filled with the most dislikeable characters imaginable. The main character is married into old money and his wife is totally unlikeable - even by the main character. The cast of supporting characters is weak, and I simply found myself wishing that this book would end. I finished it only because I'm a completion-oriented person, and I won't be worried about picking up another of his books for a very long time.

So when I'm reading a 626 page epic to stupidity, it's hard to be happy when you have to go to work on an early Monday morning. Now if I'd been reading a new Michael Crighton - or even a Tom Clancey then maybe... but it's Monday, it's early, and it's a terrible book. Thankfully, I finished the book and on this evening's train ride I'll be reading The Legend of Baggar Vance which promises to be a much more enjoyable read than The Gold Coast.

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Well... it's just like a Monday for bad news...

This morning I checked the SpindleTop page where the guys at MIT are making the Blackbird machines. Basically, wonderful machines that are black cubes with dual Pentium III or Athlon motherboards and all-around wixkedly great boxes starting below $2400. I was planning on getting one of these as soon as I could afford it. Now it seems as though it won't matter when I get the money because they aren't accepting any more orders.

This is so depressing it's almost too hard to deal with...

I realize that I may still be months away from a machine like this, but I always felt better looking at the pictures and thinking about that special someday when I'd get a chance to order one. Now that hope is all gone.

It's so depressing to think about this... I just can't. Maybe it'll hit me tomorrow or the day after, but right now I'm just numb.

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Patience is a virtue is what I remember hearing when I was a kid. Heck, I still hear it now. Yet there seems to be a lot of folks that either don't hear it, or if they do, they don't listen. Now I'm not someone who has a wealth of patience, but even I have a hard time dealing with folks that believe they should wait for no one.

I work with people that would rather fix a problem by spending $1000 today and another $500 next week, and every week in lost time until the right thing is done, than spend $400 and get the parts needed to make it work right in a few days. It's the "If I'm doing something now then that's all that counts" philosophy. And I just can't stand it. There's a time for action and there's a time for considered thought. I just don't see the second ever being done by some folks. It's just hard to be in the middle of this. But hey, that's what I get paid to do, right? Doesn't mean I have to like it.