You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May, 2008.
-
‘[Former Press Secretary Scott] McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” is the first negative account by a member of the tight circle of Texans around Mr. Bush.’
-
I’ve neglected to ready Cory’s other books; I’m going to read this one next.
My wife has the green thumb, but I’m the other four fingers. 
Yes, it was a beautiful day in Harrisburg. We have our two new trees in and growing, bushes are trimmed, beds are mulched, trees are fertilized, planters are deployed, and we still have four new bushes to plant!
-
One of a number of technologies yet to be deployed by broadcasters and cable operators to help ease the DTV transition next February.
-
That’s Bethlehem, PA, not Israel. Transformers are made of steel, you know. Good to hear Bethlehem’s getting a shot in the arm.
-
Interesting.
-
“Yes they [Gartner and other IT research analysts] wield a lot of power, but it is often the power of discovering the obvious.”
-
Obama said McCain had a “naive and irresponsible belief that tough talk from Washington will somehow cause Iran to give up its nuclear program and support for terrorism.”
Since WP.com recently upgraded their dashboard and are offering us more storage space and other capabilities, it may be time for some sprucing up here. I’ve been using the Tarski theme on my development WPMU blog at work and I think it’s pretty nice looking. That’ll probably be the first change. I also want to look into moblogging possibilities as well, so that there’s less of a “posting barrier”. I’ll probably add my Yahoo Pipe content, which is an aggregate of my blog, Twitter, Flickr, and del.icio.us streams. I should probably clean up categories, tag old content, etc., but that’ll take some time. I’m thinking of ditching my old alexharden.org blog instance (and its permalinks) since I have copies of the posts here, but there’s probably some image copying I’d need to do to preserve the content. We’ll see. Don’t know if I have enough time to care about that!
VMmark is a virtualization throughput benchmark developed by VMware to test its products’ performance on compatible hardware configurations. Its job is to stress the CPU/memory subsystem of a server hosting virtual machines and index its performance at its maximum acceptable workload. Vendors document VMmark tests with VMware products (normally ESX) on a given hardware/software configuration and submit the results to VMware, who publishes them on a web site.
VMmark came out of beta with version 1.0 in July 2007. To date, Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun have submitted results that have been published by VMware. The results cover the AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon server platforms, which all four server vendors now provide to varying degrees. It’s been a useful resource for me, since the competition between AMD and Intel the last few years has resulted in each vendor taking turns leading in virtualization performance in the 2-socket and 4-socket x86 server spaces. Regardless of which vendor submits a VMmark result for a particular processor/memory/chipset combination, the result can usually be inferred to be similar to what would be obtained on another vendor’s implementation of that combination. Based on a recent conversation I had with HP, they expect that customers will make that inference. I had approached them twice about HP’s lack of up-to-date VMmark results for their flagship virtualization platforms, and was told that they hadn’t submitted recent benchmarks due to their reluctance to publish results with non-production VMware ESX builds and/or hardware that wasn’t yet available to customers. Because other vendors were publishing results on current or upcoming platforms sooner, HP apparently didn’t see much return on going though the trouble and cost of performing and documenting VMmarks on their implemenation of similar platforms.
Note that when I described VMmark, I mentioned compatible, not supported, hardware configurations; that’s because VMware has published results from vendors that used pre-release, unsupported software and/or hardware. I think this is the most likely reason Dell was the first to release a quad-core-Opteron-based VMmark. If you look at the disclosure for that submission, you’ll see that it was run on a PowerEdge R905 with 2.5GHz quad-core Opterons (model 8360 SE), a processor model that isn’t available for purchase in that server today. The fastest available R905 today has model 8356 (2.3GHz) processors. Dell’s submitted results for their PowerEdge R900 with Xeon 7350 processors used a beta version of VMware ESX Server v3.5, build 62773, and was tested on November 16, 2007: a few weeks before the production release of ESX 3.5, build 64607, on December 10th. In fact, of the 16 total VMmark results published as of today, the only vendor who submitted results with hardware or software unavailable at the time of publishing is Dell.
To better reflect the version and status of hardware and software used to obtain the published results, I think VMware should:
- refuse to publish results that use pre-release hardware and/or software
- clearly state the availability and/or versions of the tested hardware and software in the system descriptions on the results page
That would allow customers like me to better determine the veracity of a published score without having to be a detective. As VMmark evolves and future SPEC-sanctioned virtualization benchmarks come to market, it would be nice to be able to see more, relevant benchmarks from more vendors rather than gamed, dubious benchmarks from a few.
-
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
nin-theslip-24-96-wav-replaygain, originally uploaded by aharden.
Which of these tracks is not like the others? Brian Gardner at Bernie Grundman Mastering in LA was the mastering engineer for these 24-bit-depth tracks, some having over -10dB of Replaygain. That’s kind of like saying you have a 24-foot-deep pool when in reality you dug a 24-foot-deep hole and filled it with 10 feet of concrete before putting water in it.
-
s/REM/Rush s/Document/Presto s/Accelerate/VaporTrails
-
Apparently Bernie Grundman Mastering delivered mostly padded 16-bit tracks to NIN for the 24/96 “hi-res” mix of “The Slip”. Were they trying to give Reznor the slip? According to the thread, NIN are aware and are working to fix.
-
Came across this on a Google Image Search. Hilarious.
-
At this point the Democrats are trying to reduce John McCain’s news cycles as long as possible. I just heard him in the news today for the first time in weeks.
-
AMD’s Barcelona surprises me out of the gate. Their quad-socket system bested the fastest tested Intel solution on the VMmark by 26% adjusted for clock speed, and by 8% straight up.
-
An excellent example of over-reaction. I, too was amazed by the capacity and size of the ferries when I visited Seattle. I’d hate to think that awe and curiousity would cause me to be suspected of wrongdoing.
-
The Votemaster has a great site.
-
Playing with Ubuntu JeOS 8.04 (thanks, Scotbuff) at work under VMware ESX to host WPMU/LDAP.
-
Via Bob Plankers.
-
I saw ‘Iron Man’ yesterday as well and overall, I loved it. If you see it, definitely stay until the end of the credits. You’ll get another 30 seconds of cool.
-
I had to turn off Tarski’s update notifications on my corporate WPMU install to get my Dashboard working right. Probably something proxy-related, but I didn’t feel like getting it work. Tarski is a great WP theme.
-
Here here, Karoli. Great post.
Recent Comments