Chris’ Blog

I’m gonna buy one of these for each of us when we fly home for Christmas.  When we flew last time we had a carseat and two screaming kids as we walked on the plane – and of course we didn’t get on early so we got to walk the WHOLE length of the plane with people staring at us and you could see it in their faces… “Your on MY Red-eye flight?!”  If you’ve never flown with your own young kids, its quite an experience – unless of course you don’t care if everyone hates you…

http://www.cafepress.com/dd/36347865

I read a few weeks back that the Google Docs Api had the ability to allow you to share your folders but that the interface didn’t have it yet.  I don’t know how people find things like that – going through the api code I guess… but anyway I logged in today and sure enough I got a message that I could share folders with others!  YAY!  Even better I tried to share a folder with one of my Google Apps email addresses and sure enough – it showed up there too!  Cool beans!  I think I’ll use google docs even more lately.  Just last week I copied all of my project data into seperate folders so that it was more organized and I didn’t just have it all over my white board.  I wasn’t using it for complete project management – but for the overall big picture.  Now I can share that one folder with anyone who might be helping me and then we can all edit them more easily!

Ok, now that I’ve got your attention I’ll add a small discalimer – the dust hasn’t quite settled yet and no one knows at this point exactly what will happen, but from what I can tell this is one of those places where a decision was made not because it was the best one but because it was seen as being the most popular for those making the decision.

At a time when the economy is truly suffering and people everywhere are looking for leaders to do the right things, many see things such as ballooning costs in government programs as being full of fat and needing to be purged.  Thus was the case with the VH-71 Presidential Helicopter.  From what I understand this was a bid by Lockheed Martin for a 2 phase project.  The original cost was $6 Billion for 28 helicopters.  Now that is probably the seed of the overall problem.  I will admit that there is a spending problem in Washington and that seems like a huge amount of money for a helicopter.  As a tech person myself though, I must also admit that we as civilians also don’t know what technology they were trying to put into those helicopters to justify such a huge cost.  The biggest news we have heard is that the project cost has ballooned to $13 Billion.  Truth be told most of the “soaring cost overruns” and “government procurement process ‘run amok’” were probably scope creep in phase 2 where the military was trying to push the already bleeding edge technology even further which would also lead to delays and extensions of the deadlines (which was also cited as a reason for the cancelation.)

After spending $3 Billion already on phase 1 (and having 4 prototypes built – 3 of which are the final product scheduled for delivery in 2010) they decided to cut funding to the program completely and put additional money toward repairing the already failing helicopters.  It seems that the money (and jobs?) would have been put to better use finishing phase 1 and having new (albeit not so technologically advanced) helicopters so they don’t fall out of the sky.  Why punish the citizens and local economies because the military and government have a spending problem.  Lets curtail costs where we can and reign in spending but lets not throw jobs and money away and pretend that we are doing the right thing for the economy.  But hey, its all a political game right?

The President was quoted as having said “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” but isn’t that kinda like someone in a building when the fire alarms are going off saying “I don’t see any smoke… must not be a real fire…” – What does he know about a helicopter?!

Further Disclaimer: I have some bias toward wanting the right decision for this program to be made as I am from the Binghamton, NY area where these possible job losses would cause a devastating problem to the local economy.

I had this “virtual drive” script I wrote setup a while back for my windows machine to make certain things easier.  For instance I setup my apache htdocs directory so that it was the “W” drive so I could just open my computer and W and I would be there with my websites – it just made things more easily accessible.

The solution was used again for a different purpose when one day I had a friend who had installed windows and something went wrong.  A drive other than his main windows partition was set as “C” and his windows partition was created as “F”.  What made this a problem was that when he would install some programs (flash for example) it would attempt to install certain things to the registry on the “C” drive which it couldn’t find and there seemed to be no way to correct this.  So I showed him my little trick.  I didn’t think much of it until the other day he asked me for the script again because when he just installed his new computer the USB drive was “C” and he messed it up again.  He said he searched for a fix on Google and couldn’t find one.  You can’t just rename the partition because you are using it.  I imagine there is some kind of a fix if you put in a live cd and you can change it but we didn’t really look into it.  I just gave him the script and off he went.

So its a very simple batch script and you can modify it to do either of the things that I just mentioned.  Just save the following as virtualDrive.bat (or whateverYouWant.bat)

This first one shows my setting up the W drive:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO.

subst W: /d
subst W: D:\htdocs
CLS
EXIT

This one shows the fix if your windows partition is not set to C and it is causing you a problem:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO.

subst C: /d
subst C: F:

CLS
EXIT

The first “subst” line deletes the “C” drive in case your script has already ran previously (this stops an error from popping up if it already exists) – The second creates the “C” drive pointing to the “F” drive.

The last hint is that if you want to have it created every time you start your computer, just put a link to the virtualDrive.bat file in your startup folder in the start menu.

Ok, so the other day I found out that my iPod touch is limited to 9 pages of apps. Now I know some of you are thinking “how did you fill 9 pages?!” but I also know others are saying “I know 9 is not enough!” Well I understand why, especially because I don’t know if apple initially planned on having so many apps and therefore didn’t plan for this problem. Anyway what happened today was that I was trying to move some icons around and I accidentally pushed one off the edge of the last page! If you’ve had this happen, have no fear, just turn it off and then back on again. The icon will now appear in the first open spot starting at the left most page. So all you have to do is go back and find it!

I work for Cluster Resources as their Business Infrastructure Developer. Basically in my job I find ways to make our business processes more efficient, removing touch points and creating value through IT. Really love my job and specifically, the company. The more I have come to understand our product, the more I want to tell people about how amazing it is. No one else’s product does as much as our’s does and it does some amazing things. As I have interacted with different people, I’ve come to realize that our product “Moab” is so complex that I can never explain it as fully as I would like. I decided that I basically needed a landing page that I could give out that I could consolidate my thoughts and some links to help people get introduced. Although I work for Cluster Resources, the information posted here is my own understanding of the product and does not represent any stance or opinion the company currently has. As I mentioned, I love talking about our product, but I am not a sales person. If you have questions or are interested in our product you can contact me through my contact page or by leaving a comment here (comments are posted for everyone to see) and I will put you in contact with someone who can answer your specific question. I may create some more advanced follow up posts to this if there is interest – if I do, I will edit this post and put the links at the end.

What is Moab?

From our website: Moab Cluster Suite is a policy-based intelligence engine that integrates scheduling, managing, monitoring and reporting of cluster workloads. It guarantees service levels are met while maximizing job throughput. Moab integrates with existing middleware for consolidated administrative control and holistic cluster reporting. Its graphical management interfaces and flexible policy capabilities result in decreased costs and increased ROI.

Solutions Moab Provides:

HPC (High Performance Computing):

In the past clusters of computers were most often used in academic and government facilities to perform huge calculations and manipulation of data. Moab was originally setup to work in these environments sitting on top of the cluster managing the resource managers that are set up to accept and control jobs. Moab’s unique scheduling capabilities give it the ability to increase the use of hardware and allow for less manual intervention necessary by administrators to keep the system working smoothly.

As the information age has come upon us, huge amounts of data have become prevelant in all parts of society. Many companies have to utilize large IT budgets to manage the hardware and sofware necessary to manipulate the data that they receive and make it usable for the business. With this in mind, Moab has been modified through its development to work well in other situations. These include both Cloud Computing and Data Center environments.

Adaptive Computing for Clouds and Data Center:

At Cluster Resources we sell a solution tailored to fit these environments. This solution is our Adaptive Operating Environment—Powered by Moab. In this environment Moab can intelligently manage your resources to utilize as much or as little of your hardware as necessary at any given time. Moab looks in the queue of upcoming jobs and can dynamically power on or off hardware as necessary to accomodate those jobs. For instance if your data center provides web hosting and one of your customer’s websites gets to the front page of digg and their bandwidth increases, instead of having a denial of service, or needing to turn on new hardware, Moab would recognize this increase as it was happening and would power on nodes to handle the workload seemlessly providing the bandwidth and server power necessary to handle the workload. If all of the servers that you own are utilized, Moab can utilize servers “in the cloud” and push jobs as needed to hardware carved out specifically for your organization. Here is a link to a video we have created that gives a brief overview of this solution.

Green Computing:

Green is the new thing these days. In fact if your company hasn’t figure out some way to show you’ve gone green you are behind the times. If you have or if you haven’t, here is yet another way you can show you care about the evironment (if not the bottom line). The Green Computing solution uses moab to do things like power off unused hardware, locate high processor intensive jobs in cooler parts of the data center to allow the temperature to become more uniform throughout, consolodate jobs to as few servers as needed and even hold off performing non-essential jobs if possible until there is space on the available hardware so it doesn’t have to start up and shutdown servers more than necessary. Here is a link to a video on green computing.

Hybrid Computing:

Is your IT budget larger than it needs to be because you need to run both Linux and Windows servers? How often are all of your servers in use at the same time? With Hybrid Cluster – powered by Moab you can buy less servers and have them dynamically re-purposed based on the current need of your “cluster”. I personally think this is one of the coolest solutions we have. Think about it, if the main time you need to run windows servers is when your accounting jobs run at the end of the month, you can have the system DYNAMICALLY change the OS on the servers to meet the need of those jobs for that period of time. After the need is passed, the servers can either be turned off to save power, or switched back to the original operating system. How cool is that?! Here is a link to a video on the Hybrid Cluster solution.

Ok, I’ve written more than I thought I would, but I think this page now serves the purpose that I wanted it to. If you found this page from a link online, feel free to visit the Cluster Resources web page at http://www.clusterresources.com for more informaion. If ypuvwould rather as I mentioned you can ask me a question and if I can’t get the answer for you, I’ll get you to someone who can answer it.

One last note:

If you have actually read down this far you might be interested enough to know that we will be holding our 2nd annual Moab•Con Conference June 17 – 19. More information can be found on the information page.

So today is my birthday and this week I treated myself to a new toy. I am terrible when it comes to buying things because I never want to spend money on things… But I decided I had some money from my b-day and I had thought about it quite a bit and I figure I can use it for a lot of things so I decided I’d go for it. So this post was written on my brand new iPod touch.

I read an article last night that gave me some very good ideas. It started with a poem:

I always eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
They do taste kind of funny
But it keeps them on my knife
- anonymous
In IT we are often doing the same things as eating peas with honey because we are using a knife. What we need to do is not create solutions that make bad things bearable, but that actually fix the root of the problem – getting a spoon instead of using a knife.

So I went through my projects today to see how many of them could be considered “honey projects” – probably half of them could go away with a good CRM solution.

Even better, not only would they go away but they would be easier to maintain in the future. I’ve started, instead of looking at my projects a entities in and of themselves, looking at them in the whole scheme of things and whether they only are a band-aid to cover a problem, or if they are actually fixing it. Its a good change and I anticipate that looking at things this way will help to make projects in the future more productive.

Ok, so I’m not usually one to get overly involved in politics.  I follow things, but I find that often I’m one of the onlookers who lets things happen as they will.  We can’t let just anything happen with this vote.  This is really a big deal and it needs to be dealt with in the right way.  We need to vote to help protect our kids and the future of this country.

Digg the website up: http://digg.com/political_opinion/Prop_8_The_Divine_Institution_of_Marriage/ (The site can be seen here: http://www.preservingmarriage.org/ If you don’t have a digg account – get one just for this!

Here is the text of an email I just received – and my response to it:

–
Benjamin Patron Villegas
801.472.0065
ibpatronv@yahoo.com
ibpatronv@byu.edu

Stick to your task till it sticks to you;
Beginners are many, but enders are few.
Honour, power, place, and praise
Will come, in time, to the one who stays.

Stick to your task till it stick to you;
Bend at it, sweat at it, smile at it too;
For out of the bend and the sweat and the smile
Will come life’s victories, after awhile.
-Anonymous

—————-My Response ————————————–

Ben,

I think I found your links – although the story seems to be a bit different than the one in the story this guy was sent to jail over a book about homosexuality in a book titled “Who’s in a Family?” http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45594 – here is another link about how the supreme court failed to hear the case:
Massachusetts court case: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54420
Supreme court: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=77373

And here are some links on the field trip to the wedding:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,436961,00.html

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/11/MNFG13F1VG.DTL

Today is Blog action day.  I can’t remember if I signed up or not, but as I did last year, I figured I’d shoot out a quick post about this year’s topic – Poverty.  There are lots of ways that we can help overcome poverty in the world today.

One of the first thoughts I had was a site that I’ve visited a few times, but have yet to try.  It is Kiva.org.  Kiva allows you to make a “Loan” to an entrepreneur in a 3rd world country.  You pick a specific person to loan to, and the loan amount and they pay you back when they succeed.  If you invested even $25 (the smallest amount allowed) every quarter, or even every month, my thought is that if/when you get paid back, you can then reinvest that money back to someone else who could use it and that same money would build over time as you invest in more people and you could help a whole bunch of people – and you can see their businesses grow!

Another way to help out poverty in your own area is to do something that we just did recently here at work.  A food drive.  Its not a new idea but if you can get a group of people to donate a few dollars worth of food you can make a big difference.  I know that here in Utah they are needing way more food than they recently anticipated due to the hard economic times.  If you are time pressed, the Utah food bank even has a virtual shopping experience where you can donate food or money without even going to the store.

In the Doctrine and Covenants section 104 verses 17 and 84 read:

17 For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves.

84 Inasmuch as you obtain a chance to loan money by hundreds, or thousands, even until you shall loan enough to deliver yourself from bondage, it is your privilege.

Take a few minutes today and see what you can do to help poverty.  Even just a few dollars can go a long way.