Extra Pepperoni

We got a Razor for Amy and me, so we can scoot with Julia. It’s fun, but apparently for robust kids, as the handlebars are too low for a grownup, but it’s rated up to 180 pounds. The handlebars bug me, though. They have a label which reads:

Caution: this moves when used. Exercise caution & common sense when riding.

Okay, I understand that a liability lawyer made them put that label on the scooter. But anyone who needs to be told that a Razor scooter moves, is going to be unable to exercise common sense when riding.

Amy and I were walking across the Gowanus Canal to see Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, when we came across this amusing Easter residue (on Saturday, so pre-Easter, no less!). I like Peeps, but not that much. Amy dislikes Peeps, but not that much. Her comment, upon hearing I intended to submit this photo to Miss Heather? “It’s not a poop. It’s a peep.”

Despite not being feces or canine, this still seemed right up Heather’s alley.

I started at Goldman Sachs Monday, working at their 30 Hudson St office in Jersey City (apparently the tallest building in NJ).
My temporary desk has a Southern exposure, with a great view of the Statue from the 32nd floor; next week I’ll move to my real desk.
The views of the Manhattan skyline at the end of the day are remarkable.

The commute (R subway to PATH) is actually 10-15 minutes shorter than the 65 minutes to or from Rockefeller, which is a pleasant surprise, although lunch options in that part of Jersey City are pretty sparse.

Joyce (Raskin) White is a friend of ours from the neighborhood — Julia and her daughter Sydney are a couple days apart in age and were best friends when they lived in Brooklyn. A few years ago Joyce, Matt, and Sydney moved to Boston, and we were all sad. Before Brooklyn, Joyce was in a fairly successful rock band named Scarce, but they broke up after a brain injury took Chick Graining (lead singer) out of commission.

A couple years ago, Joyce started writing a book about her experiences growing up as a female rocker, called Aching to Be: A Girl’s True Rock and Roll Story. Amy edited the book, and we’ve been waiting to see Scarce perform ever since.

Tonight they played at Union Hall, just down the street, and we finally got to watch Joyce rock out. It was most excellent, and I got a mess of pictures.

The Pretties

Inspired by When data center cabling becomes art from Andrew T Laurence & Chuck Goolsbee’s pics of Digital Forest, I took some photos of Rockefeller’s new data center. We’ve been planning out various scenarios for 5 years at this point, but we finally moved most of our systems in this month. Note that the network guys (mostly Eric) took care to run cables connecting to ports on the left half of each device in from the left, and come in from the right for ports on the right. This makes more work for them in preparation, since one cannot simply plug a cable into a free port, but makes things look prettier, and also reduces cable snarling.

More Connectivity, Please

Since we first started discussing data center plans, I’ve been saying we need more connectivity. The new DC has 48 patches per 42U rack, and some of the new racks are indeed running out of ports before they run out of vertical space. In our racks 2U is used for patch panels and 2 cables control APC managed power strips, so we have 40U and 46 patch ports for servers. Our Linux servers have Ethernet, serial console, & KVM; Suns have Ethernet & console; Windows have Ethernet & KVM. In the worst case, 40 1U Linux servers need 120 connections, but we only have 46 available. If the rack is full of 2U Suns & Windows servers, we’re okay with 6 ‘extra’, available for dual-connected servers or whatever. As we get more dense, we begin to run out of ports.

Blades

Blades are no better — their chassis tend to blow out the power budget because they’re even more dense than 1Us (although they do get more servers per rack), and with all the redundancy they still require a lot of cabling. For a reasonable IBM BladeCenter, we need 4 x 2 for GE switches (FC cables don’t go in these patch panels). Then 2 x 2 for (Ethernet & KVM) for management modules per chassis = 12 ports for 7U. For our new HP c7000 chassis with basic networking, we have 16 GE ports, 2 GE console ports, 2 OA Ethernet ports, and 2 2 OA serial ports (again, ignoring the fiber-optic GE ports): 22 ports in 10U. I’m sure somewhere HP has demo chassis, filled them with fully-connected GE switch modules: (9 x 8 + 4 = 74 patches) & (4 x 8 = 32 fiber-optic ports) = 106 cables total (not counting power connections — 6 in our case). In 10U — 1/4 of a rack — insane!

Update 2008/2/5: Eric pointed out I was wrong about the ports — the Cisco switches have 8 uplink ports, 4 of which are either fiber-optic or copper (you can see they’re 17-20 in the photo); the other 4 copper ports seem intended for cross-linking to the other switch. So the max copper patch count remains, but the the fiber connections would be instead, rather than in addition, and we may fully connect our 2 switches with only 8 GE uplinks rather than 16 going out of the chassis.

I went out tonight to see Gavin perform (accordion, piano, & backing vocals) with Anna Copa Cabanna at Jalopy, a performance space and instrument repair shop so old-timey and rustic they had a wooden bolt to lock the bathroom door and a wooden box sink.

Getting there was surprisingly difficult. I called a local car service, and they told me it would be 10 minutes. In 6, the car was outside; when I went out, she complained that I’d kept a woman waiting, and spent much of the drive complaining about the car we were in. Then she drove 7 blocks south to 9th Street, and asked me how to get there. Since the driver didn’t know the way, I used Google Maps on the iPhone to give her directions. As we got to the Fort Hamilton Parkway, she began to tell me that Columbia Street (which Jalopy is on) didn’t exist on the other (north) side of the Parkway; I insisted at least half a dozen times, and guided her around the entrance — insisting to me all along that we couldn’t get to the north side of the Parkway, until we saw the place, right where Google claimed it was. To get home I called Eastern, and they were 30% cheaper without arguing or needing directions.

I got some very dark pictures (no flash).

It was a very good show, although as a friend of Gavin’s I didn’t really appreciate the harassment of “Smitty” that’s part of their shtick. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have appreciated him treating her that way either…

Lots of strange songs about New York and America, by a fascinating and deliberately somewhat crazy outsider (Australian import). I was particularly impressed that they managed to do “Beauty Bar” as a real punk song — on tambourine & accordion.

I also enjoyed Royal Pine, but was a bit freaked out when they played a song I recognized — “Pearl Polly Adler”. This is inexplicable because I listen to perhaps a couple dozen songs I don’t know each year (largely from James), so recognizing a ‘new’ song that’s not in my iTunes library was a (pleasant) source of shock and confusion. Apparently I found it while surfing YouTube recently — something I also very rarely do, as opposed to effectively never before the iPhone. The Pearl Polly Adler video looks familiar, but I can’t be sure it’s not all delusional deja vu.

Anyway, I enjoyed that song while racking my brain for where I had heard it before, and “Stone Cold Mamacita” even more, although I enjoyed the rougher and tougher live version more than the recording on Huasteca.

I take a lot of pictures of Julia, and every year we make holiday photo albums (normally from iPhoto); last year we got 6.

I just went through December 2006’s photos, picking 5. Now I have 2,400 that made the initial cut from January through November 2007 to review. There are also 47 Julia took this year to check out.

It’s a big job! The books tend to be a bit longer than the base 20 pages, but we like them.

I stopped posting about the Super-Tent, because not much has changed since we moved in. I did get a bigger desk when Mark left Rockefeller, which matters to me but not much to anyone else. I have continued to take pictures of Rockefeller as the various construction projects proceed, though.

• http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/album/ru/ru-2007-07/
• http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/album/ru/ru-2007-08/
• http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/album/ru/ru-2007-09/
• http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/album/ru/ru-2007-10/

I’ve spent the past 90 minutes or so scanning over 100 CDs into Delicious Library. These aren’t even CDs I particularly want to keep — I’d be happy to lala them, but it’s great to have such a simple way to build a catalog.

I’m wishing for better integration already. DL doesn’t pick up albums or album covers from iTunes, even though obviously there’s a very strong correlation between CDs I own and complete albums in iTunes. Further, it doesn’t interface to lala — they already have a list of CDs I own, and automatic updating between lala and DL as I buy, send, and receive CDs would be excellent. Likewise, building web pages from the catalog requires a third-party utility (fortunately free).

This might be helpful for my parents, who own a 300 CD changer and have a lot of trouble keeping track of what’s in it — but I haven’t gotten that far yet.

DL does books, movies, music, and games. It works most easily by scanning UPC barcodes with an iSight — I’d heard about it and thought it sounded great, but only recently gotten a computer with an iSight built in. As it turns out I could probably have used my Sony TRV25 DV video camera, but this is fine. I expect to have all our CDs and DVDs within a month; afterwards I’ll start scanning books. Not sure if I’ll ever use the database for anything important, but it will be excellent to have a database.

For friends like James and Matthew who have out-of-control CD collections, this could be a huge deal.

DL serves as a good illustration of the differences between physical and virtual. Holding the CD in front of the camera is annoying and slow, while sucking information down from the Internet is fast. I suspect part of this is false perception, though, as it may well be pinging Amazon with tentative bar-code scans until one is verified, meaning the Internet lookup is already halfway done, and contributing to what feels like scanning time.

I only had one bar-code that read wrong consistently, and one CD (Snapshot: Live At the Iron Horse, by Livingston Taylor) where if I put the artist in DL doesn’t know what it is — on the other hand, if I leave the artist blank, DL correctly picks up the Amazon profile — which shows Livingston Taylor on the site. Very strange.

Tip: Scanning got much faster after I rotated my MBP slightly. It was about 2′ away from the wall, and once I turned the back of it slightly towards a ceiling light, so there was better illumination on CDs in front of the iSight, scanning took less than half as long as it had been. This is mentioned in the help, but I had thought there was sufficient light because it worked. I was impressed with the difference a small rotation made — perhaps Delicious Monster will add a low light warning in a future version.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t format titles the way I do, so I’ll consider DL a reference, and iTunes the master.

We noticed several fire engines and a crowd of people standing on 5th Ave and 2nd St, looking at a building across the street (on the west side of 5th Ave, between 2nd & 3rd Sts). We initially thought Gary’s building was on fire, but there was no smoke — just a couple cherry pickers working at an empty building in the middle of the block.

Ironically, we noticed on Sunday that you can see right through that building, which we hadn’t really noticed before, and I took some pictures:

Very strange, and we still don’t know what happened. We hope nobody was hurt.

http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/album/353-2nd/album/353-2nd/5th-ave-fire/

Update 2007/08/10: They have boarded up the windows, and continued building on top. It doesn’t look like there was a fire; Scott & Christine think there was some sort of collapse of the construction work they’re doing.

The Super-Tent/IT Pavilion/Big Top/Big House fronts on the main RU parking lot, at the other end of which is the 66th St Gate. Except that after we moved in, they walled in the lot and started digging:

They still haven’t started on Smith Hall, though, which makes me wonder why we couldn’t still be in a proper building now. In the meantime, the main campus entrance and driveway are closed, along with the parking lot, under which a new electrical vault will be built. Getting around campus is much more complicated now than 6 months ago. This is especially true for IT, moving equipment around the tent, as the pathways and steps around the periphery don’t quite work for carts.

Our new main data center is nearing completion. It was previously our backup/disaster recovery site, so needed a lot of build-out to fit the rest of our servers. The swap from the older/smaller UPS system to the newer/larger one will be tricky, as several live servers will be switched over while running. Later we get to swap systems end-for-end across campus, so the primaries are in the primary DC, once their current location becomes the DR site. Needless to say, most of our systems are not redundant, so there will be a bunch of minor disruptions.

Stu, who is overseeing the build-out of what will largely be ‘his’ DC, showed me why Cat6A cabling is so much thicker (and thus harder to work with) than old-school Cat5 UTP (”Unshielded Twisted Pair”) — the internal copper wiring is twisted around itself many more times to reduce interference, and the whole thing is cradled by a plastic framework shaped like a plus sign. This framework is twisted as well, so as the Cat6A cables lay next to each other in cable trays, the individual conductor strands don’t align with neighboring Cat6A cables, again helping to avoid signal transference between what should be independent connections. The idea is that in 10 years, when everybody is demanding 10GE connections, we’ll be able to simply re-patch uplinks into 10GE switch ports as needed. Otherwise the rewiring would be painful for individual machines, and impossibly disruptive to do in bulk.

Unfortunately, the heavier-duty Cat6A is also heavier and bulkier, thus significantly harder to work with and slower to run. Each of the 24 new 42U racks is getting 48 runs, from 2 1U patch panels in each rack, back to 6 patch panels (96 connections) in each of the new network racks, where switches and other Cat5-based gear, such as terminal servers and KVM switches, will go. This is new 1,152 runs in addition to the slightly older stuff at the South end of the room, which is still our DR site during this construction.

My question is: How long will it be before we need more than 48 connections in a rack? Our non-blade Linux servers tend to have 3 Cat5 connections: Ethernet, serial console, and KVM; Windows systems don’t need serial consoles, so they get 2. A rack of 1U Linux servers maxes out at 40 1U servers and 120 Cat5 connections, which just won’t fly here. 8 2U Linux servers (24 connections) and 12 Windows servers (another 24 connections) fill a rack, meaning as time goes on and we are again someday tight for space, we might run out of network connections sooner. At that point we could put a KVM server in every third rack and reclaim a lot of cabling for Ethernet, but it violates our model of having everything run patched to the switch racks. We’ll see what the world looks like when we actually get there…

I discovered yesterday that they’re also simultaneously digging up the driveway between Founders Hall and Flexner — not sure why, but it looks like pipe-laying for plumbing.

Update According to Stu, this is actually conduit for electrical wiring, from the vault under our parking lot up through to an electrical switching station in Flexner.

Many more RU photographs are up at http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/album/ru/

Tuesday morning, Amy and I were walking to the subway together, and we saw this amusing sign:

I sent it to Heather & Sam, who run New York Shitty (she acid wit & poop snaps, he back-end hosting), and she liked it. Then Curbed picked it up, and it’s made the rounds.

I took a bunch of pictures at RU today, including some of our DR site being expanded to become our primary machine room. Lots of AC & UPSes going in. I even got my father and Stu (Data Center Manager — he gets an office outside the Super-Tent!) in a couple.

The USPS is doing Star Wars stamps, and they’ve decorated some mailboxes. I’d link to the Star Wars web page at the post office, but it’s unimpressive & loud. But I did get some good pics of an R2D2 mailbox.

Friday night I got 2 750gb hard drives for the Power Mac G5 I brought home from work. I was very impressed by the elegance of its hard drive bays (which have since been replaced by carriers in the Mac Pro), and it’s much faster than anything else in our house (until Amy gets her MacBook tomorrow — that might be faster), so I’m doing a little iMovie work on it.

I’ve installed Leopard Server several times already, having some trouble with networking/naming, largely around the fact that the Power Mac has an internal hostname & IP, an external hostname & IP, and a DNS hostname for the external IP which didn’t agree. Mac OS X Server is picky about hostnames & IPs, and ironically this weekend I found and fixed a similar problem on my PMG4, which dates back to when it became the production (www|mail).reppep.com (shortly after 10.4.0 [Server] was released); I noticed the old name kept showing up in odd places, and now I know why. changeip is your friend.

I just checked, and I have sent 24 messages to Apple since Friday night; probably 1/4 are updates for existing reports. Most of them are about very small points.

The new box will be a Leopard Server testbed until it’s released, and then the production (www|mail).reppep.com, with much more disk capacity and general “oomph”.

For the stuff I had planned a week ago, I’ve done most of it, but the TiVo isn’t connected yet (it’s sitting under a table waiting for me to take the time, but the APExpress is ready to go); Amy’s MacBook arrives tomorrow, and I just sent my original MacBook Pro to Apple to get its backlight fixed and perhaps battery replaced; once it’s back I am considering sending the new 23″ CD in to have its backlight replaced, as it’s got an annoying flicker in the lower right quadrant.

The rest is done; I can now post images to Julia’s site at 100mbps from my PowerBook, rather than AirPort speeds, and I am considering moving the GE switch to the inside, since that would let the PowerBook run at full speed (and most bulk transfers are betweeen it and the server), and obviously the front side of the network is throttled by our 3mbps/768kbps DSL circuit. But it requires me to use different names for everything to get top speed and bring an old 100mbps switch back online, so I’m not hurrying to implement. I can see the GE is working, though — I just moved a 1.35gb iMovie project from the PMG5 to the PMG4, and it peaked at 300mbps, averaging half that. After I invert the network I’ll see if the PBG4 can do faster transfers than the PMG4.

I decided to hold onto the Dell PC, since nobody else wants it and it’s a fine machine for XP or Linux; I’ll just leave it in a corner until I come up with a worthwhile use for it.

It’s very nice to have an iPod on the stereo again.

People are also calling it the Pavilion and the Big Top (I like Big House), and we’re now supposed to move in April 27th (previously it was set for March 15th, but I guess we’re not going to make that one). Last week, moving boxes showed up in our current office — that wasn’t encouraging.

We’re discussing steps to alleviate the crunch, like swapping out desktops for laptops and virtual machines, but I’m somewhat surprised there’s no big movement in this direction. Personally, I’m hoping to get rid of 3 desktops and upgrade a laptop. Mac Pro octo (when released) should be a dandy VM host too.

It would be helpful if we could do some telecommuting, but I’m not sure if the Powers That Be will allow it. We’ll have to see how bad the crowding and noise are — the real experience may change everyone’s thinking (or it might not be too bad, but that’s a lot to hope for). The partitions certainly were higher than I expected, and the cubes less tiny, although if we double up, they will be very cramped. On the bright side, I hear the city will only give a 5-year permit for the tent, which is better than I expected. It’s not a good thing when you’re relieved at only spending 5 years in a large semi-permanent “building” with outside bathrooms. But hey, at least we’ll have good connectivity. Oy vey!

Anyway, new pics are up.

The Canon SD800 IS started taking a long time to recharge the flash, and exhibiting the lag issues I’ve seen before with the S400, so I changed the battery and they went away. I’d gotten up to image 365 (videos, of which I’ve taken about 5, increment the image count). This is very good battery life.

First flaw: the low charge warning doesn’t come soon enough. It should be before the camera’s behavior is affected, with enough margin that people will normally be able to keep using the camera for a while after seeing the warning before it becomes problematic, since most of us don’t want to stop shooting until we can recharge or get a fresh battery.

Second issue: Image Stabilization doesn’t work when the camera is held at a 90° angle. Worse, the image stabilization icon (either a hand with motion bars or a circle with motion bars) doesn’t change when IS is disabled due to orientation. I only know it’s not active because I read the manual.

Overall, I like the camera very much, even though I’m disappointed they didn’t fix the recharge warning (which has been this way since the S400 was new, at least).

I was up on the 8th floor of the Rockefeller Research Building (RRB), and got captured by the prospect looking down, south onto the FDR and the East River, and separately west onto York at 63rd Street (and the Peggy Rockefeller Plaza). I took a bunch of pictures, including a few of the crowded mess that is my cube. Our move to the Super-Tent has been pushed back from March to April (tax day?), so I’ll have to clean up and dump a bunch of stuff soon, to fit into the new cube-farm.

But I was reminded that, overall, RU is a good place to be. It’s why I came back after leaving several years ago, and why I’ve stayed this time (I’m in my 7th year this round).

FYI: Our web group has posted an excellent Interactive Campus Map.

Oh, and the camera is still going strong after having taken a total of 188 pictures & movies combined since its initial charge.

I like the SD800 IS a lot. The face recognition (although it still feels like a computationally insoluble problem to me) actually works, and the image stabilization does too. It enables me to take slower shots (and use flash less often), which is more likely to get a blur effect on running kids — often fun, sometimes unacceptable. I’ve taken 148 photos and a few 640×480x15fps videos and the battery is still fine.

My only complaint about the S400 is that it only had a “battery low” warning, and inevitably once I saw that warning, the camera’s performance was already starting to suffer (particularly flash recharge times). Something showing 0-10%, 10-20% .. 90-100% charge would a major improvement, but I haven’t seen anything like a charge indicator on the new one either, yet. We’ll see if it gives me enough notice. If not, I guess I’ll just have to get a spare battery, but they ain’t cheap.

Almost everything is logical or as expected from the S400. I was surprised that image stabilization doesn’t work when the camera is rotated 90°, though.

The SanDisk 2gb Ultra II SD Plus USB Card is indeed excellent.