A Few Thoughts…

For those who don’t know, a numismatist is someone who studies and/or collects coins, paper money, or medals. And no, I don’t mean collecting money as in earning interest. My grandpa had a coin collection – and I hope to receive it one day! I remember many times looking through the books of coins when I was younger. That and stamps – which is a collection from both sides of my family.

Coins, however, have always had a certain allure that I just cannot explain. Old coins, coins with special historical meaning (1909 V.D.B. for instance), and modern coins with investment value (How cool would it be to have silver, gold, or platinum bullion as an investment), all of them I have an interest in. Unfortunately, I don’t have the income to support this hobby, let alone in addition to the hobbies I currently claim to have! Oh well, time to save a bit and hope that one day I can pass on to my kids/grandkids a piece of history.

As a side note – the US Mint is starting a couple of sets of coins that just might have me spending some money purchasing money.  The 2006 American Eagle Platinum Proof coins begin a three-year series honoring the three branches of our government.  Beginning in 2007, the mint is beginning a run of $1 coins honoring the presidents of our country in the order they served the office – 4 quarters a year up to Nixon at this point, but that’s in 2016, so I’m sure they will update it before then!  Additionally, the first ladies will be honored on $10 gold pieces with their husbands.  Watch for a new $0.01 coin design in 2009 for the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth!

The blog has been moved to the HTG webserver!

So I’m reading Appendix A of the Computer Architecture book, which is all about pipelining.  Dr. Wilsey told us in no uncertain terms that if we couldn’t wrap our heads around the material in this chapter we would not understand anything the rest of the quarter.  The material: pipelining – some really cool stuff, but some really deep stuff at the same time (no pun intended for those who get it – for those who don’t, a deep pipeline is one that is very long and can take a lot of time to get through).

Anyway, Chapter 3 of the book is about more advanced concepts in pipelining – different dynamic scheduling techniques and the like, and we were told to read Appendix A before chapter three.  So I am most of the way through the appendix, and it says to read the first few pages of chapter three for some background information on the dynamic scheduling concept.  Flipping back ~900 pages, I get to chapter 3 and start reading the introduction – which promptly tells me to read appendix A before continuing with chapters 3 and 4!  This is where I cry circular dependences!

I briefly go forward to see what chapter 4 is about, and find that chapter 3 is ~100 pages.  At this point I say “Joe, what have you gotten yourself into?!?”  I reach for the pot of coffee, and decide to take a mental break to write this and fold my laundry. Luckily, chapters 3 and 4 are not on the first midterm…

Yes, dependences is a real word – though I think it is some English (that would be British English, not American English) extension of the word dependence.  Miriam Webster and Dictionary.com do not mention this form of the word directly, but bring up the entry for dependence.  I still have my doubts, but Kelly insists it’s the “cool” word to use…

If you spend much time reading various information from car manufactures/reviewers (especially ones who spend time reviewing cars in the country which they are made) you will notice a common theme when referring to American car owners: We apparently love big cars. It’s not hard to see that the statement is true for the most part: the shear number of SUVs on the road gives a good indication. The sad part is that it is taking a crunch at the gas pump to move many Americans to even consider smaller vehicles.

(more…)

So I was looking around a bit for some information on what other people might be doing to run a highly-available web server with H-Sphere – the software we’re using to manage HTG, Limited’s web servers. After running through a few links, it looks like most people who are touting High Availability service are using redundant system components: i.e. – RAID disk arrays, redundant power supplies, and dual processors (though, if one processor dies, there’s a good chance that the server will be coming down).

To me this all seems like a fake high-availability scheme. There has got to be a better way that this! Some sort of failover mechanism which H-Sphere could be setup to use. Maybe setting up a single maintenance server which all customers use, which manages the data store, then a cluster of load-balanced apache servers which server the data for the hosted sites.

Well for now HTG, Limited, will not be running highly-available servers in the true sense of the phrase. Though we do have redundant server components!