Is it just me, or has this heir apparent to slashdot’s success been compromised as of late.  What has been a nexus of the weird, the geeky and the just plain cool of tech on the web turned into an Apple PR engine.  It seems like there are always multiple copies of stories that show up that usually revolve around either Apple, the iPod and are usually posted from someone’s blog.

The other thing that has been frustrating me of late has been the growing number of inappropriate pieces that wind up on the site as well. 

Having to deal with all the stories marked NSFW (Not Safe For Work – you can guess what that entails), the multiple blog links (that usually go down under the strain) and the just crap that has show up late has me wanting to get my tech news elsewhere .

For you non geek readers, it’s been either slashdot.org or digg.com for the last 8 years giving regular tech news to the masses; it’s Publisher’s Weekly, if you will, for the publishing industry.  The problem with digg though is that is primairly user-driven content; it lives and dies by it’s readership.  Since it’s gotten a bit bigger, it tends to attract the lowest common denominator coupled with the site branching out into regular news has done it’s share to dillute the core audience.

Well, we’ll see where it goes; it’s done it’s share of not being impressive lately .

Two nights ago we picked up ‘Flight 93′, a hollywood version of some of the events documented in the 9/11 commission report.  I ended up watching it by myself and I have to say I was incredibly surprised with the quality of movie that they did do.

A warning: at least for me, this is one of those films that document something far to recent and far to horrific that should not be viewed by people under 18.  It’s just that disturbing.  It’s the first film I think I’ve seen that got an R rating and deserved. 

With that said, the film reminds me of ‘Tora, Tora, Tora’; hollywood’s attempt to document another attack on our soil – Pearl Harbor.  It’s a very matter of fact reindition of the day that doesn’t rely on gimmicks or music to highten the terror; I think there was music in it, nothing was really overt though. 

The film begins with one of the most beautifully filmed scenes I think I’ve ever seen in a movie (with the exception of Michael Mann’s work).  It starts with a flyover Manhatten interwoven with scenes of the hi-jacker’s preparations the day of the attack. 

The other nice thing that this movie does is effectively offer explanations for information that was left out or the government’s lack of organization on the day of the attack.  One particular scene has Norad’s chief shouting an obsenity about planes that were supposed to be patroling NYC airspace heading out to sea. 

My only complaint about the film is the downplay of Todd Beamer’s moment where he prays on the phone with the woman from Verizon and says those unforgettable words: “Let’s roll”.  The scene was played out well, however, with various cuts of people aboard the plane praying.  It was heroic, well played out cinema and you would be bereft if you didn’t get a chance to experience it.

This was originally one post, but I’m breaking it up into a couple because there are a few thing I want to do with it.  My workplace entered the world of fibre channel storage yesterday when we got a brand new, XServ RAID in the shop.  We had an opportunity to demo this unit when we were considering making the purchase and several features of the system tipped the scale for us.

First, but certainly not the deciding factor was money/value.  The closest entry in the low end SAN market was a AX100 from Dell/EMC.  We were looking primairly at SATA based storage simply because we couldn’t produce enough capacity to justify purchasing true Fibre based storage.  After looking at specs, the comparison on seek times on the XSR vs. CX300, Dell/EMC’s fibre-based storage system was simply comparing apples to oranges.  SATA based Fibre storage (it’s confusing if you’re not familiar with the terminology) seemed to be the right pick for us.  With that said, I was able to get roughly twice the storage with Apple’s product at roughly twice the stated speed compared to the AX100; and, I was able to get it at 3500 less (YMMV). 

This unit was going to replace a PowerVault 220s that started to fail miserably after I realized that, in cluster mode, the ability to service more than a dozen or so concurrent users was pretty small.  As an aside, I can think of no more useless product that the PowerVault 220s.  A google search will return a ton of people who are dissatisfied with their experiences with the 220s.  For us, it boiled down to not being able to do write caching in Cluster mode.  Because of that, during peek times of our day people couldn’t copy anything up to the server because it was too busy.  Feel free to e-mail me if you want more details.

Speaking of write caching, the two systems are really divergent in how they handle write caches.  When you put that ability inside an enclosure like the AX100 or XSR there needs to be some way of protecting it in case of a power failure.  For the AX100, the backup is a whole seperate UPS that needs to be plugged into the unit in order for it to run.  For the XSR, it is a battery backup module that keeps the write cache running until everything is written.  Stated specs say it can run for 72 hours; I’m not sure, but it is internal to the unit and extremely easy to replace/trade out.

Support looked very similar in both situations though for the price I paid for the XSR, I was able to get three years of 4 hour response time support as well as a small parts closet to replace key components (all of which are hot swappable) in no time flat. 

End result, we picked the XServ RAID because it was a better product that was cheaper.  Likelyhood is that it will go into production sometime early next week. 

While I’m in a picture sort of modes, here’s a theme that’s been running through my life this week.  First, notice the above razor?  It’s put out by Gillette and it’s the best razor I’ve used so far.  Notice what is absent on it?  That’s right, the multi-blade, comfort protection, gizmo attached glory that you normally see on razors these days.  It’s the subject of many jokes, but truthfully I’ve not found a better razor.  I think what did it for me was the lack of a comfort strip.  It just cuts my stubble and does it exceptionally well.  Simplicity is the key.  The funny thing is that I can’t even find a picture of this stupid razor anywhere on gillette’s site.  It’s all about the Mach 3 and turbo 4 and the gosh-gee-whiz-I’ve-got-alot-of-blades 5. 

I wonder if an issue we have as an american culture is a problem with simplicity; that bigger has to be better simply because it’s bigger right?  The Ipod, for example, falls prey to this lure with the Shuffle (512MB and 1GB), the Nano (1, 2 and 4 GB models), the U2 Ipod, the Ipod Mini, and the Original Ipod in it’s variety of sizes.  Yet people gravitate to it as a device because it’s essentially simple.  At it’s core, it’s a bastion of simplicity.  It has only a few buttons (play, pause, next track) and can hold a tremendous amount of stuff. 

Well, my world intersected with apple in a big way this week.  A long story, indeed, but I had to replace a woefully underpowered Powervault 220s (a machine, by the way, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy).  I had two options: a dell AX100 and an XServe RAID.  Both options are in the ‘entry level’ SAN catagory having primairly SATA storage and similar performance numbers (the Xserve raid edges out the AX100 by a fair margin though).  At the end of the day, I got a demo XServe and ended up putting it through it’s paces and it was dramatically easy to setup, run and get going.  The best, in the simplicity philosophy that apple seems to hold to all of it’s products the Xserve did it’s job extremely well and was extremely easy to setup and it will be arriving at my doorstep relatively shortly.  At this point, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get a decent SAN setup relatively cheaply and without compromising the ability to make things work and offer a considerable amount of capacity.

O.k., so there are a couple of things you need to know about IT people, if you haven’t guessed:

 1) Acronyms are our life.

 2) Writing a book dealing with technology from any angle is an almost instant draw.

 I bought a book for MJ for Christmas that was on her list.  SAHM I am, by Meredith Efken that I picked up an read over the past couple of days and I liked it…a ton.  SAHM stands for Stay At Home Mom and it’s a book that tells a story through a collection of e-mails sent to and from a listserv and to and from various members of the listserv.

There are a couple of interesting dynamics that strike a cord for me from my grad school days.  There are good examples of the book of people crafting a different face to their online communication to escape the trouble of their own offline lives.  There are two lists in the book that get used – SAHM I am, the main list, is a larger group and is moderated by the chief ‘villan’ of the book Rosalynn and there is ‘Green eggs and Ham’, a smaller group of people that exchange e-mails and is filled with the main characters of the book.  There is an interesting dynamic in ’small groups’ (I use the term loosely because some of the dynamics work in an e-mail list) that when it is too large there are often sub-groups that form.  Green eggs and Ham is one of those subgroups.  Finally, it’s also filled with some good examples of how e-mail can be misinterpreted. 

 The book is a quick read.  The characters have some good depth to them and the dynamic of exchanging e-mails makes the book an interesting read from my perspective.  It’s also just funny at points with a wedding scene (at the end of the book) described really well. 

The main character, Dulcie Huckleberry, has a husband who is a programmer.  The two big compaints that I have with the book have resulted in some conversations with my editor wife.  First, is that Tom (Dulcie’s husband) really doesn’t ’sound’ like a geek.  There are points later in the book that it changes, but overall his geekness lacks.  MJ pointed out that he’s not a main character which works.  The other, and it’s a trivial complaint at that, is that the e-mails take on a very novel like quality – it’s just not how people write.  The point being is that I don’t know if character development could have taken on such form if e-mails were a bit truer to form.

 End result – it’s a fun geek read.  It gets you an insight into your wife’s life , there are some interesting dynamics of e-mail and it’s really quick…it gets a 4/4 for me .