Virtualisation

Anyone who knows me can attest to my total addiction to virtualisation technology, if you haven’t played with a Virtual Machine yet, i would recommend you do. Microsoft is giving away MS Virtual PC 2004 so the price is right for this awesome piece of software.. It’s free.

Lets answer a few questions first:
What is a Virtual Machine?
Basically, it’s an emulator that runs in windows or mac and allows you to load another operating system within it.

 Why do I need it?
Personally i use it to test software installs, surf to questionable websites and playing around with settings and software i generally try to keep away from my work machines. It’s just another machine to muck around with..

What are the advantages of using it?
I have standard XP installs that i copy and load into MS VPC, load software, change settings, basically trash the install in my testing. Once i’m finished destroying a perfectly good install of XP I delete the image from my hard drive and start again.

Here’s some links to get you started with this awesome technology:

Microsoft’s Official Virtual PC website
Operating Systems the work with MS VPC 2004
Robert Moir’s Virtual PC FAQ

Google test site

Google has gone live with a website to test new features. SearchMash has a very simple UI, no surprises there and currently has some great features.

This taken from their features page:

Start typing!

You don’t have to have your cursor in the search box to start typing your query.

URL menu

Click the green URL of a web result to open a menu of options for viewing the URL or refining your query.

Image results panel

You can see the top three image results next to your web results.

Reorder results

Click the number next to a result and drag it around to reorder. This is just for fun right now, but we have some ideas for how to use this.

More results bar

Click the “more results” bar at the bottom of the page (or hit the space bar) to load more results and automatically scroll down to view them.

Overall it’s a useable search engine, i will use it as my default search engine for the next month and post my findings.

Evil Micro$oft?

Knock them as much as you care to. One fact remains true and is a testiment to the generosity of everyone employed by Microsoft… They have recently surpassed $2.5 Billion of charitable donations.

Read about it here.

Say g’day to our insect overlords

The one advantage with Google maps is that anyone can perform intelligence work for their respective countries, i’m certain the pictures Colin Powell showed the United Nations were screen capped off Google maps. Just this week a very observant or very bored nerd discovered this on Google maps, yes, it’s a 200ft insect shitting in a field in Germany.

I don’t know about you, but i’m scared as hell, for starters we don’t have guns like the ones they used in Starship Troopers, those things were effective against giant insects. How the hell are we going to kill this thing? Could we possibly get a firefighting helicopter to drop a couple of thousand litres of Baygon on it? A giant shoe? A few hundred Iraqi’s with shoes? What if there’s more of them? Oh crap, insects don’t travel alone.. and they breed fast.

What will President Bush do about these invaders? Surely he’s mobilised the marines, a task force or two.. I’m certain our “eager to assist the US in any way possible” Prime minister will send a contingent of soldiers to meet the insect horde head on. Although, with our current global commitments and lack of ammunition we may need to pass the hat around and collect some shoes.

I’m praying it’s just a bug in Google maps.
If it’s not, then…. “Nuke em Rico”

80 cores of goodness.

Anybody lucky enough to make the trip to the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco yesterday would have been salivating at Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s presentation of the prototype 80 core (YES, 80) CPU scheduled for release within 5 years.

This behemoth chip is capable of performing a trillion floating-point operations per second, one teraflop on a single chip, to put that into perspective, the first supercomputer ever benchmarked over 1 teraflop was Sandia National Laboratories’ ASCI Red in 1997.

Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Red was a supercomputer commissioned by the US government to simulate nuclear weapon testing following the moratorium on underground testing in 1992. ASCI Red comprised of 4510 Pentium Pro processors running at 200MHz, it had 1212 Gigabytes of distributed memory and 12.5 terabytes of disk storage (That’s 12,500 GB of storage). It was later upgraded to 9298 Pentium II Overdrive processors and benchmarked at 2 Teraflop.

Lets get back to Otellini’s prototype, 80 cores of goodness, all contained in one chip. Does the average punter need all this grunt to run Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer? A good analogy would be killing a fly with a bulldozer, so, no, the average computer user has no real use for so much power. Now ask a gamer or developer whether they could use 1 teraflop, gamers especially benefit from the extra grunt provided in floating-point calculations.

All this talk about ASCI Red has you thinking right? I bet you’re wondering just how fast supercomputers are these days. Top 500 supercomputers is a site that lists the fastest 500 computers on the planet, just for the record the fastest supercomputer available today is Blue Gene/L which runs at 360 Teraflops and was built in collaboration between IBM and the Department of Energy’s NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and is used exclusively to advance humanity’s understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding. If you’re interested there’s a white paper on Blue Gene/L’s system, architecture here.

So does this mean I can expect my desktop to run at 360 teraflop in 10 year’s time? I hope so, imagine some of the simulations I would be able to run..

Here we go..

I have decided to move my blog from the server at home to these WordPress servers, the decision to do so was made for me by my new ISP, Optus. They don’t trust me so have blocked port 80 and several other ’required’ ports into my home. The joys of cable, gotta love it.

For people who have read my blog in the past, it’ll be business as usual, for the newcomers you can expect a regular dose of impertinent chitchat served up with a healthy dose of cynicism.

Strictly for the newcomers: I work as a senior software architect for an ISV based in Sydney Australia, I have designed, built and maintained software covering the gamut of industries from entertainment through to property management. I’ve been fascinated by computers ever since I can remember and have worked in IT since the late eighties, look through my garage and you’ll find a box full of modems, ranging from 300 baud to 56K, i also have a rack of 4 X 9600 baud modems that were used to run a bulletin board many, many years ago. My love affair for technology regularly interferes with my debtors, pfft, they can wait till next month, there’s a new NAS from HP i have to test.