August 2003

[27-Aug-2003]
OpenVMS Meetup:   Recently you may have noticed a new link appear in the navigation bar, VMS Meetup. The idea behind this site is to organise once a month meetings between people interested in a specific subject, in this case our favourite operating system. (90 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

MSA1000 qualified on OpenVMS:   The MSA1000 Modular Storage Array is now qualified on AlphaServers running OpenVMS. (39 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[24-Aug-2003]
Interrupt time:   For the last couple of versions, OpenVMS has offered "Fastpath", a way to offload most disk interrupt procesing from the primary CPU on SMP systems. There are a couple of SYSGEN parameters controlling this functionality, one of which could give you a performance boost, especially if you have a lot of disk. (187 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[21-Aug-2003]
Database performance:   I arrived back from Atlanta to find that the performance issue that the business has been having with a new data warehouse running Oracle 9i has escalated to high management visibility. (299 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[19-Aug-2003]
Marvel performance:   While searching for something else, I came across a comprehensive article describing GS1280 (Marvel) performance. Did I mention it was comprehensive? (22 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[17-Aug-2003]
Picture of GWCC:   Pics from the conference. The entry to the Georgia World Congress Center. Smaller on the outside than on the inside. (21 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[14-Aug-2003]
White screen of death:   At the OpenVMS Engineering Panel, there was a near disaster when the video projector screen decided to fall over, nearly landing on a whole gaggle of engineers. More geek humour instantly termed the event "The white screen of death". Heh. (40 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Thought for the day:   A good indicator to see if a company is taking their IT operation seriously and if they see those operations as a strategic advantage or not, is if the CIO reports to the CEO, not the CFO. (39 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[13-Aug-2003]
Geek humour:   In a talk about the competitive storage landscape this afternoon, the presenter asked if anyone knew how much storage AOL had on line. The answer turned out to by 17 petabytes (!) Some wit at the back of the room quipped that probably 90 percent of it was dedicated to spam. Heh. (52 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

OpenVMS performance improvements:   Greg Jordan from HP's OpenVMS engineering team talked about performance improvement work being done in OpenVMS, particularly for the upcoming version 7.3-2. (297 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Rdb status and directions:   Bill Gettys from Oracle just gave a status and directions talk on the Rdb database product. (247 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Ann Livermore:   Ann Livermore: "Nothing gets better unless you can measure it". (54 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[12-Aug-2003]
Rumour: EVA followon:   It was rumoured this morning that there would be a 4 gigabit followon to the Enterprise Virtual Array. This could be released as early as 4th quarter, 2004. (61 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Carly speaks:   Carly Fiorina: "High tech, low cost, best customer experience". (9 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[11-Aug-2003]
Two rumours:   Rich Marcello, senior VP and general manager for HP, just spoke on Business Critical Servers. Two rumours fell out of that talk. (99 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Demand more from us:   One of the emerging themes so far at the conference is that HP is asking their enterprise customers to demand more from them. No problems. The company that I work for has been doing this for quite some time, for reasonable results. (160 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Shane Robison:   Just attended the first keynote address at HP World 2003, presented by Shane Robison, CTO for HP. Shane expanded on HP's strategy, but the most interesting thing was a quote he used from Bob Napier, HP's CIO. Bob said that every business decision triggers an IT event. How true that is. (51 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

OpenVMS Technical Update:   The first technical session at this week's HP World 2003 was certainly interesting. There were enough new features to keep the presentation going for well over it's allotted 75 minutes. Greg Jordan and Andy Schneider talked about the technical road map for OpenVMS at length. (200 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[09-Aug-2003]
Scott's farewell to CA:   Every now and then, I realise why I spend time reading other people's weblogs: it's because there are like-thinking people out there. And usually, they can express themselves far better than me. Scott LePera who is moving to Seattle to take up a new job, wrote a little entry entitled The Quality Of Light farewelling (?) California, and San Francisco in particular. (180 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Pesky bugcheck solved:   The bugcheck that we uncovered a number of months back has been resolved by OpenVMS Engineering. I received an e-mail yesterday telling me that the fix would be in patch VMS73_SYS-0700 for OpenVMS 7.3, and patch VMS731_SYS-0400 for OpenVMS 7.3-1. (427 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[08-Aug-2003]
Print style sheet:   I wanted to print a page of my site today to show to someone who I knew would not want to go to the hassle of firing up a browser and having me dictate the address to them. This got me thinking about a stylesheet for printing. (99 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[04-Aug-2003]
Oracle FAQ site:   Our lead DBA just pointed me to the Oracle FAQ site, which promises to keep me busy doing some reading. At first glance, it looks "comprehensive". (85 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[01-Aug-2003]
Guardian comments on web design:   An article at The Guardian Unlimited, "Are most commercial websites designed by children?" is right on the money. (158 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

Open in new window banned:   Elimination of popup windows for comment and trackback links finally done. (90 words, 3 comments, 1 pings)