Justin's Blog

April 22, 2004

Linux Expo went well

The Linux expo in London went well. The bladecenter with pSeries blades got CSF a lot of attention, and we actually had more leads than any other Business Partner on the IBM stand, which is great. I met up with Jon O'Bacon (sorry mate had to do it!) and other peeps. Finally met Henne face to face, and had some really good conversations with him about random stuff. Went out for a meal last night with some old SUSE people and Raj kept on feeding me Tequila, which has now given me the biggest hangover ever, and to top it all off, I am now starting work with a new customer implementing a clustered, DR aware SLOX site, so all is good :o)

Pictures of the expo will be going up soon.

April 15, 2004

MS and Sun

Well, it looks like Sun has been bent over a table and been shafted by Microsoft good and hard. I just got this email in my inbox from Sun:

"In a landmark settlement, Sun and Microsoft have forged a broad agreement that fundamentally redefines the enterprise computing landscape. It signals a new relationship between Sun and Microsoft that promises greater product interoperability, technology innovation, and ultimately greater choice and flexibility for you, the customer."

This reminds me of the poison partnership between MS and Apple year back, and if you have seen the file "Pirates of Silicon Valley" you will remember the menacing look of Bill Gates over Steve Jobs on the stage. Doesn't matter whether you think MS is good or evil, they always get there way, one way or another. The EU has help MS with the "license your code" decision, which everyone thought was great, but spare a thought for the Samba team. IT means that if MS releases portions of the CIFS code under a license, then they will have to license that code or be taken to court. Once way or another my friend.....

April 08, 2004

Concern over /.

Over on /. is a story on Linux in use by a babe. Now to me, and I do not know whether this is just a British interpretation of the word Babe, I was thinking along the lines of the BSD honey all of us have seen at the expos over the years, unfortunately it was talking about a 4 year old kid. Maybe /. should rethink the wording to say baby. And before I get comments about bad comprehension of English, the modern culture has reinforced the term babe as a "the beauty of a woman" and has moved away from the original term of babe/baby (Think "Babes in the wood"). Here

April 07, 2004

Germany

Flights to Boeblingen are booked, so after the Easter holiday will be jetting off to IBM for a day to sort out the rest of the details for the Linux Expo demo on the 19/20th of April. I should be taking delivery of the six pSeries blades (js20) soon after as they are beeing DHL'd to the London office on Friday, and the Bladecenter chassis with the 1800W power supplies should arrive ASAP. That leaves me about 5 hours to build the demo hardware, test and ship for stand build up at Olympia on Monday. As if my life was not stressed enough!

Book

Working on the book for Debra at Wiley at the moment, as I had some free time tonight and the TV in the UK on Wednesday is crap (No Eastenders or any US show I am addicted to is on!). It is shaping up nicely, and hopefully Roger and I will have a good project to work on. So now I have extra curricular activities if: Fencing, my MBA, the Book, oh and a wedding coming up! Sheeesh!

IBM SW Group

Still battling with the IBM Value Pack. As of this time I have still not managed to get WebSphere portal up and running as the IBM download center really does suck. There are multiple entries for the downloads I need, one may work, but I have not managed to download it yet. Installing WAS was easy, I just dread trying to put a solution together when I need Lotus and JDBC connectivity.

Nip Tuck

Well, the last episode of season 1 of Nip Tuck was on last night. Love the show, shame it had to end. Now to wait for Spooks! Woohoo!

April 04, 2004

Fencing

Well, I succesfully did the fencing introduction, and my cold was non-existant which helped a lot. My fitness though was an issue. Four hours of fencing practice was hard work, but a lot of fun. Tim, our fencing master is a great teacher, and very graceful when he fences, as well as fast!

My next four hour session is on the 17th, and I am hoping to go to the gym a lot between now and then to build strength in my legs, and also increase my stamina.

I highly recommend that anyone considering fencing take the plunge and go for it. It is a lot of fun, and is more of a skill thing than pgysical strength. There was a guy there who was quite large, and seemed to have no concept of skill or agility and just constantly lunged at me without taking into consideration the rules of engagement, so even though I would attack once he had finised his, he would always try to hit me without recovering his attack. I just let him win as I was getting pissed off with it.

The US, 9/11 and Bush

Watched "How the Twin Towers Collapsed" on Discovery last night. Scary stuff. And for the first time I saw the video of the plane hitting the first tower, which was scary stuff. The second tower hit was even worse, which is the one most people have seen. They put a projection of a Boeing 767 over the tower, and the wing span pretty much covered the whole floor, so bearing in mind how the building was constructed with the inner and outer support, how it stayed up as long as it did was a miracle. Now with the news story that Roger has linked to, it looks like the US knew the attacks were going to happen in early September, and did nothing. This adds more fuel to the fire of conspiracy theorists, and with good old Bush and his pa having such close connections to the CIA, it really isn't looking good for them.

The other problem is that I watched US new the other day with Dan Rathers when I had to get up way too early and the way that the news service is blatently tainted makes me wonder how much people in the US are aware of what is going on in the world.

The British media is not perfect, but they at least talk a lot more about things that matter and do are not in bed with the government (the BBC in fact is trying its best to move away from any governmanet intervention). But what can we do ? Nothing at all. There are too many powerful people in the world who have too much to loose to give people in the US the rights they *think* they have. The US should wake up to what kind of crap they put up with, and who is behind it!

Did anyone watch what happened with Condola Rice when she was doing a television interview and one of her aides told her (not whispered) while on TV about the Madrid Bombings ? Why would they do that ? To be able to glamorise how the US is fighting terrorism, and making maximum impact to the many US citizens who fall for that crap.

Clinton had his problems, but at least he didn't try to run the country by catering for the lowers common dominator, the 80% of US citizens who can't even point out where they live on the map (that is a true statistic).