antipaucity

Microsoft is trying to buy ~650k IPv4 addresses from in-bankruptcy-proceedings Nortel (for $7.5m).

What gets me is that IPv6 has been a standard for over a decade, and yet so few have moved to it. Way back when I was in college the first time – in 2000 – our networking professor told us we should move to IPv6 as soon as feasible. Somehow I don’t think 11 years meets that urging.

This morning I saw the headline on InfoWorld: “Oracle stopping development on Itanium — slap at HP or obvious decision?”

At my previous employer, we were entertained by a couple visits from both HP and Intel folks ballyhooing the Itanium, HP-UX, and the future of the platform – especially in the database arena.

I thought those visits were pretty funny because every company I have seen with any HP-UX installed base has been migrating off to either AIX or Linux for some time, leading me to conclude that HP-UX is a dead platform. The fact that Microsoft and Red Hat both dropped support for Itanium processors with there last OS releases also tells me that Itanium is not here for the long haul – at least not in anything other than specialized platforms (such as some of the Top 500 entrants).

Yes, in Japan Fujitsu and others are shipping Itanium-based products, but they’re not running anywhere outside of Asia.

Intel had the chance 15 years ago to produce the game-changer for the server and home markets. If they had properly implemented an x86 emulation module (or, shoot, put an x86 processor on the die and switched via microcode), AMD’s x64 extensions would never have taken off the way they did, and we wouldn’t be stuck with bizarre functionality that only made sense in a 16bit world – but not anymore.

But between HP and Intel, they horched the platform, delaying it by months then years. In the process, the venerable DEC Alpha was killed-off by HP, as was HP’s own PA-RISC line.

In my opinion, Oracle’s move is brilliant for a couple reasons:

• HP-UX is dead
• Itanium has no future with any other OS vendor
• Larry Ellison wants to push OEL and some form of Solaris (though I’m convinced Solaris is not long for this world either)
• Larry Ellison doesn’t care what other people think of him
• Oracle is making more money than they know what to do with – so why support something you don’t want to?

What think ye?

Today I started a new job, which will hopefully involve a bit less travel than my last one did. I enjoyed working with my team at my last employer, and wish them the best in their future ventures.

Now off to find out where my first customer will be

Though it’s not the ideal we have of owning our own home, my wife and I will be one step closer in a few days as we will be signing a lease on a rental home here in Lexington and moving out of the apartment complex we’ve been in since we got married.

I think she’s pretty excited

I finished debugging the regex for a new wordpress plugin I’m now using on my blog – it will take a “tagged” block of text (in this case inside double curly braces), and link to a target website (duckduckgo.com, amazon, etc) based on the ‘type’ of content (another tag inside the curly braces).

A recent Final Jeopardy! question said there are two pairs of countries which differ in spelling by only two letters: Australia/Austria and one other. The answer they were looking for was Niger/Nigeria.

Well, I was thinking about this recently and realized there is a third pair: Mali/Malawi.

It’s not often you see errors on Jeopardy!

My wife started blogging recently – and while there’s only one post up so far, I’m sure it will grow

Welcome to the blogosphere, honey =D

Term Define is a pretty simple plugin – something really just to get my feet wet in the area.

For any ALL-CAPS terms/words in a post, when the page is rendered, a link to dictionary.com is inserted.

So a word like ‘HULA’ would get transformed into HULA.

(Note: I’m not using this particular plugin on this blog.)

I’ve started writing [simple] plugins for WordPress – the blogging tool I use to manage antipaucity.com.

As I write more, if I think they’re worth sharing, I’ll write about them here. A full list will also be available at http://antipaucity.com/plugins.

I came across this news story today regarding Rentech that is planning to produce “synthetic” fuels, ear-marking more than half their planned production for airline use (16k barrels of 30k barrels in their first facility).

Of course, this is only a tiny amount compared to the amount of petroleum consumed per day worldwide, but as a step towards less petroleum use, this is great. 30k barrels vs the 20.8m barrels that just the United States consumes is tiny, but it’s showing that there are initiatives to move away from petroleum-only towards other materials.

In addition to things like what Rentech is doing, we should also be looking for our own supplies of fuels and not relying so much on other countries (reducing transit times, tariffs passed-on to consumers, and creating high-skill, high-demand jobs in this country).