* Congrats @[RickForMI](http://twitter.com/RickForMI) on your win. Let us know how we can help! [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/20308293872) * @[Obdurodon](http://twitter.com/Obdurodon) seen that a bit with (insert your favorite distribution here). Need to promote the concept that a distro is an instance of linux [in reply to Obdurodon](http://twitter.com/Obdurodon/statuses/20312247237) [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/20317313478) * @[herrold](http://twitter.com/herrold) Have seen lots of folks thinking that our time/effort/materials were free because the software was. [in reply to herrold](http://twitter.com/herrold/statuses/20316475702) [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/20317379240) Powered by Twitter Tools

I can’t say why just yet. Lets see if anything comes of it, I certainly hope so. Spent … I dunno … most of the day … in meetings or on the phone. Good stuff is a-brewing. Good stuff.

… and it looks like he just won his primary. I am not normally one for discussing much politics here, I’ll keep that to a minimum. Rick Snyder is a former Gateway exec, and has been a VC in the Ann Arbor area. I’ve never met him personally, but have heard nothing but good things from people whom have met him. Our daughters attended the same school, and will again next school year.

Basic MD raid0, xfs file system, 2 SSD Intel drives (X25-e). There are quite a few benchmarketing numbers out there, and no, I won’t regurgitate them. Or believe them for that matter. Just built a testing kernel out of 2.6.35, installed it on a test machine, and I wanted to see the impact on random reads/writes of a few of the changes to xfs and others. From our (otherwise excellent) 2.

First, and most important … my 19th wedding anniversary. Woot! I’m a lucky guy, and I know it! Second, and very important for the day job front, we’ve been in business 8 years … self bootstrapped, profitable, and growing. This is not to say we don’t need capital, but we are a business first, and making a loss is not something we can sustain for very long, as we fund our operations from our cash flow.

Matt Asay has an interesting article at The Register. In it, he argues that Microsoft needs to adapt to the world that has evolved around it, and do something drastic. This article references a Wall Street Journal article/post on the state of Microsoft and the lack of motion of its share price over the last decade. In the quoted WSJ article, Matt points to a paragraph that I’ll repeat here:

See here. These are in testing, so please report any bugs/errors. mpiBLAST is of course is one of the original cluster-accelerated BLAST implementations, being developed by Wu Feng’s group at VT. IMO there is a strong need for applications like this, as well as mpihmmer and others. As data set sizes continue to grow at exponential paces, we need tools that can scale to the need. mpiBLAST is definitely in this set of tools … being an enabling technology to perform analyses at scale, that might not be possible without it.

At The Register, Chris Mellor has an interesting article on Bluearc. In it he notes that they just raised a new series of capital Seven rounds. Total capital input is $225M USD. For a VC to be really interested, they need to see some serious multiplicative effects of this investment. Assume that they can exit at 10x valuation … assume that for $20M they sold 50-ish percent of the company. VC’s typically want in the 33-50% region, and the money is expensive.

For a while, we’ve used Ubuntu 8.04 as the baseline distribution for DeltaV. In the earlier days, it was easier to get some aspects of the load working, as we had a modern kernel and userspace to work from. Ubuntu 10.04 has come out, and I am not sure I like it as much. It has some good features, but Canonical has been pushing Ubuntu into some not so great directions as of late, IMO.

… died. Display randomly quits. Just weeks after the warranty expired. Ugh. Spec’s for new one: 8+ GB RAM, quad core Intel, Nvidia graphics. So far, Dell has a 4500 workstation that looks good, and HP has a multimedia laptop that looks good. Anyone else I should look at? Need to run Linux, Windows 7. Mostly Linux. 64 bit. Long battery life (3+ hours) would be nice, this is what I have today.