We have … well … lots of interest from cloud folk. And cluster folk. And … well … you get it. More soon. And yes, the PR is open in OO v3.0.1 on my desktop as we speak. If I do my job right, it should be out Friday.

[update] In multiple conversations/emails today, I learned that this was indeed true. The link to InsideHPC story is here. Vipin and I were rooting for them, as the technology was interesting, the approach different, and the value apparent. This was before we talked to them about possibly working together. This company did have good technology, did have great people. Now a VC/financial group has assets they have to sell. Maybe someone can explain to me how that is more valuable than a viable functioning growing going concern, generating revenue, closing in on break even.

You can hear lots of people talking over the last few weeks, how we are “bottoming out” in terms of the economy. Privately, I had wondered if this was merely a dead cat bounce. With oil now rapidly rising, articles are appearing that start to call into question the impact upon the economy. Turning what they authors hope to be nascent recoveries into what they predict to be additional (significant) declines.

About a month ago, I altered our SMTP daemon to not be so picky about mail. Previous to this, I had turned on and tweaked many anti-spam things. One of my favorites so far has been spf. Turns out, that lots of mailers are incorrectly configured. That is being generous. Lots of mailers are on the internet, and not complying with RFCs, which makes it real hard to distinguish spam sources from real mailers.

Imagine if you will, a single consistent command line interface to setting up and managing file and block based IO targets. Well, we have this mostly operational now for NFS, and are working on the iSCSI, SRP, AoE, SMB, and a few other targets while we are at it. Targets are added via plugins which handle the workflow of setup/teardown, etc. This is the updated version of our API. And it is an integral part of our STorAge SHell, used for managing huge storage systems.

I have long ago given up on the perl builds in Redhat and build-alikes. To call them broken is … well … to be unfair to things that are merely broken. The Redhat/Centos Perls are basically completely hosed, in part due to incorporating bad patch mixes, poor build Config options, etc. Some will claim that despite the broken-ness of the build, it is better to stick with this build, and not install updated/corrected modules via CPAN.

[gallery link=“file” columns=“2”] Yeah … well … At least it recognizes it could be humorous. Look at the bottom of the image …

Yesterday, I got into a discussion with Sean Eddy at Janelia farms over the change in HMMer. Today I saw this online. Let me be clear. The name “HMMer” is Sean’s, and he can do with it what he wants. My concern was about something different, which we are going to adapt to. We are working to make sure we are correctly respecting his rights, while at the same time supporting users with a “business” case for using the existing code.

While the rest of the nation deals with a persistent and painful recession, with associated job loss, business activity slowdown, Michigan pretty much leads the nation in unemployment. This is not a good thing to lead the nation in. Job production. That would be good. VC and capital investment. That would be good. Educational accomplishment and R&D; dollars invested. That would be good. Unemployment? Not so much good.

Our bank is one that failed its stress test, but just got another $13B by selling stock. Ok, we are being told the credit market is unfreezing. LIBOR is falling. Good. What does this mean for small businesses? Precisely squat. Yup, you got it. Our credit market is frozen solid. The bank analysts admitted, on the radio program, that what the banks were doing was hording cash. The banks want to pay back TARP as soon as possible.