Licence to Roam

Nice to see Ewan’s annual Fringe Podcast show is doing well, being the top one in the iTunes catalogue. I recommend tuning in if you want a great taste of the legendary festival

Noel and co, as part of his Luck of Seven series, have filmed two Apple fans waiting outside the Apple store at 5th ave New York. They both have blogs. Greg, from Long Island, does not own a Mac nor an iPod, still want a phone and does not know if he can keep it. Dave is third in line and wants to buy two and sell one for charity. Who’s second in line then? Dave’s reasoning:

I just graduated from college, and have another week of vacation to burn before I enter the work world. I can’t think of a better way to learn about New York than hanging out with a wide cross-section of the New York population. Granted, the thought of waiting in line might not strike you as an ideal vacation, but in my travels I’ve found that the best memories come from unscripted interactions with locals.

So go meet them and ask them why..and find out who’s number 2 inline

Update: and here’s why Greg has no Apple products..he’s just a ‘professional’ liner-upper, who spends his life getting on the media. Dave sounds far more interesting (wonder if he’s told his parents yet?)

Last week I attended the latest in the NYC Google Speaker event series: “Luiz Barroso, Google Distinguished Engineer, will talk about “Watts, Faults, and Other Fascinating Dirty Words Computer Architects Can No Longer Afford to Ignore”. Luiz was talking about things way beyond my skill or experience but I still got some great insights into designing hardware and infrastructure. That’s mainly why I go to things like this - it’s new information, just expands what I know a little about. So here’s some notes from the talk; there was a lot more to it than I noted.

• power and energy usage have not been very sexy when it comes to designing architecture and that has caught up with people. It is now the centre of plenty of attention.
• In the 90’s there two big research areas, the MHZ race and the DSM (Distributed Shared Memory) race. The first for accelerated single thread performance and second to improve the efficiency of shared memory
• Moore’s law is fundamentally about transistors. The issue is becoming power; they are energy wasteful and temperature control is difficult. Power costs are increasing and look like being more expensive than the hardware. It may tend towards the Mobile model, where you get a energy contract and then the hardware thrown in for free.
• they are focusing on reducing conversion losses and improving power conversion. On PCs the power supply consumes much of the energy, with 55-70% efficiency. .
• Multi-core processes help reduce energy use. You need to design software differently to take advantage of it, building efficient concurrent programs.
• Google has been monitoring diskfailure. Common wisdom is that failure rate is <1% and temperature is a big factor. So we looked at 100k+ drives over 5 yrs. Failure rates were ~8% after 2 years, all way larger than manufacturers rates and temperature did not appear affect the rate. Trying to find a predictive algorithm has had little success; more than half the disk failures happened with no indicative errors and the arrival of errors did not indicate time to failure. The models are good for predicting population wide trends, ie predicting how many failures you will have and how many replacement disks you need. And also for telling you that temperature does not matter that much.
• Looking at power requirements, the average data centre costs $10-22/watt used, whereas US average energy costs $0.8/watt/year. It costs more to build a data centre than to power it for 10 years. YOu have to optimise energy usage to be close to capacity, thinking about power provisioning, how many machines can be used, the unused watts cost.
• Studying power usage, we found the data centre never hit peak capacity, even if a rack on its own could have. A PC uses about 60W at rest, 120 at full usage; a human uses around 60W at rest and 1200W at high usage. We are far more efficient - machines have a factor of 2 between idle and peak, humans a factor of 20. To improeve energy efficiency for data centres, we should focus on reducing the usage of idle power.
• So by reducing the idle power, with no change in peak, you can get a 40-50% savings. You can reduce the peak power requirements for the data centre as a whole by reducing the machine idle consumption.

In 7 days, from idea to publication, Troubled Diva has produced a book of 100 blog posts to raise money for Comic Relief/Red Nose Day. Go and read the story of the publication.and buy!

Yesterday there was a moment of madness in the city, a Pillow Fight organised by newmindspace. An absolute blast, an urban maul in Union Square, where the cameras, both amateur and professional, nearly outnumbered the fighters.

Just more gear

Originally uploaded by RachelC.

Another thing I went to on Monday was the Mobile Tech Roundup Meetup, where a gaggle (or another collective noun for the 3 hosts) of mobile podcasters got to meet each other in new York instead of always being in different cities.

Despite a lack of air conditioning, about 10 turned up to chat and look at some cool gadgets. Not being completely au fait with all the names, makes and models i never the less saw somethings I liked, such as the Motorola Q - fe;lt great, light and thin but crap battery life of about 4 hours by the sound of it. The tiny Sony Vaio was good and so was the pictured set up , with EVDO being used to network the device to a Slingbox..so we were watching the ABC TV channel. Testing the download speeds I learnt that it is always good to straighten out the USB wire, as the speed increased from around 500 kbps to over 900 kbps.

And it’s brilliant news to hear that the Slingbox is finally available in the UK.

Tonight we have WebWednesday, full of web entrepeneurs.

Next week we have the London Bloggers Meetup on 18th

And don’t to sign up for the next London Gilr Geek Dinner on the 24th.

For a little more money than those, there is a panel discussion on Personal Publishing - beyond blogging on May 6th.