AllergyNet – Allergy Advisor Find
The authors conclude that the methods of frying or boiling peanuts, as practiced in China, appear to reduce the allergenicity of peanuts compared with the method of dry roasting practiced widely in the United States. Roasting uses higher temperatures that apparently increase the allergenic property of peanut proteins and may help explain the difference in prevalence of peanut allergy observed in the 2 countries. (Beyer 2001 ref.4203 2)
Claus Mikkelsen of HDS teases us that their next big announcement is an anagram of REGRADES OUR CLASSY TREAT. http://blogs.hds.com/claus/2009/05/regrades-our-classy-treat-may-27th.html
Chris Evans claims (http://thestoragearchitect.com/2009/05/21/enterprise-computing-the-new-usp-scabetera-dreary-storage-cluster/) that “Regrades Our Classy Treat” is an anagram of “A Dreary Storage Cluster”.
However, I note that it is an anagram of “Storage Daycare Rustlers”, so I think HDS’s new announcement is that they are going to be stealing children from kindergarten (*) and pressing them into service testing HSSM.
-phil
(*) Perhaps (in a Very Frightening Development) holding them upside down by their ankles
Like Monty Python’s famous dead parrot, the futile Aperi open source storage system management project has fluttered to earth because IBM has removed the funding nail that was keeping it upright. Aperi is now openly dead for all the world to see.
via Aperi dies on its arse • The Register.
Chris Mellor, whom I don’t know except via his writing, has never been a fan of Aperi, or of SMI. A year ago he wrote that Aperi was stalled or maybe dead. (And at that time he indicated HP Storage Essentials was the leading storage management product “because HP is putting resources behind it and the AppIQ team produced a great initial product“. What a nice fellow he must be.) But now it’s clear for all to see that Aperi has joined the choir invisibule.
I wouldn’t like to say whether Aperi’s downfall was in part due to HP’s non-involvement, or whether HP’s non-involvement just exhibits excellent foresight with regard to the future of Aperi. I certainly always felt more comfortable with Aperi as a competitive threat than as an unquantifiable distraction.
Clever vs. Readable
So, I’m looking at some Perl Books (Perl Best Practices By Damian Conway and Effective Perl Programming by By Joseph N. Hall and Randal L. Schwartz) and I found two encountered opinions on how good code should look like. In particular, both adressed (casually?) the following line:
$result = [$a=>$b]->[$b< =$a];
This returns the lowest of the two values.
Let’s see what they said about it!
* Effective Perl:
“This wonderfully symmetrical one-liner contributed by Phil Abercrombie returns the lesser of $a and $b….
* Perl Best Practices:
“[...] The syntactic symmetry is very elegant, of course, and devising it obviously provided the original developer with a welcome diversion from the tedium of everyday coding. But a clever line of code like that is a (recurring) nightmare to understand and to maintain, and imposes an unnecessary burden on everyone in the development and maintenance teams…
My google alert for “Phil Abercrombie” turned this one up recently, and I was pleased to see that something I’d done so casually is causing soul-searching and conflict amongst a new generation of perl monkeys.
To understand the spirit in which this code was offered up, the monkeys should read http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/browse_thread/thread/f935e8ea5637db9c. Readability was hardly a goal when Joseph Hall solicited these contributions. This one was crafted to use the misdirection of symmetry to hide the multiple roles that some characters play in perl’s rich lexicography.
I have used it as an interview question (“What does this do?”) but I wouldn’t expect to see it in any real code.
In a similar vein, here’s a wonderfully symmetric definition for two well-known values in C.
int false = '-'-'-';
int true = '/'/'/';
David Skok
The Proust Questionnaire shines its light on David Skok today. David is a successful entrepreneur who founded Silverstream which went public and Watermark which was acquired by IBM. For the last five years, he has been a partner at Matrix where he has had a remarkable track record investing in great companies like JBoss (acq by RedHat), AppIQ (acq by HP), Tabblo (acq by HP), Diligent Technologies (acq by IBM), HubSpot, and others.
I just completed moving the abercrombie-family.org hosted websites from RCTHOST.COM to HOSTMONSTER.COM.
I started hosting at RCTHOST back in 2002, when they were just starting up, and they gave me a pretty good deal as an early customer (unlimited disk and bandwidth for $30 p.a., subject to reasonable restrictions). Initially I had some problems getting CGI to run, but had positive interactions with their live support people and was pretty happy.
Over the years though, I’ve found their servers unreliable and slow, and their support non-existent.
So I read some reviews and went shopping, and ended up with HOSTMONSTER’s cheapo plan, $5 per month (twice as expensive). Everything pretty much the same except for a few details, some good, some bad.
The migration was easy.
All in all, I’m pleased with the result and surprised it went so smoothly.
Hope these notes help anybody else trying anything similar.
InfoStor – HP to buy Opsware for $1.6 billion
The Creekpath software is probably a complete overlap with the AppIQ technology, which HP sells as Storage Essentials. Opsware’s storage technology doesn’t come close to the functionality of Storage Essentials,” says Stephanie Balaouras, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Balaouras says Storage Essentials is already considered “best-of-breed” SRM software and, given that HP has already integrated Storage Essentials with other HP management platforms, such as Systems Insight Manager, she would not be surprised if the Creekpath technology is shelved.
Interesting how things turn out! Not long ago, Creekpath were the only people doing something interesting/similar to what we were doing at AppIQ; through a series of land grabs, it seems AppIQ won all the territory that was available for a startup doing enterprise storage management, and left Creekpath in the cold to reinvent themselves and finally be acquired by Opsware for about $10M. It will be interesting to see if we get to team up with any of the Creekpath SRM technologists.
Orbo – The Magnetic Free-Energy Generator from Steorn
Steorn are currently demonstrating their revolutionary free-energy technology to the public in London. You can visit in person or watch live over the internet until we close on Friday July 13.
There is something truly mysterious about these Steorn guys. According to the financials summarized on Wikipedia, they’d spent through 5Mega-Euros on other activities by the time they got onto perpetual motion. No figures since then, but a very professional looking website, advertising in the Economist, exhibits at a museum, academic sponsorship and community activities all come at some price.
C. S. Lewis once said of Jesus “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg – or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.” Well, I feel the same about Steorn. Either
(Obviously this post is a troll: mentioning Jesus and Steorn. And I haven’t even got onto Intelligent Design yet…)
My opinion is that they are not right, and they are not poached eggs. If they were crazy, they wouldn’t have done such a good job of buzz marketing. But if they were scientists, or engineers, or good business people, they would have kept this under wraps until they could prove it, then either published in Nature and collected their Nobel prize, or until they could bring out a working device and become instantly fabulously wealthy and famous.
So they are charlatans. Now, what would be the point of such a hoax? i can think of at least three possibilities.
I like theory 3. I hope that’s what happens.
Work In Progress » Blog Archive » Low Flying Bikes
a pancaked front wheel on the tandem
And that’s not all. Wheelworks tell me we need new cranks, rim, and most annoyingly, a new fork. Lots of $$ of damage, and a five week delay to get a new fork painted and shipped out.
Note to self: try not to do this again.
Today I had a 80mph bicycle accident. No people were involved.
Our Co-Motion Periscope tandem flew off the trunk-rack as I was going slightly over the speed limit on rt 90. So did my rattly old Trek that was also on the rack, behind (rearwards of) the tandem. I think this is what happens if you drive fast with bike wheels sticking out on both sides into the main airflow beyond the turbulent wake of the car.
I was driving in the left hand lane, westbound on the Mass Pike, just before exit 12 (Rt 9, Framingham). As it happened, I immediately saw the bikes break free in my rear-view mirror. Amazingly there was nobody behind me to receive a face-full of bike. The road was clear enough for me to pull to the right and stop in the shoulder, while the bikes bounced to the left of the left hand lane.
All I could think to do was to call 911 to get someone to clear the road and, with luck, to return the bikes to me. The dispatcher said a state trooper would be out soon, but as I terminated the call I saw a Mass Highways truck pull over near the bikes and two men jumped out and threw them in the back and drove over to me.
Unusually, very few cars had been by in this time, and none of them had hit the bikes.
The Mass Highway guys commiserated, recognizing the beauty of the yellow tandem and its sad condition: the front wheel was pancaked, but no other obvious damage. They left, and I awaited the State Trooper – he showed up in 5 minutes and took my details. He was reasonably friendly and helpful too – he offered me the option of picking the bikes up at a Police depot, but I thought it would be easier to load them back on the car.
I got them loaded up – as I said, a pancaked front wheel on the tandem, and no obvious damage on my Trek (which is about as beaten up as a bike can get already).
Then off to work, and later to Wheelworks to have them lavish some affection on the yellow tandem.
Unloading the bike at wheelworks, I leant it on the car and scratched the door a little. I was more annoyed about this than about the fact that I’d dropped the bike on the highway at 80 mph. What’s wrong with me?
What lessons to learn from this: