Peter's Random Thoughts

I became aware of this video from a Twitter post by Chris Pirillo. I found it interesting if for no other reason than the history is documents and represents. I myself have only been using Macs since they transitioned to Intel processors a few years ago. Since that point I find myself using my Mac(s) where ever possible, work or play.

I've always been a voracious reader and many times I've been "accused" of being an information junky. I truly enjoy reading all types of literature. For work it tends to be technical journals, for relaxation I drift towards science fiction, military fiction, detective novels. It used to be that every other month I would end up with a stack of paperbacks that I would pack up and talk to the half-price book store for credit.

Then about three years the way I "read" books changed. Enter audio books and ebooks. It was then, three years ago, that I purchased my first iPod and a Sony eReader. The iPod was a real game changer for me. I was living and working in downtown Ottawa during that time and walking almost everywhere. Audio books were a real saviour during that time, as I could walk and listen/read to any number of books.

The Sony eReader became my repository for more and more work related information that in days gone by I would have printed out and put in a three-ring binder. The Sony eReader along with Adobe Acrobat allowed me to keep the technical documents, in PDF form, in one easy to carry place. [I could have kept those same documents on my laptop, but this was made it possible to have the "book" open while working on the laptop and not have to switch views as much.]

In the last year I have "retired" my iPod and upgraded to a 3G iPhone and added a first generation Amazon Kindle to the mix. I love the Amazon Kindle because it allows me to electronically take delivery of periodicals and books in an extremely easy manner, that being via the cellular network. The iPhone does an equally outstanding job with respect to audiobooks and podcasts. When you add the Amazon Kindle application to the iPhone it becomes amazingly easy and practical to catch up on ones reading while doing such things as waiting at railroad crossings or standing in-line at the grocery store checkout. My only complaint if you will, is that while the Amazon Kindle will take delivery of periodicals, the Amazon Kindle iPhone application does not.

Where does this lead next, who knows. I do know, however, that I am not visiting the half price book store much these days.

I had a colleague recently suffer the trauma of house fire. Besides the insanity associated with the fire a serious realization hit home. Local backups are not worth much when the building is destroyed or seriously compromised.

The short story is that my colleague was fanatical regarding backups and yet the backup hard drive was simply a NAS device sitting on a shelf in his home office. When his house caught fire not only did his machine get cooked but so did the NAS. This got me thinking....

I've got a few TBs of storage in my house, depending on the machine I've got some backing up to a NAS and some to USB attached storage devices. From a data perspective there are numerous documents and pictures that are irreplaceable, and to numerous to print out and put off-site. Electronic off-site is another matter entirely. Enter the "Cloud"....

Given I have a mix of Windows and Mac machines I wanted to find a rational approach to Cloud backup. I finally settled on the combination of Amazon S3 and Jungledisk. The initial backup took 14 days! But other than that it has been flawless. Incrementals takes on the order of minutes. Finally, I have successfully restored from Amazon S3 selected files and thus I am happy.

Frankly if something happens to both my house and the Amazon data center, there are bigger issues to be dealt with.

I was listening to Leo Laporte's MacBreak Weekly podcast a couple of weeks ago when the subject of Leo's brand new Nehalem based Mac Pro came up. His concern seemed to center on Nehalem's slightly slower clock speed versus the Xeon processors used in the prior generation Mac Pro. What struck me about this conversation was that I remember listening to similiar conversations thirty plus years ago only the discussion then centered on IBM mainframes versus Amdahl mainframes.

Thirty some odd years ago IBM was transitioning from uni-processor (today's parlence single core) mainframes to dual-processor (dual core if you will). Amdahl was focused on building larger uni-processor mainframes. [It should be noted here that legend has it Gene Amdahl, who was the hardware "father" of System/360, left IBM to form his own company because of his strong beliefs in this area.] Truth be said, all I remember back then was running countless application benchmarks for my employer at the time to determine which machine design, IBM or Amdahl, did better running a given application. The answer then was "It depends". It depended upon whether the application could exploit more than one processor or not. If it couldn't than the the large uni-processor design was needed. If the application could exploit multiple processors then the dual-processor was the path.

Which brings me back to the Leo's concern. Frankly at the end of the day it will be whether or not the application he is going to run understands and exploits mulitple cores.

I was twelve when I had my first interactions with computers. My father was the provost at a small college where they had an IBM 360 Model 40 and an IBM 7090. My father realizing I had an interest in computers introduced me to the head of the computer science department. He, in turn, loaned me some early programming books [which I still have] on FORTAN IV and set me up with a usage account for the IBM 7090.

I taught myself how to program in FORTAN IV, it being my preferred programming language for next few years. I also learned how to use an IBM 029 Key Punch [and got much better when I took a typing course when I was 15]. I can't honestly say I was doing anything useful. I was, for the most part, playing around with various problems derived from my math and science classes in school.

We moved to Houston between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. My high school had Teletypes in the math classrooms which were tied to a CDC [Control Data Corporation] 6600 at the University of Texas in Austin. It was then that I learned two things, how to program in BASIC and how much I disliked working with paper tape programs. Unlike the punch cards I started with paper tape being a continuous strip made error correction difficult at best. On the other hand the Teletype enable a rudimentary form of real time interaction. One of the first programs I wrote a simple encoding/decoding program that did simple character substitution based upon a hard coded table.

Late in my sophomore year of high school I was recruited to join a special interest Explore Post [Exploring is a co-ed program of the Boy Scouts of America] sponsored by the Exploration Division of Humble Oil [now known as Exxon-Mobile].  In this case the special interest was computers and the advisers were drawn from the system support staff of the I/T department. For the next two years I and the other members of the Post had evening and weekend access to one of the biggest computers IBM made at the time, an IBM 370 Model 165-II. It was during this time that I learned IBM PL/1 and IBM 370 Assembly language. I hung out with the systems support staff when they were making changes to the various systems and learned the ins and outs of being mainframe support person. By the time I finished high school I had a good working knowledge of how the operating system [IBM OS/360-MVT] worked and how it was maintained.

That was thirty plus years ago and I look back now and realize that this introduction to the IBM Mainframe set the underpinnings for my future career.