Posts by scottk:
Giving back the XPS13
Over the last six months I’ve had the privilege of working off of a Dell XPS13. I signed up for the Sputnik program thinking there was no way I would get one and was accepted early on. We received a test unit at Adknowledge and things just seemed to fall into place. Over the past decade of carrying a machine home with me daily, this has by far been my favorite. Various beasts have passed through my hands, most of them Latitudes or varying sizes, a couple ThinkPads and a pairs of MacBook Pros. None of them I’ve enjoyed as much as this little number. I had for many years thought I needed a big monster of a laptop decked out with a huge screen and massive drives. Recently I’d come to the realization that I spend 90% of my day in console session or in a browser where apps have gotten so much better over the last couple years. I don’t need a 16GB of RAM and 1TB of disk, the times I need more horsepower I am looking at something much bigger and will probably need to be running the app in a cluster or off of a VM server. What I need day to day is something that’s light and portable that I can fire up quickly. Something with a big enough keyboard for my hands (I’m 6’2″) and I don’t feel like I’m missing screen real estate. A machine that is not akin to setting up a Dungeon Master screen in front of me when I take it to a meeting. It gets bonus points when it looks sexy enough for the C-level people in the office to request one too. The XPS13 has been all of that and more. From the get go running Ubuntu on it has been a dream, it’s going to be a sad day on Friday when I turn it back in.  The new job I’m taking with Pivotal has a standardized order of a MBP for everyone. I’ll be required to run VMs much more often, so I don’t think the little guy would hold up (though I’d love to give it a try) even were I able to hold onto it. Thus I’ll have to set what has been my favorite laptop aside and move on to something else. The poor thing did get pretty hot on a minecraft server with a lot of action going on, so maybe his next life will find him some lighter usage and he can make someone else just as happy.
Bisectional Bandwidth
Getting caught up on some of my RSS backlog and really love this section from a post: What the heck is bisectional bandwidth? If you draw a line somewhere in a network bisectional bandwidth is the rate of communication at which servers on one side of the line can communicate with servers on the other […]
Platforms
It’s been a few weeks now since I made it out to EMC World and attended the 2012 Data Scientist Summit. My purpose at EMC World was to get myself schooled on a couple of key technologies that we use, Hadoop and Greenplum. I build out and work to optimize the clusters that we run. […]
Hack the Midwest
Working with a group of coworkers for this weekends Hack the Midwest event. Being sysadmin guy it’s going to be a real change of pace to do a little more on the coding side. There is still going to be a decent amount of DBA and system work to do, that should be low hanging […]
ubuntu 12.04 upgrade
Shot up to the ubuntu 12.04LTS release last week. Things I currently am having issues with DNS when I connect to the VPN has been all kinds of funky. I believe I fixed this today by turning off dnsmasq I really don’t want a local resolver, how can I turn it off? To turn off […]
Unix Underpants
Old one, but still good -Â http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25
It’s all about the Big Data
From what I’m seeing it looks like the big companies out there have snatched up about every person out there that have managed to touch the Hadoop stack and the tech marketing machine is in overdrive. I’m spending a majority of my days (and some nights) dealing with Hadoop and Greenplum so I’ve got some […]
Kansas Gov. Twitter Brouhaha
We had a lively discussion at work yesterday about the Brownback Twitter story that has been across the news. If you don’t know what happened, a student was present at a speech Gov. Brownback was giving and tweeted while he was giving the speech “just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he […]