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“What’s faster – A supercomputer or EC2?” – Great insight by Ian Foster
I enjoyed reading Ian‘s analysis on how to interpret “faster” when it comes to comparing infrastructure-as-a-service and a supercomputer. Snippet: For example, let’s say we want to run the LU benchmark, which (based on the numbers in Ed’s paper) when run on 32 processors takes ~25 secs on the supercomputer and ~100 secs on EC2.…
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Weekend of riding, camping, hiking, lake swimming, windsurfing, and book writing
… Phew… what a fun weekend that was! I had such a good time even though i am now suffering the consequences (more on that later). I seriously needed the time to switch off. The weekend was totally packed but I still had time to contemplate a work-related decision. Earlier today I put things in…
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102F, 40C – Officially the hottest day in recorded history
I am amongst those who don’t complain! I miss the hot weather (coupled with being on the beach of course). This is my third summer in Seattle and I love it so far. It’s been absolutely beautiful. Blue skies, warm nights, people are out all the time, Washington lake is full of activity, and so…
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The author of the windows file copy dialog visits some friends…
This is indeed very funny (thanks to Lee for forwarding 🙂 (source xkcd)
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Now, that’s a wedding entrance…
… worth blogging about 🙂 Well done to all involved for being creative and doing something different 🙂 YouTube video (sorry, no embedding). (via Karen’s Facebook status update).
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Keeping track of my running with RunKeeper
RunKeeper is a very cool app for the iPhone. I tried it yesterday and today for my runs and it’s working pretty well. I have to try harder to bring back my level of fitness (if the numbers are correct :-). I also need to check in my next run whether the numbers were skewed…
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SciScope available (including source code)
This is another offering from my previous team and my good friend Bora (who I think is an upcoming star in Microsoft). SciScope (see it live) is a prototype web application that allows data discovery from across multiple distributed heterogeneous data repositories. It leverages Bing Maps (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth) and Microsoft SQL Server 2008…
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Ah!!! The joy of services “owning” your data – Facebook’s turn
I saw this in my friend Laura’s Facebook status update… FYI: Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission. Click on SETTINGS up at the top where you see the log out link. Select PRIVACY. Then select NEWS FEEDS AND WALL. Next select the tab that reads FACE…
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Wow… amazing photos submitted for Bing
I submitted few of my photos for the internal-to-Microsoft version of this photograph competition, few months ago. No surprise, mine didn’t have a chance when they can get such gorgeous photographs!
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Microsoft and GPLv2 – I bet you weren’t expecting this 🙂
I didn’t know about it until last Friday when Alex Wade told me. Today, Microsoft announced the submission of GPLv2 code into the Linux kernel!!! Unbelievable. As Jim Zemlin characteristically said: “Hell has frozen over, the seas have parted”. :-)) You can read all about it in this NetworkWorld article (and I am sure all…