DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

There was a curious-looking guy at the gym today. He wore an Adidas cap, an Adidas logo T-shirt, and Adidas-branded shorts. His shoes, ironically, were Converse.

So, clearly, the guy is a big fan of Adidas — except for their shoes. Which sort of makes me wonder… why does he advertise the brand if he doesn’t like the product? Adidas doesn’t spend a dime figuring out how to increase their market share for T-shirts, shorts, or baseball hats. That is, it’s unlikely this guy was wearing Adidas shorts and shirt and hat because they’re more comfortable or better than competing products. I guess it’s most likely that he was wearing these by coincidence, meaning these three articles happened to cycle to the top of the workout-clothes pile on the same day. Still, I can’t imagine what would possess a guy to acquire an entire outfit of branded apparel, short of a corporate sponsorship.

On a related note, I went shopping for a new belt a few weekends ago. I searched through 200 belts for something suitable: a matte-black leather belt with a silver buckle. The unforseen problem is that belt buckles are a territory long-ago conquered by the marketing schmucks in the fashion world: I couldn’t find a belt that didn’t show some idiot’s name on it. The worst example was a Cardin belt that was beautifully made except for the “pierre cardin” logo on the buckle. Then I noticed that the logo was embossed on a reversible metal widget. “This is great,” I thought; “They’ve made it so I can hide the brand name.” So I flip the little widget around, to find a different Cardin logo on the back. This was just unbelievable — as if their customers are going to get up in the morning and ask themselves, Should I display the ‘PC’ logo or the ‘pierrecardin’ logo today? Hmm, which goes better with my tie?

Against the advice of critics everywhere, I saw A.I. last night, and I’m still angry. What a dumb movie!

Here’s just one ridiculous, unbelievable detail that leaves me banging my head against the wall: a genius scientist creates a robot that is in nearly every respect indistinguishable from a real 11-yr old boy, and yet when that robo-boy swallows some food, he short-circuits. Err, can you say design flaw?

This detail isn’t central to the story, making it even more insulting.

If you haven’t seen the movie, take my advice: wait until it comes out on the rental market, and then rent something else instead.

Another day, another exploit of a Microsoft product. Sigh.

Today’s installment brings us the SirCam virus, which emails itself to everyone in your address book (multiple times!) and overwrites critical system files.

This doesn’t concern me particularly, but I want to mention a great anti-virus product that works at the server level. If you run a UNIX mail server, consider installing AMaViS to have all inbound mail scanned for virii prior to delivery.

This is a remarkable product. I’ve seen it in action; today it corralled over a dozen copies of SirCam on a busy corporate server.

Once or twice a year we throw a “pizza and Zinfandel” dinner party, where we eat lots of pizza and drink lots of Zinfandel. Last night’s episode succeeded in both respects. Here, in the style of Harper’s Index, is a recap:

I attended a presentation by two of the lead systems geeks from Google last night. The content dipped below my threshhold of interest when it got into the minutiae of their net-booting protocols, and we nearly throttled one guy who kept asking questions that were way too detailed to be of general interest (especially when it became evident that the guy asking questions had no idea what he was talking about).

Google is hosted on 10,000 Linux servers, most of which are half-depth 1U devices from rackable.com (no link — I thereby spare you the pain you’d feel from rackable’s awful Flash-based website). Each host has 2 Maxtor 40- or 80-gb IDE (!) drives accessed primarily via DMA. They didn’t use SCSI because it’s too expensive, and they can get comparable performance with DMA/IDE. Surprising!

Their web index and cache is replicated across many servers, meaning that a single “database server” has only a tiny fraction of the entire index available within local hardware. This is fascinating, and I guess it’s the heart of their scaling technology — to be able to break down a single index across many servers and query this cluster quickly and effectively.

Many of these architectural details are contained in this article: Google Defies Dotcom Downturn

In a humorous twist, Google presented attendees with Google-branded boxer shorts emblazoned with their appropriate and familiar slogan “I’m Feeling Lucky.”