Recently there was some discussion around the memory that is addressable in a Windows environment. In fact there is varying opinion on the configuration options for 32-bit windows systems. I thought I would add to that pool.

In very (very) simple theoretical terms 32-bit systems only have 32-bits of data to work with resulting in them being able to address only up to 4 GB of memory. However a 64-bit system could theoretically address up to 16 exabytes of memory.

So why then are there different configuration options for 32bit windows systems and not that many for 64bit windows systems? Lets take an all too typical example - When fitted with 4GB of RAM why then in 32bit Windows on an x86 architecture one is able to see say only 3.5GB?

Although most of the address space on your Windows Memory Manager is filled with RAM a good amount of it will be used by memory mapped devices. Booting with the Physical Address Extension (/PAE / NOPAE) switch allows the processor to access the memory beyond this boundary. The post on Chad Boyd’s SQL stuff gives a far more in depth discussion of PAE than I could. Microsoft’s PAE knowledge base gives a table listing the maximum memory support for a few different windows OS with PAE turned on.

Of course applications complied under dotNet 2.0 (and newer) apps with the AnyCPU switch set to true dont really need to worry too much about the underlying hardware.

Just coming up to breathe from the mountain of work that had piled up while I was away at the ‘Systems Technical Conference’ held in Los Angeles. It ran over the course of four days (May 12-15th) but they sure did pack in a large amount of content into those four days.

I touched down in LA on the Saturday afternoon (it felt strange arriving at a time that was well before the time of departure) and along with RB headed to the Westin Bonaventure in downtown LA. I spent the rest of that weekend with some friends of mine I hadn’t seen in about 18years! In addition to the massive catchups I had an express tour of the general Hollywood and Beverly Hills areas … of course this included touristy sports like the Walk of Fame, the main strip of the Sunset Boulevard and Rodeo Drive. My mate MK and I both commented on how much the Beverly Hills reminded us of the neighborhoods in BSB we grew up in (okay so we were feeling pretty nostalgic).

I turned up for breakfast at the Los Angeles Convention Center for the conference, bright and early on Monday and what hit me first was the scale of the whole affair. Our Program Guide was fairly thick and indicated the scope and depth the different sessions were going to cover. The sessions were grouped not only into IBM’s major brands to cover technical detail, but they also had a loose coupling with areas of solutions to cover the amalgamation of these technologies. While there were just the two of us from NZ, there was a large number of total attendees - IBMers, from all regions of the IBM world.

One thing that really struck out was the people … all the people from the presenters to the technical experts to the attendees. There was an amazing amount of knowledge and talent. People just geeking out discussing passionately things that interested them, mingling and meeting colleagues who are able to contribute to one’s own pool of knowledge … and one is left with the feeling of how amazing a corporate like IBM can be. We here in NZ really are at the tip of a monolith sized iceberg of technical proficiency, right from pure science research thru to product development all churning with elegant business acumen.

There is just too much to write about regarding the subject matter and there was a fair amount of really good sessions …

I took another week off and went to Portland (Oregon) where I spent the weekend gazing at the Pacific from the other side of the world and discussing social issues from a historical trends perspective with MB. The rest of that week I spent around San Jose, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino and San Fransisco where I also got to have a good half day of solid geeking out with JN. I love the intelligent lights installed at his place!

This being my first trip to the States, I was throughly finger printed, photographed and added to their database … I think. It was a very fruitful conference and I sure learnt from more than just the content at the sessions, so buy me a pint at the pub and ill freely go into all the detail that I haven’t mentioned in this post … actually some whiskey instead please.

The above title is framed as a question not as a statement. A few months ago IBM announced that it acquired a new disk technology from a start-up called XiV.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

To address the new requirements associated with next generation digital content, IBM chose XIV and its NEXTRA™ architecture for its ability to scale dynamically, heal itself in the event of failure, and self-tune for optimum performance, all while eliminating the significant management burden typically associated with rapid growth environments. The architecture also is designed to automatically optimize resource utilization of all the components within the system, which can allow for easier management and configuration and improved performance and data availability.

XiV’s chairman Moshe Yanai said:

We believe the level of technological innovation achieved by our development team is unparalleled in the storage industry. Combining our architectural advancements with IBM’s world-wide research, sales, service, manufacturing, and distribution capabilities will provide us with the ability to have these technologies tackle the emerging Web 2.0 technology needs and reach every corner of the world

edit: After the ‘Systems Technology conference’ I have come back to edit to post with more information. I hope it shows up on any RSS readers.

The blog posts that broke out during the time of the IBM/XiV announcement were quite interesting as people who have been part of the Storage industry (from a research point of view I suppose) argued and joked about this acquisition. What is interesting however is the new architecture that XiV brings into the enterprise storage space.

It is noteworthy at this stage to know that I haven’t any formal training on the XiV architecture, the information below is simply a collection of educated hypothesis gleamed from various publicly available documents. Lets talk about two of the neat things in this architecture (two because these are the ones that I understand )

Many of the subsystems in the market place are handled by two or more controllers in some form of active/passive approach. The XiV (Nextra) architecture does away with this and has independent clustered controllers, ‘interface modules’ that function somewhat independently as a member of the clustered community. So in some sense these interface modules are like traffic managers of the system acting a data routers. When I said that these interface modules are part of a community, that is to say that all of the modules have information on any given piece of data held by any given module. This I understand is done via the use of a form of ‘distribution table’.

The XiV Nextra architecture doesnt use RAID or depend on disk modules. Let me explain. It seems that all data is sliced into 1MB objects and distributed within the system where each object is stored on two physically separate drives. That is to say, each volume is split int a 1MB partition and each of these partitions are mirrored to two different drives (or it could be mirrored to two different Data Modules? A data module is a single physical unit which is a collection of disks with its own cache and processor). Further, algorithms spread these 1MB partitions across all disks in the system. I don’t know why the 1MB size was selected, but I can assume that PhDs were earnt in the process of evaluating this size. This architecture not only improves performance, but rebuild times on any drive failures see a significant improvement. No metrics have been published however so I am unable to give any firm numbers.

There is much more to the XiV but these two point were what fascinated me the most. Hopefully as more in depth information trickles my way I’ll be able to write a bit more on this. Does this system perform better for online transaction processing databases or does this architecture favor discrete files? Also the obvious question of where the XiV Nextra is placed in IBM’s Storage family is still floating.

A few days ago a friend of mine sent (mass emailed, but he’s forgiven) some detail about his latest upcoming philanthropic trip to the Himalayas. He has let me reproduce his email verbatim here.

Yup it’s me and I have some news,

I am off on a small journey to the Himalayan Mountains in a couple of months and I need a little help. I plan to spend 3-4 months (maybe more if need be) in a rural village in Nepal doing some volunteer work with the school there, and also around the village itself. I will be working in conjunction with an existing small Canadian charity that helps with the running of the school. The village itself is far away from any road let alone a town and thus is self reliant on most aspects of daily life.

My role will involve helping the School by teaching staff and children on various aspects of technology. I plan to try and improve the current network and provide more exposure to computers/internet to the people which they can user for their respective benefit. I also will be involved in the wireless connectivity project which aims to connect as many of the villages to the Internet and thus the rest of the world. Might even teach a bit of Maths/English if I feel able enough

There is plenty to do, but like all things they cost money. I can fund my trip myself and my stay there, but there are requirements for resources like Books, Computers, Wireless equipment and all that costs money. Since it is a volunteer project I want to be able to help build their current capacity to develop by providing useful assets. This is why I am approaching you to help me do the best I can for the students and people of this village while I am there. If you are keen on giving a small contribution it will be much appreciated, remember no contribution is too small.

Click on the Link and it will take you my Volunteer Site.

http://www.anukoolsathu.webs.com/volunteeringinnepal.htm

Sincerely appreciate your help,

Anukool

So inshort, he’ll be volunteering with with an NGO helping to run a school in a village called Nangi. Nangi is located at 7400feet above sealevel and has no access to roads, a 9 hour (at best case) hike is the fastest way of getting there. This NGO, Himanchal Education Fund is run by a local Nepalese teacher and has been featured on the BBC years ago.

Several mates who have been to the Himalayas have all been back to help and volunteer. There must be a certain magic about the place and I am keen to take it all in when I visit towards the start of next year. And it’ll be extra brilliant as i’ll have my brother who would have been there for a couple of years by then to show me the sights.

Back in February 2008, IBM decided to include what previously were optional licenses right into the DS3000 family base unit (with no increase to the cost of the DS3000 base unit). These were the DS3200, DS3300, DS3400 Software Feature Packs (39R6540, 42C2142, 42C2143) and the DS3000 EXP3000 Expansion License (39R6537).

This means that out-of-the-box a DS3200, DS3300 and DS3400 will now include:

• 4 storage partitions.
• An attachment license for 1-3 EXP3000 expansion units.
• Windows and Linux on Intel Host Attach License.

Now note that this is effective from a firmware level of v06.70.23.00 and newer. By including these in the base unit, they are now no longer orderable items, which means that existing customers can enable these changes by downloading new firmware on or after 2/12/2008. Here’s a handy link to the support site for the DS3400 to get you started.

Its well known that I have an unhealthy obsession for mobile / small form factor gadgets; an ipaq rx, nokiaN95, iPodTouch and recently the EeePC can almost always be found on my person plus a medley of devices scattered around my room.

So I was especially excited when Intel offcially (finally) annouced their new Atom procs. As I understand it, in addition to the CPU packaged are integrated graphics with HD video playback, HD audio plus other I/O capabilities on the radio front.

Youtube has several video’s of devices based on prototypes of this proc being demo’ed at trade shows. Pretty darn niffty!

All exciting technology, but I have a feeling I wont be satisfied until direct neural interface and machine-human implants become a solid reality The closest that ive had to this experience was having some good geeky whiteboard pow-wows with the bio-medical research team … and as I said before AL, im putting my handup to be a subject, we dont really need ethics approval for human tests do we

Has it really been 10 years since Mozilla officially launched!

March 31, 1998 is the date that Mozilla was officially launched. It’s the date the first Mozilla code became publicly available under the terms of an official open source license and a governing body for the project — the Mozilla Organization — began its public work. It’s always been known in Mozilla parlance as “3/31.” We’ll be celebrating Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary throughout 2008.

To remember this jwz has brought the Mosaic Communications Corporation website back online.

home.mcom.com a snapshot of that web site from 21-Oct-1994.
mosaic.mcom.com a snapshot of that web site from July 1994.
He’s also hosting his personal collection of old Mosaic browsers.

Very retro, all goodness. When I started on this post I was going to go back several years and write a bit about what it was like surfing the then very fresh ‘internet’ in the early 90s, the BBS and Brunet’s intranet pages but then decided that I should be spending this time reading the posts and articles by technology connoisseurs who were knee deep in both the development and politics of that age.

What about the next 10years?

The challenges before us are great. But the opportunity is many times larger. We have the ability to affect aspects of Internet architecture and user experience. We have the organization, we have the frameworks we need to work in, we have the voice. And most important of all, we have the Mozilla community. The many thousands of people actively engaged, and the multiples of that who support Mozilla goals and offerings.
It’s our world. Let’s make it great. Here’s to another 10 years!
- Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler

Hats off to the Open Source Hackers who have rocked ‘Mozilla’ to the success it is today.

The Storage Networking Industry Association will be having their “SNIA ANZ Storage Academy 2008” on the 26th of March at the Langham Hotel in Auckland.

Seems that this year, the focus will be on virtualisation technologies. Now virtualisation although somewhat a ‘fad’ term amongst vendors recently in NZ, it is a term that has been around since the mainframe days of old. In its purest form, i suppose you can summise virtualisation as the hiding of detail. In the context of Storage sub-systems, vendors these days perhaps use this term rather loosely? So should the term Storage Virtualisation only be applied to sub-systems (/devices) that abstract all layers in the storage software and hardware stack?

SNIA is a vendor neutral and standards driven organisation … so it will be interesting to listen to the presentations delivered around this topic.

Entrance to this event is free (and I hear that lunch and refreshments are included). So if you do decide to attend, come on over and stop me for a chat. I’ll try keep my tweets updated as to my whereabouts.

So, i was meeting up with some friends the other day, and one of them left me puzzling over a simple “you’ll love your phone that much more soon” statement.

And now with todays announcement im feeling rather giddy. (thanks HGK)

Nokia and Kordia have teamed up to bring Nokia Nseries users access to free wireless internet at locations across New Zealand.
Simply visit a Wi-Fi hotspot, run the WLAN Wizard application and select the Kordia Metro WI-FI access point. Then hop online and surf to your heart’s content.
This service is available to all WiFi enabled Nokia handsets, purchased in New Zealand through an authorised retail store.

Kordia’s coverage shows some rather sparse areas, but to date ive been able to connect to their wifi spots in most places ive visited in the Auckland CBD. Their speed and reliabilityis quite sufficient - NJ and I were able to do some rather sucessful demos of Second Life over a Kordia wifi connection (thank you to the Kordia rep who let us on).

Im just about to rush off and see how things work out … watch my twitter for feedback.

(after thought: i do not know if that wifi connection were we on while demo’ing SL was open to the general auckland public or created specifically for that particular event)

Yes, I havnt been updating this weblog all that much have I? Shame on me!

Since my last update quite a few things have been happening … worthy of mention here? Perhaps.

I suppose when writing for a medium that suggests a slightly more structured approach, one wonders about the actual value of the content. One of the ways to know is by actually writing more and with feedback, fine tune content.

edit: By ’structured approach’ i imply one that reads more as an article as opposed to an impulsive twitter stream.