Pulp Free

It was bound to happen… But this one wasn’t really planned. After 9 years working for Citi (Citicorp Mortgage, then CitiMortgage, then Citigroup, and then Citi… If you can keep them all straight!) - I’ve decided to change directions and take on a new opportunity with Hewlett-Packard (you can call them HP if you want…)

For my time at Citi I really did have a great job starting out doing Web support (dare I saw it… Technical Webmaster) - a few years of UNIX Engineering (I’ll always love you first, AIX) - developed a great Enterprise Applications Management team (long live WebSphere) and the last several years as their Infrastructure Architect & Engineer. I’m really going to miss the 4 years of running Precise the most! (We’ll see how that looks in a few months…)

However - on Monday I’ll be starting as a Solutions Architect for HP and I’m sure to have new opportunities to enjoy. What is a Solutions Architect? A quick search of Google will lead you to a few Web sites… Some really funny guys on the Web say that “they don’t do much!” - I have to laugh at that… But I think in reality you can say that there are a lot of people out there that “not doing much” can be applied to. Me - I’m really looking forward to just absorbing a lot of new enterprise software technology, getting my hands dirty with new hardware platforms and other corporate cultures and just helping my team deliver value. (Is this job interview over yet?! LOL)

In all seriousness, though… it’s going to be a great challenge. I couldn’t have gotten here without a lot of great people. I’m expecting plenty more of that at HP - making working there just as rewarding…

Tonight has had it’s fair share of newsworthy events… Not only did we get a pretty nice looking lunar eclipse (with a very clear sky in Saint Louis)…

but it seems that our US government has successfully blown up an orbiting satellite in outer space.

A missile launched from a Navy ship struck a dying U.S. spy satellite passing 130 miles over the Pacific on Wednesday, the Pentagon said.

It was not clear whether the operation succeeded in its main goal of destroying a tank aboard the satellite that carried a toxic fuel that U.S. officials said could pose a hazard to humans if it landed in a populated area.

“Confirmation that the fuel tank has been fragmented should be available within 24 hours,” the Pentagon said in a written statement.

While I’ll be the first to say that blowing up a satellite from a ground-based launch site is quite impressive (knowing that it’s traveling at over 17,000 mph at the same time) - doesn’t that make you wonder a bit about what else they might feel like blowing up in the future? Or now that “we” can do it… would somebody else care to take pot shots at our satellites? I mean - the next time DirecTV has a little signal degradation on their HDTV channels somebody might feel like taking some action!

This tidbit has been floating around for a little while… but I enjoy such broad ponderings… Like - what really is happening on other planets? The universe is awfully big just to think we’re the only “intelligent” creatures in it. As they said in the movie “Contact” - sure would be a big waste of space if we’re the only ones out there. Just take a moment to step out of your own surroundings. The room you’re sitting in reading this post. Your house, then your neighborhood. How about your town, city, metro area, state, country? (I’m still always amused at Sci-Fi shows like SG-1 that show a whole planet from space but then focus on a village of people as its only inhabitants. Is Earth the only planet in the future with 6+ billion people?)

In any case - here’s a little bit of perspective:

Since I was poking around in my computer BIOS over the last few days during a rebuild of my Dell desktop back and forth from Windows XP & Vista - I thought that I’d partake in a quick experiment to see exactly how much of a performance difference turning on or off Automatic Acoustic Management would be. I’ve always had it enabled since I did my first install a few years back, but since I use this Dell 9100 for both my project studio as well as my day-to-day Web surfing/Home office computer - silence is golden! So a few things first…

• I didn’t try to optimize performance (not the point of this 5 minute effort)
• It’s not about the quality of the HD Tune product (or other Hard Drive benchmark tests)
• Not about getting the best hard drive performance in general (although I now have a few of my computer benchmarks to compare!)
• Tests were run in Accurate mode with 128 KB block size
• Not a comparison of Vista versus XP (just happens that I’m running Vista right now… and my media server is running XP64)

So what did I find out?

With AAM turned on:

With AAM turned off:

My 5 minute conclusion would lean towards obviously slower access times - but in the real world? Not a lot… A tad noticeably slower - but I’m mostly interested in bandwidth transfer (after all, it’s a RAID 0 SATA configuration in the first place…) since the real workload is digital audio. In my case, I’m keeping the acoustic management turned on since it’s an audible difference for sure.

For grins, though - I decided to give my custom built ASUS media server a run with the same benchmark (it’s in the basement so hard drive noise doesn’t matter…)

Whew… Maybe I should bring it out of the basement and swap it with my desktop! Almost twice as fast transfer rates and access times! And it doesn’t seem to trail off in performance at the edges of the drives… (Okay, yeah - I said drives… It’s also a RAID 0 setup, but with 4 SATA drives!) And who said motherboard RAID didn’t perform? I’m pretty happy with my 220 MB/sec peak transfer rates… (With an 8MB block size it went up to 323 MB/sec!)

Perhaps it’s just time for a new desktop!