BadCheese.com

I read a review of a few parallel file systems the other day (I tried to find the link and couldn't find it, sorry), but it suggested PVFS, Lustre and GlusterFS. I had used PVFS back in the 1.0-days and thought that it was worth trying again.

I installed 8 vmware instances of Ubuntu 9.10 on a machine that I had lying around and started compiling PVFS. I got the server running on all 8 instances and got the kernel module running on one node, so I had a real, mountable filesystem. I'm not sure how to measure performance because it's all done in a virtual machine on a 100Mbps network in my home, but I was surprised to find that PVFS was not fault tolerant if/when I took a machine down. What?

I dug through the docs and it turns out that PVFS is only fault tolerant for the server if shared storage is available and it uses heartbeat to do the failover, so the 'server' is fault tolerant, but the file system isn't if we lose a machine or harddrive. Bummer.

Oh well. So much for PVFS. Although it has matured quite a lot since the 1.0 days, it's still not a 'redundant' solution if you need replication and want to design around storage hardware failures.

Taken from "Stop Demotivating Your Employees!" Harvard Management Update, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2006

Most companies have it all wrong. They don't have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.

The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85 percent of companies, our research finds, employees' morale sharply declines after their first six months—and continues to deteriorate for years afterward. That finding is based on surveys of about 1.2 million employees at 52 primarily Fortune 1000 companies from 2001 through 2004, conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence (Purchase, New York).

The fault lies squarely at the feet of management—both the policies and procedures companies employ in managing their workforces and in the relationships that individual managers establish with their direct reports.

Three key goals of people at work

To maintain the enthusiasm employees bring to their jobs initially, management must understand the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work—and then satisfy those goals:

* Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
* Achievement: To be proud of one's job, accomplishments, and employer.
* Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.

To maintain an enthusiastic workforce, management must meet all three goals. Indeed, employees who work for companies where just one of these factors is missing are three times less enthusiastic than workers at companies where all elements are present.

One goal cannot be substituted for another. Improved recognition cannot replace better pay, money cannot substitute for taking pride in a job well done, and pride alone will not pay the mortgage.

What individual managers can do

A while ago, I had an idea about search. What if a search engine recorded the last hit that you went to off the search results page and used those urls as the most popular results from that page? The theory is that once you find what you're searching for, you stop searching for it, aka - you don't go back to the search engine anymore. So, the last link that you click on from the search page should be the one you wanted. If enough people click on the same link, that link should be the most popular and should be at the top of the page.

I wrote two greasemonkey plugins. One that allows a user to submit results to the study and one that queries the study database for results. They can be found here:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31639
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64039

You'll need to be running firefox and install the greasemonkey plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 first in order to install the above scripts. Once everything's installed, you're part of the project!

The author of jgit shows why C is so much faster than Java when comparing his version of jgit to the original C version.
http://marc.info/?l=git&m=124111702609723&w=2