Chris Farris

Stephen Fleming, a former Venture Capitalist, who now handles commercialization of intellectual property for Georgia Tech, penned a good blog post on UGA’s expressed interest in creating an engineering program. Campus rivalry aside, Fleming makes the case that the money could be best spent elsewhere. More funding for K-12 Math and Science, expanding the Georgia Technical College System, or expanding the instructional facilities at Georgia Tech, would cost a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars it would cost to create an engineering program from scratch in Athens.

$1500 for a new ESXi server for vSphere 4.1 is a bit high. Unlike this guy, I have a lab in the basement so decibles aren’t as important as capex and opex costs. Plus, to have a lab in the basement where I can do things with a cluster would require two of these beasties. Running a second on the iMac i7 probably won’t cut it. Last time I needed a lab for something it was because a network change crapped out 1/4 of my primary vSwitch.

VMWare ESXi 4.1 looks incredibaly interesting. It has better monitoring functions, better authentication integration and other cool features. I need to upgrade. Sadly, the CPU in my current VMWare host doesn’t support the Intel vt extensions so it won’t run 64bit VMs, and it won’t support ESXi 4.1. So I’m looking at having to drop at least a grand to get a new server capable of running the latest VMWare. My Media Center PC could do it, but sadly, the Shuttle PC I was going to make my Media Center PC has a dead power supply, and Shuttle doesn’t carry accessories anymore.

Preseeds are poorly documented. This is a note to myself on how to reproduce an install sudo apt-get install debconf-utils # It is part of the debconf-utils package. debconf-get-selections –installer > somefile.txt debconf-get-selections » somefile.txt “ via [ubuntu] preseeding installation 8.10 – how to preseed “encrypted directory” prompt? – Ubuntu Forums.

I’m beginning to think vmware people are cult-like. Show And Tell : First vSphere Plugin for WordPress! | Nickapedia.

When I saw the release announcement on WordPress 3.0 (Thelonious), I was excited to see that is was finally integrating in the WordPressMu project allowing one installation of wordpress to handle multiple blogs. I maintain several websites and blogs in wordpress, and have struggled with the operational best practices surrounding it. I was quite excited to see the multisite support so I decided to deploy a VM at the house to test out migration of all my sites to a single install.

Courtesy of Intuit Works to Restore Online Access – WSJ.com: Intuit Inc. said it is trying to restore service to company websites affected by an outage that began Tuesday night, leaving consumers and small businesses without access to online versions of the company’s accounting and tax software. Intuit’s products include TurboTax, Quicken and the QuickBooks accounting program used by many small businesses. The online services associated with those products remained offline Wednesday afternoon.

I like to buy companies I use. Some stocks I’m considering: VMWare – Cloud infrastructure provider. Amazon – Not of the consumer shopping, but because of all the neat stuff they’re doing with EC2, S3 and Mechanical Turk. Citrix – Xen masters and purveyors of Go To Meeting and Go To MyPC. Apple – the iPad is the laptop killer for causal couch use. It’s a multimedia Kindle. Sucky name though.

@lance (an ATDC startup guy) pointed me to a pretty good Op/Ed from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. Let me say that of all the NYT people, I respect Friedman the most. His Lexus and the Olive Tree sits up there with Mystery of Capital as one of the best economics books of recent years. It also sits up there with The Pentagon’s New Map as one of the best national-security books of recent times.

Now this is what we should be spending our R&D money on. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated) Coolant Self-regulating Proliferation potential None Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone via Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke | Magazine.