Goldfish not included.

 What happens when you don't seal the bag properly in a typical British summer.

This isn't just someone putting up an ad for a missing pet, this is a legally required planning notice put up by the local council - who whould know what they're doing considering the number of these they have to put up in  year.

You can just about read the top three paragraphs and that's it. It relates to a temporary road closure that happened 18 months ago!

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We may have a problem here....

There's currently a radio ad running over here in the UK for a company that replaces windscreens (wind shieds, what-have-you) and they keep going on about chips developing into cracks, and how much it would cost you to have the glass replaced rather than having the chip filled.

Very laudable. Keep the punter happy and they'll come back to you next time they have a problem,.

I'm not worried about the company going on about this, after all they have a business to run, what does worry me is the fact that a chip can develop into a crack in the first place by just going over a bump in the road. To me, this points out what could possibly be a flaw in the way modern motor vehicles are constructed, especially in the way the glass is fitted.

The old way of doing this was to insert a rubber gasket into the frame of the vehicle and fix the glass into the gasket, using a sealant that lubricates the glass for insertion and then sets with time.

The current way to do this is with a polymer-based glue which sets rigid in a fairly short period after application. I know production costs are everything, but couldn't a different adhesive be used to give some flexibility in the installation? Surely that way people wouldn't be left with fairly hefty bills when the screen has to be replaced.

"Greening" IT

I've just been browsing through the latest crop of IT trade mags that drop onto my desk around this time of the month, and it never ceases to amaze me when I see headlines "Most efficient data centre to date".

Without exception every single story I have seen of late that has a picture attached, either an external shot of the building or an internal shot of one of the data halls, shows the damn thing has been built in a converted factory unit!

Whilst I will admit that there are a growing number of these that have some form of environmental containment, surely it's about time that people began to look at the buildings themselves and what can be included in the design and construction stage to lessen the need for the more expensive solutions.

And yes, I agree. If there's no option because your data hall has to be built inside an exisiting building with no hope of re-designing the structure, then containment is your only option.

Have we sealed our own fate?

A thought has occured to me recently, considering all the health problems I'm currently suffering. It is simply this:

Would I actually be alive if all the anomalies in my genetic code had been eliminated by the process of natural selection?

Think on this. The morbidities currently uppermost in the psyche of Man are exceptionally rare in any life form not having been messed around with by us: i.e. those that we haven't tried to manipulate in some way by breeding etc.. Those that do suffer from them get them by - for want of a better phrase - "secondary transfer", in other words because they can't escape our detritus.

I know there are evolutionary dead-ends out there: flora and fauna that have not changed in millions of years such as the Ginkgo biloba plant, crocs, caymen, gators and the like or everyone's favourite insect - the 'roach'. But the reason they haven't changed is that their family trees have hit the buffers, their adaptation is perfect for their little niche in what's left of this planet's eco-system.

I will not get into the "creationism" debate, it just isn't worth it. Suffice to say that if there is any indication of intelligent design, it certainly isn't homo-sapiens: we have just too many physical problems.

My point is this: I do not believe we have reached the pinnacle of our existence in terms of what we could become. By prolonging the life of people with genetically caused problems for so many centuries now, have we actually caused ourselves to stop evolving? If so, what could we have become?

Mechanical Trees yet!

I know I've said this before elsewhere, but either Douglas Adams was a visionary or he could see into the future. In the second radio series of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there is a character called The Wise Old Bird who mentions that all the imprisoned robots from Brontitall's first plague are working to build "continent toupees" for planets that have used up all their forests.
Now today, we get an article hitting the news stands about more ideas to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere using mechanical trees!

I must admit, the idea of artificially reducing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere has its merit, but it has to be practical with no long-term side effects of it's own. The two main contenders are to reduce it by filtering it out and storing it in empty oil wells or by converting it with algae using photo-synthesis.

Not too keen on the first idea. this could just be saving up more trouble for future generations, who have enough to worry about already with global warming and another nasty man-made product of excessive energy consumption.... nuclear waste.

How green is Silicon Valley?

Well, what do we think?

Being closely involved in the world that encompasses these almighty cathedrals to technology that we call "data centres", I wonder seriously how green we can actually get them. It may be unfair to single out this particular part of the world as there's nowhere that's any less guilty at wasting energy.

The prime problem is how inefficient the actual equipment is at using the power that we put into it. There are very few "conventional" server/network chassis that can boast better than a 20% efficiency rating, and as you've most likely guessed the rest simply comes out of the box as heat.

Thus we have a situation where the problem has to be solved in the long term by the manufacturers. Moves are being made in this direction: more efficient ways of distributing the power to the servers, more use of blade servers, far more intelligent power and performace management software in the servers themselves, and so on.

Meanwhile in the short term, we just have to make the environment that it lives in far more efficient at dealing with the problem the equipment is causing us. Here are some ideas from my addled brain.

How much heat in the data centre is coming from outside the building? In certain climates, I suspect quite a lot at certain times of the year, yet I have visited places where the insulation in the area of the DC's suites has been non-existent. Conversely, how much cooling can we achieve from the outside of the building by just allowing the outside atmosphere to get in? Some method of controlled heat transfer when the outside air is cool enough cannot be beyond the whit of Man.

Can the excess heat be converted back to useable electrical power, or indeed be condensed enough to help in powering the air conditioning systems - a Combined heat/power system maybe.

How do we cool the equipment itself? The current method in an awful lot of DC's - even brand new ones - is to cool the suite itself rather than the equipment itself. This is a hangover from mainframe days when this was really the only viable way of doing it. I come from a broadcast engineering background where it has always been the norm to use contained cooling within an area, so this way has never made sense to me.

This has got to change.

CFO's have got to realise that saving money in the capital stage of a project and just throw air handling units around a large open area is only going to increase the costs to the company when it reaches the stage of going into operation, especially when a large number of governments are introducing carbon taxes in some form or another.

Bite the bullet guys and consider doing this now: there are options out there already, some of which can be easily (and relatively cheaply) retro-fitted to your existing installation.

Finally, an idea for the manufacturers out there: the Dell's HP's Cisco's of this world. Broadcasting, especially national broadcasting uses a fair number of high-power transmitters to reach it's audience. To keep these enormous beasts going they are cooled directly. The coolant pipes are plumbed directly into the output stage and the liquid pumped through these rather than having an intermediate "air stage" in the process.

It's already being done on larger scale computers... think Kray and the like. Is it really so mad an idea to do this to even small machines like say a C7000?

Be lucky and stay safe out there people!