the cole family blarg

I forgot ALL about blogger!
Things are good here…the weather is finally warming up, and we just got back from our first road trip to Calgary!

1. Facebook
   What is everybody interested in right now? facebook. It seems as though
   facebook is a very catchy cold as it is spreading to everyone imaginable and
   fast.

   Facebook doesn’t really do anything too interesting or novel, but the
   interesting thing about social networking sites is that their popularity is
   driven by their popularity (it’s a lot like IM in that regard actually…).

   I suppose the most useful function of facebook is located long lost friends
   to suddenly say hello.

2. Fancy storage
   Working with the HP Storage Array at work proves to be quite interesting. I really think that iSCSI is a very cool little technology. iSCSI encapsulates standard SCSI commands over IP which lets you do cool and weird things like connect your server to a drive hosted on another machine through a boring old LAN (or super high speed WAN if you are so inclined). The thing that makes iSCSI even more interesting is it’s devastating efficiency. The protocol seems to have the necessary talent to hog 98%-99% of a 100Mbit link. This can actually be very deadly if you decide to implement it on your LAN without QoS or VLANs or something.