rackspace ipo

Apparently the S-1 got filed yesterday, and it's an illuminating read:

• you get a short history lesson on Henry Ford ;)


• it costs $28,761/month to rent out the 6th floor


• the remaining founders' names only appear once in the entire document


• operational costs are trending around 1/3 of revenues (except in 2006 when they were about 1/4)


• due to incentives from Windcrest, Bexar County, and the State of Texas, RS needs to create about 2,500 more jobs than it currently has (probably more, since it's committed to 4,500 employees at the Windcrest location by 2012), and median salary has to be at $56K


• executives and officers control around 45% of the stock, about 24% (counted as part of the 45) belonging to Graham Weston

To the folks who are still there, congrats and I hope the IPO goes well. :)

hardware upgrade

For the first time since 2005, I've finally got a new system. Actually, due to hardware prices being low, I got 2 (and for less than what I paid for my old workstation. I snagged a couple of Intel Core2 Quad Q6600's from Ascend Tech with 4GB of mem, Nvidia 8400GS vid cards, Audigy sound cards, DVD-ROMs, and 160GB SATA drives. I opted to go with prebuilt systems because it was actually cheaper than getting all the parts seperately.

This was the first time I'd purchased anything from AscendTech. It took a little while to get the systems (about 9 days.. UPS ground delivery, 2 days for build, 2 days for burnin), but everything arrived well packed and ready to roll.

The big feature I was interested was that these CPUs support VT, and I wanted to play around with how that works in Xen. I'm currently installing XP Pro 64 on one, and have decided to try out Ubuntu's Hardy Heron release.

I ended up setting up a PXE installer on my old workstation to handle the Ubuntu install. Other than me pooching the DHCP configuration and an installer package dependency error, the install went fairly easily. I ended up going with a base X system and plan on adding packages as I need them. Haven't had time to setup the Xen kernel yet, and it'll be interesting to see how their apt system handles the Nvidia driver package.

For the Winders side, the install was just like every other: Put in cd, wait, wait, press a few buttons, wait, wait, press a few more buttons, reboot, wait, wait, reboot, etc. XP64 can luckily run 32bit programs, so I was able to get the staples installed: Firefox, pidgin, msys, python, perl. I left the machine in the process of downloading WoW (5GB of stuff to download!!) and MS VS 2008, planning on slapping XNA on it later. I also got blender on there. Gonna be interesting to see how well everything runs.

nerd warning sign #12,572

When you watch Cloverfield, you catch yourself getting pissed off at Hud for not holding the camera steady and getting a better shot of Big Monster(tm) so you could study it better, but then that gives way to you wondering what kind of metabolism it has to let it knock down freaking skyscrapers and spawn thousands of those terrifying little bug soldier things when its only food source appears to be the random human fleeing from it that it occasionally snags and by the way, didn't the grumpy prof you had in bio 101 say that there's was a limit to how big any cell (and consequently any organism) can get due to the constraints of physics?

Sorry, but I found the creature 100x more fascinating than 20-somethings running around yelling, "Ohmigawdohmigawdohmigawd". Amirite?

but on stage call me dynamutt

Today's Friday video comes from A Tribe Called Quest, with some help from De La Soul.

absolutely nothing

This post is about absolutely nothing.

Except testing out the python feedparser library.

this can't be a good sign

Over the past couple of years, every time Stephen Hawking's name has come in up in a news article it has mentioned his advice that we become a starfaring civilization. While he holds exploration up as a good reason for this, his main point is that if we don't get off the planet we're more likely to be wiped out as a species by a planetary disaster.

It makes me nervous when a guy who's smarter than me and makes his living as a cosmologist starts showing signs of obsessing about space travel for the purpose of surviving epic Newtonian diasters...

sorry, I don't see the lock-in

One of the big complaints about google's App Engine was that they were trying to induce some sort of vendor lock-in by requiring the use of their python libs. After having stumbled through the getting started guide, I don't see what the foundation for that complaint is.

The way this works is that python has something called the WSCGI (google around for the spec for more info). This basically allows you to route web server requests to different portions of your python code. It's kind of like having "dispatch.cgi" embedded into Apache for a Rails application. From a programming standpoint, you simply route URls to functions, and since WSCGI is a python community standard it's the same thing that stuff like Django uses. Other than support for BigTable (which I suspect can be ORM'd out of the way) and gmail account authorization (which you can sidestep if you want to do something like run your own LDAP service on a remote server), there's not a whole lot in there that's trying to pin you down to google.

The only thing I see that's going to trip up the rails and php folks is the lack of anything similar to WSCGI in those communities.