Their format is a bit different from normal- its tiny inside, and its prix-fixe, with a buffet with a bunch of miscellaneous stuff and a choice from two hot entrees. We enjoyed the buffee a lot- a citrus salad with orange, grapefruit and blood-orange, a great beet salad, some radicchio, home-made yogurt with some great jam and nuts to mix in, and a couple of other things. We got both entrees, a quiche with pork belly (bacon!) and sturgeon. Everything was great, and the overall experience was a really nice departure from the standard brunch experience all over town. At $23 its not inexpensive and I’m sure that will deter many people, but for a special experience with top local ingredients, its well worth it.

My suspicion is that the Windows Home Server integration might be at fault. I recently upgraded my Home Server with Power Pack 3 and it has a cool new feature that integrates with Media Center and can automatically archive data to the larger disks on the server. The Home Server has always been a bit strange about how much free space it reports- despite ~7TB of real free space, the system disk I have is fairly small and I think that causes it to report only a small amount of free space. Now that the C: drive on my Media Center is doing the same thing it makes me suspect that the Home Server is doing something fancy with the disks and causing this problem.

Anyone have any ideas? The Home Server tie might be a total red herring…

Photo of the first take-off of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, right after rotation

Driving home the NPR hourly news came on and reported the take-off. Too bad they spent 90% of the blurb talking about how delayed it was rather than the achievement of the day. Would it have been so hard to have mentioned the breakthrough technology, efficiency, passenger comfort rather than just focusing on the delays (which at this point are old news now that the program is back on track)?

Anyway its right now tooling around up over the San Juans at 7,800ft and about 160kts and due to land at Boeing field in a few hours. You can watch it on FlightAware here.

On that last point, its unfortunate that its necessary but it really does seem like a good thing to do. It isn’t as bad as it was in the old days when your system really got slower and slower and progressively less stable if you didn’t clean it up. But as improved as it has been the last couple of years, there is still plenty stuff you install that makes various hooks into the Windows Explorer, into your codec list, and all over the place and without starting from scratch now and then. In the past I’ve felt like I had do to this every year with my main machines, but I guess its a mark of progress that I’ve survived for a whole 2 years without worrying about it.

Two years ago I built my new workstation using top of the line parts of the day. At the time a 3ghz (overclocked to 3.66-4ghz) quad-core CPU with 4GB RAM was pretty much top of the line (unless you went to the server-class Xeon chips in which case you could use two quad-core CPUs for 8…) It is an interesting benchmark of the state of progress in the industry that while the shiny new Core i7 machines are indeed faster, they aren’t enough so that I’m really eager to build out a whole new system right away.

Still there have been a couple of things that have been annoying me. My home workstation was still running Windows Vista and while I’ve been increasingly using a Win7 VM on it, having used Windows 7 at work for a long time now I’ve been eager to upgrade it. The other biggest concerns were that the main disk has been feeling really slow. Its one of the expensive faster “Raptor” drives, but its not that much faster and combined with the fact that I’ve been running 32-bit Vista which sure seems to page a ton, and that the drive is so noisy you really hear it when its seeking all over the place, it has felt like a real dog.

So given that I’m moving up to Windows 7, I bought myself two key upgrades- more RAM to take the system to 8GB (which with the 64-bit install of Windows 7 I plan should work nicely) and a SSD for my boot drive. NewEgg was nice enough to have a screaming black-friday deal on the 80GB X25Mg2 drive for $219 (down from the usual $279 or so) which was enough for me to pick one of those up right away. I kind of wish I’d bought two so I had one for my laptop, but I’m not quite going there yet.

The other big plan is to install Windows 7 in a VHD so that I’ve got more flexibility to backup my OS image. I found some instructions here although I’m not worried about the dual-boot thing. I know some friends who are using dual-boot to have separate partitions for non-released stuff (beta versions of Office and other stuff) but I just run those in VMs and don’t mess with different base OS images.

There was one big trick missing from the instructions for VHD install. When I went to setup Windows and selected the VHD disk it told me that the given partition was not supported for boot. Turns out that the “Next” button was enabled after all and the install worked just fine, so that warning just needed to be ignored.

So hopefully that should do it for now. I suspect it will be time to upgrade my video card (currently an ATI 3870) in a few months, although I’m really hoping that they will come out with some that support 4-6 outputs on a single card (which is the rumor). Those of course might need new connectors (DisplayPort) so the scary part might be waiting on a new generation of displays. Since large multi-touch displays should also become practical sometime in the next year, I’ll be waiting on those for sure before I upgrade anything.

So if you aren’t trying to maximize capacity in a 2U unit you can either do-
10×1.5TB 3.5″ drives, 15TB storage, 750 IOPS, $1200, 0.625 IOPS/$
or
25×250GB 2.5″ drives, 6.2TB storage, 1875 IOPS, $1500 1.25 IOPS/$

Which represents twice the performance/$ at a cost of less than half the capacity/$. But again, if you weren’t going to be able to use that capacity anyway, its a great trade-off.

Alternatively in the same price range you could get two of those SSDs if you data-set is really small-
2×64GB SSDs, .13TB storage, 6600 IOPS, $1400 4.7 IOPS/$

So the SSD performance/$ is still better, but the capacity is so small that its unlikely to work for many applications.

First numbers in each cell are normalized to the SATA drives.

The table above makes it pretty clear just how different these technologies are. The SSD is 100x more expensive per GB than the commodity SATA drive. But when you measure based on IOPS it is 6x cheaper. You would need 44 spindles of traditional drives to match the I/O performance of a single SSD. Before I go on, I should point out the measurements aren’t apples to apples. The SSD measurement is write performance. The SATA performance varies a ton depending on the type of operations. Sequential reads and writes can be quite efficient while a SSD doesn’t benefit from larger reads & writes beyond a certain point.

It is also interesting to observe that the SAS drives appear to never make sense. They are 50% faster than the SATA drives but they cost so much more that it is hard to imagine a scenario where they would be the right choice.

But as Mike points out in a post about Virgin America (and I’ve had similar experiences with other airlines), you CAN do better. And you can even do better while having your staff feel good about their jobs. You just have to care about making the overall experience and system work and not just about fleecing “business” fliers into paying $2000 for domestic flights.

Of course the reality of handwriting interfaces to computers has been pretty much a continual disappointment. I was hopeful about the whole idea of the TabletPC since it seemed like a much better way to both have a device for reading plus have a computer in meetings without the effect of everyone sitting around in a room with a screen up in front of their face. Somehow having a tablet sitting on the table feels less rude to me (although I suppose it can easily be just as bad).

Unfortunatelly the form factors of early Tablet PCs and the user experience of the handwriting input has been bad enough so far that it hasn’t been worth using. Ever the hopeful type when I needed a new laptop at work I opted for a Tablet and got the HP 2730. Now, the 2730 isn’t great- I’ve got a long list of complaints and let’s just say that it isn’t really competing with a Kindle as a reading device.

But the great news is I’ve been running Win7 lately and I’ll say that the most noticeable breakthrough in Win7 for me has been how well the handwriting user experience works. It still isn’t perfect, but the current flaws are more like minor oversights than huge flaws. For example, when you go to click on the button in the top left of Office apps, the handwriting panel is right there and likes to pop out. But overall the experience is 1000% better and so far has finally gotten good enough to be solidly useful. I wouldn’t want to write a long document using the handwriting, but mostly because I can type about 5x faster. But for responding to brief emails and IM messages, and general interaction with the system it works great, the handwriting user experience seems smooth (I even like the font they use as it translates your handwriting) and so far I’m still using it and expect to keep using it.

My dad took a cool shot of a slab of ice on Ranier as we flew by two days ago-

Cool slab of ice on Ranier

One of my favorite casual iPhone games is FlightControl. I think it cost $0.99 and its simple, easy to pick up for a few minutes while waiting for a bus or something. I noticed a week or two ago that there was multiple levels in the game- you could switch the map and try out other environments. Now that appears to be gone- probably something that looked like a routine update removed it and I fear its going to be back later as an extra charge…