I'm feeling a rather odd mix of annoyance and melancholy today. Mostly the annoyance is aimed at various services I have to use at work. But some of it is aimed at the same reason as the melancholy - a sudden change of circumstances at work.

So, firstly, last week our company announced that several people's positions were being made redundant at the company, including one of my underlings and one of my bosses. As the 'boss' has been there since I started (and was the main person to guide me through the company) it feels odd to see him leave... the company will feel very odd without. To all though whom are having to move onto pastures new, good luck :).

Also, 'Munchies' the sandwich shop I use daily for my lunch at work has moved outside of the town - too far to sensibly walk there and back in a lunch break. That sandwich shop had become part of my daily ritual, and it feels strange to walk down the high street and not turn into that shop. Given that I was introduced to the shop by the afore mentioned boss, life is suddenly going to feel very different in the coming weeks.

Hmmm, other news...

Dom has his 2X birthday last week, so the house went out for a very enjoyable meal at Old Orleans in the Lanes. Reasonable amounts of alcohol was consumed (Purple Rain cocktails are gorgeous!) and a good time was had by all. We've been trying to go out as a house more often recently, and I definitely think it's been improving the general mood of the house.

Not much else happening really. I've had a fair amount of rack mountable computer hardware come through the post, and I'm now looking into a server cabinet to house it all in (see my rant in the code section).

Oh, and I have found I have a liking for weird teas - I ended up ordering about 15 boxes of the stuff on Amazon.

Right, out of lunch time to write stuff, and out of stuff to write about, so I'll leave it here.

Damn it! Wait ages for something to rant about, and then two come along at the same time!

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Rant the first: Intel VT-x


So, some background first. I'm currently working towards building myself a mini server farm, based on Atom mini-itx boards and a specialist rack mount casing that supports two boards per 1U rack.

A fairly expensive solution (considering I managed to buy a reasonable Xeon server for less than £50) but the advantage is that using Atom processors means that each node should have a TDP of less than 40W, and so should save money on electricity used. For comparison, the CPU in my main computer, a Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 has a TDP of 65W for the CPU alone (Core 2 Quad Extemes can hit 150W TDP)

Anyway, one of the main things I plan to do with this server farm is simulations of cloud computing, using Virtualisation technology (notably Virtualbox) to push images of computer nodes around the network. I have managed to get virtual servers up and running on my current mini server 'Odin', but I hit a few snags on realising my ideal setup.

Now, ideally, I would want to run 64bit OS on the virtual images, using hardware virtualisation (a requirement for 64bit) to make sure that the set up is running nice and quickly. Unfortunately, it appears this is not possible with Intel Atons. The Atom chips come in 3 flavours, plain, N-series and Z-series. The plain Atoms are 64bit, but don't support Intel VT-x, the Z series have Intel VT-x, but are 32bit, and the N series is neither 64bit or VT capable. Suck.

Considering the shambles that Intel have made with their arbitary distribution of the technology over their range of CPUs, it saddens me that they have effectively crippled decent virtualisation support on the Atom, considering that it currently a good candidate for creating reasonably powerful low power clusters, even getting the interest of some very large players.

I really hope they fix this with the next set of Atom chips.

And AMD, get your arse in gear and bring out a competitor in this market!

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Rant the second: Wolfram Alpha

Okay, so the "New Google Killer" has gone live.

NO.

WRONG.

The amount of bad publicity this has gotten over the last week or so annoys the hell out of me. This is not a "Google Killer". Hell, I would puase for a second before calling it a search engine. What it is, is a brilliant tool for looking at data in various different formats and interpretations. It is also a great way of searching for very specific data.

Here are a few examples from the mundane to slightly more interesting:

• Interesting facts about the number six
• Probabilties when tossing a coin 32 times
• Rainfall in Arizona this week
• Comparison between Brighton and Kidderminster
• The D Minor scale
• Current position of the Hubble Telescope
• and Where Hubble will be at noon on my birthday
• Blending two colours together
• Blending many colours together
• Search the human Genome for a particular sequence

So, it's not a search engine in the traditional sense - I'm probably not going to use it to find reviews for films, say. However, I think the media are overlooking how useful a tool this can be to scientists and researchers of all creeds and levels. Not that there isn't a lot of work to be done, but I think this has the possibility of being a very big thing for the academically enclined.

Anyway, enough from me.

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Update: 19th May 2009 09:20 BST

MORE ANGER.