Suspicious Activity

It has been a long while since I have accessed my blog. So when I tried to bring it up, Google said the blog was not availble. WTF? I tried logging into my Blogger account. Google said there was some suspicious activity with my account. I had to prove I was the owner of the account first. Oh what a nightmare.

Luckily I am the real owner. Google asked me a lot of questions. Of course I knew all the right answers. I created this account myself. I am not the hacker that has been trying to get into the account. I guess it is a good think that Google sandboxed my account. Otherwise some unscrupulous individuals may have been able to take over the darn thing. This still has me irked.

Now in other non-technical IBM news, Jim Cramer has recommended IBM as a buy. Now Kramer might seem a little over the top. I also don't buy based on his recommendations. However others do. Perhaps that may drive the stock price up. Seems it is already relatively high.

I also heard some buzz that Warren Buffet has been reading over IBM quarterly reports for over 10 years. Not sure if that means Buffet will eventually invest. Could also be some sort of rumor mill. But it is interesting nonetheless.

Battery Failure

My company procided me with a ThinkPad T-Series laptop. I have had this laptop for a few years now. Not sure whether the thing was new when I got it. Until last week, the thing has been working fine. The only occasional slowness was my only concern.

This past week I noticed a strange error message as I moused over the battery in the Windows system tray. It stated that the battery had failed and needed to be replaced. I kept that thought in the back of my mind. Later I tried to move my laptop to another room. As soon as I unplugged the laptop, the thing went blank. Doh.

Later I tried booting up the system, and it would not start Windows. I kept getting a blue screen of death stating the mount volume was unmountable. Ouch. My desktop support guy said the battery was not under warrenty. Now I need to get a new battery purchased. Sounds like a good time to back my stuff up again.

Phase Change Memory

IBM has announced a breakthrough in their phase change memory (PCM). This is non volatile memory like flash. It keeps the data when the power is turned off. The big news is that this memory is 100 times faster than flash.

The worst case latency for the memory is 10 micro seconds. This statistic is 100 times the performance of flash memory. The PCM has had a capacity breakthrough as well. Previously only 1 bit per cell was reliable. IBM is now working with a configuraiton that works with 4 bits per cell. PCM memory size is going up soon.

IBM envisions this memory to be used all over the place. It can be in PCs for ultra fast startup. It can be used in the cloud. It can even be used in mobile phone applications.

Project Orion

IBM is making progress on their Project Orion. The goal is to product an IDE like Eclipse that runs on the web. They just put out a Beta release for around 5k developers.

I think of Eclipse as being an IDE for Java. However Orion intends to work for any programming language. For example, they want Orion to be able to handle JavaScript development.

The beauty of being a web app is that it can download code in real time from the web. IBM plans to integrate other free tools into Orion. This could be things such as Git, Bugzilla, and/or Jira.

Watson Plays Jeopardy

IBM has developed a computer named Watson to compete on the game show Jeopardy. It is going to be pitted against two of the best human Jeopardy players ever.

Watson has a lot of computer memory. It has a fixed store of data is has "learned". It then needs to use the clues from the Jeopardy game to use this memory to answer the questions.

Watson is composed of a bunch of IBM Power 750 servers. The thing actually understands the nuances of the English language.

There is talk about commercial applications of this technology. But first IBM will need to figure out how to run the Watson program on something less than a massive computer.

ClearQuest is a Dog

I finally got my ClearQuest client upgraded to version 7.1. This thing looks and feels a lot different than the earlier version I am used to. For starters, the thing takes forever to launch. I spend a lot of time looking at the splash screen. The screen states that the product was built with Eclipse, and uses Java. Maybe that is part of the slowness.

When I do a query that results in many defects, the results are now paginated. Previously ClearQuest would put each of these defects in a single huge spreadsheet control for me to navigate. Now I need to guess which page the resullts will be on. If my guess is off, I need to click on the other results pages. Poorly done.

I cannot resize the preview pane for the defect I want to look at. What the heck? Somebody has determined the optimal layout of screen real estate for the query results and the preview. Great. The problem now is that I feel like I used to have much more room in the preview. At least I can double click a query result row and get a popup window will all the details.

From everything I have seen in the past week, I want my old version of the ClearQuest client back.

Rational Tool Upgrade Trouble

Our customer upgraded their Rational Tools Suite to version 7 this past weekend. As expected, the upgrade did not go smoothly. Here was the plan. The servers were going to be upgraded on the weekend. An upgrade icon was going to be pushed out to workstations to allow users to control when the client tools would be upgraded.

A lot of people did not receive the icon for the upgrade. I got the icon on one of my machines. However when I clicked the icon, I got an error because I did not have enough room on my C: drive. It seems that I need at least 1G of free space on my C: drive. Now my machine is a virtual one with a measly 10G of space on C:. Most of that space is currently used. I am now spending a lot of time trying to hack away at drive space used.

I know I may be in the minority. New computers have massive C: drives. But come on. Is this some major code bloat in the latest version. It would be best if I could just install those tools I actually need. That is a small list. I require ClearQuest and Clearcase. It would also be nice if I could specify what options are installed for these two products. Microsoft does that all the time and gives me the options to not install pieces. Can we get that from IBM here?