I’m planning to see Oppenheimer this week. Saturday night’s 3-hour Christopher Nolan movie was Interstellar.
The MoCA Wi-Fi extender worked very well for movie night on the patio, and equally well for using a tablet on the deck Sunday morning. On the screen is a 1952 Atlas war comic story illustrated by Joe Sinnott.
Today is the 54th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. As monumental as that success is today and forever, the safe return to Earth of Apollo 13 stands alone as a triumph of problem-solving teamwork. One of the pivotal decisions leading to the successful recovery was made by John Aaron, a NASA flight controller in charge of the electrical and environmental systems and consumables, known as EECOM.
Neil Armstrong had been selected for Apollo 11 based on his successful handling of the uncontrolled rolling of Gemini 8. Aaron was put in charge of EECOM for the Apollo 13 emergency because he had saved the launch of Apollo 12 with his instruction to the crew, “SCE to AUX.”
I laughed watching that video, because at work I had been in situations that were similar, albeit far less significant and consequential. One of them happened while I was already planning to retire.
In the mid-90’s, with the end of the minicomputer era and the coming dominance of Microsoft Windows, management decided that our customers were responsible for their own Information Technology support, with the option of hiring an approved system integrator. Their expectation was that computer rooms were no longer needed, because servers would be the size of dehumidifiers and wheeled under workstations in offices. Which was exactly the opposite of what happened with the Internet-driven growth of massive data centers and the development of hyper-converged networking for cloud computing.
The company didn’t want to get dragged into customer problems with virtual servers, local area networks, and storage area networks, etc. So there was no money to be made by doing that, and I would be reminded that we were a software company, as if I didn’t know, and to stay out of what were considered to be “hardware problems.”
Whenever an intractable technical problem was escalated to me, the right thing to do was refer the customer to one of our approved technology integrators. It was a pointless exercise, however, because the fact the problem had been dropped in my lap meant the support team should have already done that, and probably had. The customer may have had a bad experience with an integrator, or they couldn’t afford the cost, and/or they were usually doing all right with their own IT staff. Sales reps sometimes gave customers the wrong impression of the services we provided.
Every so often a hospital executive would complain to the director above me, or to one of the VP’s above him, and I would be told, “see what you can do.” This would even happen after I had told them about the problem and been denied permission to work on it. My feeling was, “Just let me do my f*cking job!” But they insisted it wasn’t my job… except on those occasions when they said it was. Which happened many times, and yet the company’s two-headed policy was never changed. Bad management ruled the roost.
There was a hospital with a high-end storage system from EMC, called the Symmetrix, that was suffering from extremely poor disk performance. Orders were backing up, and the problem was getting worse. I recall that a VP, who wasn’t in my reporting path, called me and asked if I could please help. Sure, why not? I was going to retire.
There was no way the hospital could be straining a Symmetrix enough to make it even breathe hard. The VP clicked me into a conference call with the customer’s IT team on a speaker phone. A tactic I liked to use was to ask myself, “What would I do to create this problem?” The answer was to have all of the data written to, and read from, a single port on the storage system. Which was exactly what the customer was doing. The reason why it was set up that way was because the connection could handle 8 Gigabits/second of throughput, and they were only using 2 Gbps. As expected, the storage system should have handled that much bandwidth with ease, but it was failing.
I told a tech to go to the worst performing virtual machine and manually switch the database’s virtual drive to the connection for the failover path, leaving the other VM’s as they were. There was reluctance, even resistance, to my suggestion. I remained firm by pointing out that nothing else they tried had worked. It came down to me saying, “Just do it!” There were a couple moments of silence, then I heard laughter and somebody exclaimed, “Holy sh*t! The entire day’s queue of orders just went through! It’s working!” I proposed they keep the failover port for its intended purpose, but to activate three more ports for the virtual servers, and set VMware to round-robin each IO operation between them. If one of them failed for some reason, the failover port would kick in.
The customer asked me to stay on the line, and an independent consultant they hired, who had failed to diagnose the cause of the problem, was put on the conference call. He was told what had been done, and yet he maintained that extra paths weren’t needed, because the sustained bandwidth being consumed was less than 2 Gbps on an 8 Gbps interface. I heard him making that point, and someone on the line told him, “You don’t understand. It worked!”
Without saying so on the call, I knew his thinking was wrong. I guessed it was based on experience with more read-intensive applications, rather than real-time write-intensive online databases. The consultant didn’t understand the difference between the need for bandwidth and the demands of a busy database on a processor. The CPU that was dedicated to managing the port was pegged at 100% and the load needed to be spread out. That was my “SCE to AUX” moment. 😉
Again and again the question is asked, “Could World War II have ended without the use of atomic bombs?” NBC produced this documentary for the 20th anniversary of the events.
A new book by Evan Thomas takes a deep dive into the history of, and the thinking behind, the decisions.
My son is a Japanophile with a History degree. He read the book, and other than a couple of minor errors he found, he said it presents a compelling argument justifying the bombings of Japan over the alternative of a land invasion.
Promising to be far better than 1989’s flop, Fat Man and Little Boy, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is certain to fill some otherwise empty theater seats this weekend. Watching the opening sequence of Nolan’s Tenet in IMAX was as impressive as anything I have seen, but the rest of the movie was a big, “HUH?” Oppenheimer appears to be a WWII bookend to Nolan’s superb Dunkirk.
This is the definitive collection of archival films taken of the American above-ground nuclear tests.
Note the mention of EG&G in the introduction. Founded by MIT professor Harold Edgerton, EG&G is remembered today for its photographs of bullets going through apples and playing cards. I know EG&G as the financial backer that provided the start-up money for the company where I worked for 36 years.
Optical media is played outwards from the inner tracks. Records can be made to play the same way. Doing this makes it easier for a cartridge to track the end of a recording that is especially loud and/or has a lot of bass.
After computer graphics took over special effects in movies, the old way came to be called practical effects. Asteroid City has a cornucopia of wonderfully conceived and beautifully detailed models and miniatures.
“Freight Train” in the movie is a Skiffle record from 1957. It was released in England a few months before Paul McCartney joined John Lennon’s Skiffle group, the Quarrymen.
After the first round of layoffs at Turner Classic Movies, TCM Underground was cancelled. I was talking with someone last weekend who was enough of a TCM Underground fan that he cancelled his cable TV service.
Reassurances from the new axe-wielding boss at Warner Discovery that, despite his recent removal of the TCM management team, the station will continue as before aren’t convincing me, or most anyone else it seems.
The New Yorker’s film critic is calling TCM a national treasure.
The final movie that was shown on TCM Underground was that sterling classic of compelling inhuman drama by Ed Wood, Bride of the Monster.
Another source of classic movies, the Movies! TV Network, is no longer being broadcast on Boston television. The only way to watch it is online with the FrndlyTV service. I might give it a try.