Nick Taylors blog

ZFS will come of age in 2009.

In 2008, I had to explain what ZFS was and why it’s different to the existing volume/filesystem model. By the end of 2009, IT Pros will all be aware of it, what it does and will likely have at least a little of it in their production infrastructure. Sun has already started that ball rolling.

Heck, with full-blown support of ZFS likely to be in OSX 10.6, “Snow Leopard”, it’ll even make in-roads to the home-market. Or course, if Apple announce a ZFS-based upgraded Time Capsule/Home Server at MacWorld ExPo tomorrow that’ll happen sooner.

From a capacity perspective, with 2TB or greater drives being the de-facto standard capacity by the end of 2009 (compared with 1TB today), the growth of all types of media; including photographs, personal video and the increasing availability of internet-distributed hi-def content, coupled with the pack-rat nature of most of us (me included), demand for storage capacity has never been higher. It’ll also push the more mainstream storage user towards the 10-12TB Unrecoverable Read Error issue , aka known as the death of RAID5. 

To deal with increasing capacity and the straight line graph of bit-error rates, drive manufacturers keep making their drives smarter to handle errors and attempt to minimize data loss. This is the wrong approach, but it’s unavoidable as otherwise they commoditize themselves further. Drives should be stupid and let something further up the stack manage this. That something is ZFS.

Of course, this mostly applies to cheaper SATA drives. The more expensive UltraSCSI and SAS commanded a premium for performance and reliability. Move reliability into the filesystem and you’re just paying a premium for performance. Obviously, some need the performance which is why these drives and ancillary equipment and technologies like Fibre Channel will stay around, but I think it’s worth considering if you really need that CLARiiON or Symmetrix…

Brightkite is a geosocial network. Based loosely on twitter-style short messages, but with a much stronger leaning towards location awareness.

I’ve used both the standard Brightkite website and also their iPhone optimized site for many months. There are three things I really like about Brightkite. Firstly, they’ve done a great job in making the application agnostic. I don’t care if I’m accessing Brightkite via Safari on my Mac in my office, using the iPhone optimized site or now, the native iPhone application (link to the iTunes store). While obviously the look is slightly different, the feel is alway the same. 

Secondly, Brightkite is great at getting my location. When access from a desktop or notebook computer, Brightkite will do a pretty good job at guessing your location either by using the Loki plugin, or Mozilla Geode (more here and here). When using your iPhone, Brightkite will use CoreLocation to discover your location. I like the way the iPhone native application will sort your placemarks by what it thinks is nearest to your estimated location. When the estimated location isn’t quite right, you can “pick a place”, by searching for your actual location. It’s nice that locations are named, rather than just co-ordinates, it’s a nice human-friendly touch. 

Lastly, the balance between openness and privacy is ideal, and customizable. For example, if I want to make my exact location known or hidden, or obfuscated (Brightkite calls this “City” and is really just your location generalized to a larger area), a simple switch lets me do this. I can also set privacy levels for different categories of contacts, including trusted friends, friends and everyone else.

This aspect makes it ideal for meeting fellow Brightkite users in real-world social gatherings. Use Brightkite to see who’s nearby and send them a message!

In fact, it’s how I met Brightkite founder Martin May, at a recent Tech Cocktail event in Boulder. 

Of course, Brightkite lets you stream your consciousness a’la most other social networks, via a simple URL:

http://brightkite.com/people/nickt

This will take you to my stream of checkins, photos and notes. 

It can also stream directly to twitter, and meta-update services like ping.fm support updating Brightkite. Links to services like Facebook, Flickr and Linked-In are available via your profile page. 

Here’s a video demo of the Brightkite iPhone app in action.

Brightkite for the iPhone from Brightkite on Vimeo.

More background:

Brightkite Blog
Ars Technica review of the Brightklite iPhone Application
ReadWriteWeb review of Brightkite

Summary: a great mobile geosocial network. Recommended.

UMapper makes it easy to embed Flash-based maps in your website, blog or popular social networks. If you quickly need to create and share a one-off map for almost any purpose, UMapper is a great way to do it. 

UMapper home page

I like UMapper as both a technologist and as a traveler. It has one of the easiest interfaces I’ve used; I created and embedded my first map within 3 minutes.

WIth the ability to choose from map providers Google, Microsoft and OpenStreetMap, and the ability to embed maps easily into Facebook, MySpace, Blogger blogs, Wordpress (hosted) blogs, Orkut and iGoogle – as well as providing a Wordpress plug-in, there is enormous flexibility and ease of use. 

There’s also the ability to add custom markers, polygons, circles and lines, making it useful for a whole set of businesses from mining companies to real-estate agents. 

Import options supported include KML, GPX, and GeoRSS.

The traveler in me really liked twbr’s map, outlining his route through Africa. 

I’ve also started using it over on my other blog. 

UMapper: If you need to quickly create or embed custom maps it’s highly recommended.