perl -e 'print "hello world\n";'

(Sorry, it seemed a fitting analog to my first breath on Plug.)

I recently started working for a company that is badly in need of a new shopping cart solution. I think FOSS has something to offer for our $100 million/year enterprise, but I need to convince others. I have looked into some Java-based open source carts, like Apache OFBiz, but I'm somewhat new to e-commerce having spent much of my career in middleware and back-end development. I would appreciate some input from experienced members of PLUG about what shopping cart to recommend and how to sell my executives on FOSS. We need a stable and feature-rich cart that can be heavily customized to fit our environment.

Who likes fast systems? Who likes bleeding-edge technology? Who likes networking with people in an industry that is passionate about high-performance and high-quality? Well, me of course.

Supercomputing 2007 was the best show that I've been to this year. I didn't attend any classes, but the exhibitors present, and technology previewed was first rate. The SWAG was good too. 10GbE, Infiniband, multi-node clusters, AoE, virtualization, were all over the place. Take a look at some of the photos I took. On top of all that, I got lucky and won an iPod from Intel :)

I was in NJ this week attending an AMD/Microsoft Tech Conference. The AMD part was pretty interesting. The discussions around AMD's rollout of L3 cache, hypertransport, and split power plane technologies were of interest to the group that attended (Barcelona & Shanghai). To me, AMD seems a little more honest in their marketing than Intel does except in one subject:

The announcement of a three-core processor. I'd just expect that they call it what it is - enough failure of the quad-core processor that they could open up a new niche, and for $20-50 less, sell the quad processor with one core disabled because it wasn't reliable or working. But I digress.

October is the month for SNW, which will take place October 15-18 at the Gaylord Resort Hotel in Grapevine, TX. If you're planning to go, stop by the Supermicro exhibitor booth.

This year we'll be showing off our new 24 HDD array that you can see here:

SuperChassis 846TQ-R900B

Well - I'll be off to Reno, Nevada this year for Supercomputing 2007. I'm VERY excited! The conference starts November 10 with the Exhibitors starting on Monday, Nov 12 and running until Thursday, Nov 15.

If you are attending, please come see me in the Exhibition Hall - Booth #1229: Click to see a map here

You'll see our new quad-core, quad-socket Barcelona-based AMD and quad-core dual and quad-socket Intel solutions. We'll also have our SuperBlades and 1U Twin on display.

AMD's marketing engine announced the other day that they are announcing the three-core processor. They state: Citing Mercury Research, the company said quad-core processors made up less than 2 percent of desktop computer shipments in the second quarter -- signaling the need for a wider range of multi-core products. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070918/amd_chip.html?.v=1

What does this actually mean?

It's the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) time of year again. This year, we'll be in Moscone West as a Gold Sponsor. If you're there, stop by, say hi and see some of the very cool Supermicro products.

Photos to follow

It was nice today to connect with a few of Utah's software and technology leaders at the CTO breakfast that Phil Windley organizes.

I'm by no means a CTO, but an aspiring CTO, and enjoy networking with other like-minded people. This week I got to meet about 13 others, and some of the conversation we had was around working from home, VMWare, Adobe's AIR, Flex, DNS, Google, and a handful of other things. Here is Phil's wrap up.

The conference was a success in terms of our Supermicro Exhibition. To me, there seemed to be a smaller crowd in attendance - but I couldn't say for sure.

Take a peek at the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) photos that I took. The laptop is considerably smaller than I had thought it might be, but makes sense for kids. I wish this was available to the general public, and available in the US. If it was, I'd pick up a couple for my kids right away.

OLPC photos on my flickr stream