Think people have gone over the edge with patent craziness? If not, this entry might just sway you. The Washington Post reports that an Ohio man has received a patent for a cordless jumprope. That’s right, just the handles, none of that inconvenient rope. After all, the exercise is all in the jumping, right?

cordless jumprope

I thought that one was bad but then followed a link to a most excellent site, Patently Silly, where all the latest “inventions of note” are duly analyzed and lampooned. No doubt, one of these will hit it big (my bet, “house slippers” in the Midwest…..) Their tagline? “The humor of invention.” Priceless.

“house slippers”

“gas combustion hair dryer” (my note: single use item)

Technorati Tags: Humor Innovation Patents

As promised, some new features have been introduced in the My Sun Connection portal. Chief among them, performance and tuning enhancements, many small requests for enhancement, as well as the new “Community” tab.

If you haven’t dropped in to see what we’re doing, now is a good time. This week we should have a new thing or two on “Fresh Tools” as well.

The Coastsider has been posting some very high quality information and photos on the Devil’s Slide repairs. As you may know, April 2 of this year a 300 foot section of the roadway subsided around 5 feet coupled with a rock fall from 300 feet above the roadway. Repairs have been ongoing and are slated to wrap up late September.

Here’s a film clip provides an excellent overview of the failure, the repair plan, and shots of the work in progress. It certainly is an engineering wonder. Thanks to Barry Parr and Darin Boville for the excellent content and footage.

Meanwhile, as the road remains closed, traffic problems continue without pause. Traffic over the holiday weekend was horrible. CalTrans continues to work and monitor the traffic patterns – it’s clear they’re doing the best they can in a very difficult situation. While it’s difficult for folks to see when stuck in 2 hour backups, it is making a difference. Thanks CalTrans and keep up the good work.

Here’s a photo of the work site with crane:

Here’s a photo of drilling the “nails” into the slide (in a basket, dangling from the crane in the picture above.)

Technorati Tags: Devil’s Slide CalTrans Highway 1

A simple equation to be sure. If you’ve got to manage patches and configurations on Linux or Solaris machines, you should pay attention to this post.

Here’s what to consider:

• Baselines – Create groups of changes to be applied
• Automated application – Apply a single change, group of changes, and/or baseline to one or more systems
• Simulation – Model proposed changes to your environment before commiting to them
• Rollback – The “oops” protection, remove changes automatically
• Auditing – Know who made which changes when to aid in compliance
• Aggregation – Pull bits from many different places to a staging ground, mix and match the content in automated change tasks
• Introspection – Don’t trust what the description says, active comparison of symbols in changes vs. claims in descriptions (metadata)
• Provisioning – Deploy configurations to bare metal as workloads and demands change
• Management – Be it a data center, an application service, or a grid, actively manage the assets for workload, performance, cost, and availability.
• Realtime – Always up, always up-to-date. Continuous real-time content.
• Electronic Prognostics – Telemetry-based prediction of what will happen based on statistical models of what has happened across a broad population segment.
• Risk Quantification – Availability Risk Index (ARI) determins not only the severity negative consequence for any known risk, but also the probability of occurance in time period X.

If your vendor(s) can’t or won’t do this, come see Sun. We’ve got a solution for you…..I’ll share it this summer. Stay tuned.

Here are some hints:

+ Sun Grid
+ N1 System Manager
+ Aduva OnStage
+ Sun Update Connection
+ Sun Preventive Services
+ N1 Service Provisioning Server

Technorati Tags: Patching System Administration Systems Management Grid Software as a Service

My monthly Onstar email arrived again, great to see. The above image is a snip from that report, you can see that I need to schedule a service appointment. My oil needs changed and tires should be inspected and rotated. OK, that’s great to know, in fact, it was a similar situation to my last Onstar Update. So, if any GM or Onstar folks happen to read this, here are some suggestions that might help your customers and your business:

• Since I’m a subscriber, you know who I am and how to contact me. Why not offer me service appointments at a geographically convenient location with multiple time options? I would welcome this helpful contact until/unless I asked you not to do so. This would bias me toward your service, provide convenience value for me, and make my vehicle last longer.
• How about sending reminder messages as engine oil life heads toward 0? (where it is now. Oh, and, why is it 4% in your report and 0% in my vehicle? Why lag in reporting?)
• What if you asked me about service opportunities when I used other Onstar services or asked questions?
• OK, since you have location information for me (yes, I know you know where I travel) how about using that to arrange a rendezvous with a loaner vehicle to enhance the convenience and increase the probability I would use your service.
• Since you’re collecting data, I’d hope Onstar is analyzing it and preparing to use it. Otherwise, really, what’s the point?

As we release network services for system administrators, I hope our users will provide us with this sort of feedback. My general impression of Onstar thus far is that it’s a good start, but it’s not nearly a fully realized networked vehicle service yet. However, I remain hopeful…..I’ll provide another update next month.

Technorati Tags: Network Services Onstar System Administrator