Yet Another Reading List

So, apparently I'm a geek with what I read. Anyway, the following books have literally changed the way I see the world. I'd welcome suggestions on what to add to this list. The Beauty Myth, while I don't agree with all her theses, Naomi Wolf has some brilliant insights into the minds of women. I wish I'd read this before getting into my first serious relationship since I think it would have helped. Not by any means a light read though. Manufacturing Consent, the DVD version. It's also available as a book, but I actually think that for this particular set of ideas, video is a more effective transport. Again, this isn't easy going, but the ideas are disruptive. If you want some insight into the relationship between media and money, this is a good place to start. Hegemony or Survival, also by Noam Chomsky. An examination of American foreign policy that's painful to read, and very thoroughly referenced. I dream of the day when Chomsky puts together an accessible primer on the subject, but until then, this will have to do. The Rebel Sell by Heath and Potter helped me put some words to my discomfort with the whole "counter culture", radicalism and other flavours of rebellion. If you ever wondered why our much lamented consumerist culture doesn't seem to be affected in any way by the endless efforts of culture jamming and ad-busting, this might provide some ideas. Once I got past the self-congratulatory style of the text, I found this book quite accessible and a relatively easy read. Apparently it's also available in America under the title Nation of Rebels.

Antennae for my FT8900

Ok, so I've already got my little Comet dual band daily driving antenna, and a Comet SBB5NMO dual bander with decent gain for both bands for when I'm "keeping it under 80". Eventually I'd like to find a parked / moving very slowly and carefully antenna, or maybe two. My mount type is NMO. So far contenders are: Diamond SG7900 (2m 5.0dBi / 70cm 7.6dBi) 600g, 1.58m HUGE and heavy, no NMO? Diamond CR627NMO (6m 2.15dBi / 2m 4.5dBi / 70cm 7.2dBi) 450g, 1.51m (does 6m!) Diamond CR8900 (10m/6m/2m 2.15dBI / 70cm 5.5dBi) 490g, 1.26m (gains kinda suck, but does 10m!) Comet UHV-4 (about the same as the Diamond CR8900) Maybe I should just do a 6m or 10m dipole. Of course that would have to be a stationary antenna. I guess I could pull the radio out of my car and set it up at home some how. It's not like I ever use it in the car, and the mount, while very professional, is a little noisy sometimes. Then I'd have a ham radio at home that I almost never use. Yay!

Cluster Filesystems

Apparently these things are out of the lab and ready for production. Or at least that's what the marketing departments are saying. I'm going to use this post to keep track of investigations into the following file systems, with the hope of separating reality from hype. Eventually this might even turn into a proper article. But probably not.

1. ADIC SNFS
2. IBM GPFS
3. CFS Lustre

If you know me, then the goal will be obvious: finally a reliable, scalable, high performance file system upon which to host high availability PostgreSQL databases.