Wow, it’s been quite hard to find a few minutes with nothing else to do than open this Write Post page… So, I’ve been doing lots of things since Nov 13…

• Spent two weeks in Guadeloupe with Clo, this was our wedding gift, so many thanks to everyone! We had a great time, nice hot weather, nice places, impressive vegetation and landscapes (especially La Soufrière, the local volcano), nice and helpful people, and a great hotel… The only thing that’s been annoying at times is the rental car we got, a brand new Citroen C1… It seems nice, but it was underpowered (43hp, quite hard to reach the top of the hills) and under-equiped (the interior light doesn’t light up when the passenger’s door is opened, for example…), not even mentioning the « trunk » where we couldn’t even put our single luggage. The trunk’s 30 centimers deep…
• got back to work, seen friends, organised some Guadeloupean dinners with them, and had my birthday party.
• caught up with Claws’ development, Paul and Tristan have been busy fixing bugs, finishing the rename process, and implementing cool stuff in the adressbook. Catching up mostly means reviewing patches, which were greatly readable and clean – so that’s been a delight :-) -, updating CVS, recompiling everything, and testing… Paul released 2.6.1 a few days after I’ve been back, which fixes a lot of bugs I managed to sneak in 2.6.0, so our last release is a good one.
• went to watch Casino Royale, the latest James Bond movie, which takes place at the beginning of Bond’s life as a double-zero agent. It’s packed with explosive action, as most modern Bond movies (I prefer the old ones, but they don’t do new old ones, too bad…), and it explains the roots of some of the usual Bond thingies. Fun.
• and finally, today, racked 32 servers into their two 42U bays. At 35 kgs each, I shuffled 1.1 metric ton of stuff around today, and I’m feeling like shit… Once everything’s plugged in, that’ll be our most impressive cluster: 1 terabyte of storage per node, means 32TB for the whole cluster, with GBEth and Infiniband interconnects. And with them, we’ve reached 100 test nodes. I love that work :-) Concerning the racking process, I want to thank Dell for the crappy, idiotic packages they make. The interesting stuff is hard to take out, it’s filled with useless things that should be sold as options (like extending arms where you can put cables in, making the cable management awful as though it looks like it’d be better), and I’ve had 32 boxes of rack rails to unpack, with 32 rack rails installation manuals in ten languages. Then in the 32 nodes’ boxes, I found 32 user manuals in ten languages, 32 server doors, and 32 installation CDs. What a waste of time to sort all of this, and what an ecological waste.