I have been working on my office furniture. I have a big (6′ x 7′3” x 10”) bookcase and the start of a desk and a credenza. I need to get legs for the desk and credenza.

I am helping out for a dance concert Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 4:30pm at the Henry St John Gymnasium at the Corner of Clinton St and Geneva St, Ithaca NY.

See ya there.

I am really eager to own a house. I would actually enjoy doing home improvement and gardening. It’s hard to get excited about doing these things with a rental. I am in the process of buying a house in Ithaca, NY and I will stay at least two years, possibly more.

I came across some articles on home prices — http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/fyi/2005/021005fyi.html it appears that prices do not descend that much, and they tend to decline in large markets. I expect that the Ithaca market will stay flat at worst, since Ithaca is growing as a high-tech city.

Here’s some data on historical evidence of home price booms and busts: http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/fyi/2005/021005fyi_table1.pdf

These downturns tend to follow years of stagnant or negative economic activity. http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/fyi/2005/021005fyi_table2.pdf

I have been criticized a lot for staying in Ithaca, and have received very little support for staying — except from people whose opinion I value very highly. My current plan is to stay around, buy a little house, and have a day job doing some interesting programming while I figure out what to do. I am considering becoming an english professor or a high school english teacher, and a few other things. I want to embark on meaningful work. That said, I am still programming like a maniac and would make a good employee in the interim.

In the innermost circle of my pet peeve inferno repose those unlucky souls who bemoaned the $5 per month to have wireless access through Lightlink at almost every coffeehouse, restaurant and bar in town (excepting Starbucks, of course, but that’s another story). If we didn’t have Lightlink, we would have a patchwork of more expensive and annoying services from big corporations; and these services wouldn’t have any free access time at all.

So pay the $5 per month, people, if you can afford it. It’s not much more than the cost of two lattes…

Due to my close industry connections, several months ago I heard that local Ithaca NY internet service provider Lightlink planned to purchase a supercomputer and rent out processing time. It appears that I can rip up my NDA, so to speak, since there’s an article in the Ithaca Times this week about this project.

It seems that it’s more of a cluster than a supercomputer, though. There’s a lot of talk about the number of CPU’s (1000 to start). It’s probably a Beowulf (wikipedia) cluster. (Geeks — feel free to weigh in with speculation on hardware, software and/or performance in tthe comment section). This approach is suited to applications that are parallelizable in in which each execution thread is mostly accessing a small set of local memory — I know of applications where the memory required would be in the order of tens of GB, and the execution thread would be accessing this in an unpredictable manner, so all of the memory needs to be fast.

Google’s servers are mostly clusters of commodity PC’s — but Google’s applications parallelize very well [The famous Google IEEE paper, now getting a bit out of date].

I was going to say something about the energy cost of 1000 CPU’s — using the numbers in the google paper, it might be something like $120,000 per year. But that paper is a few years to of date, and nowadays there are 2 or 4 CPU’s on a single chip that uses the same amount of energy, so perhaps it could be a factor of 5 lower — perhaps $24,000 per year.

Who’s doing web consulting in Ithaca? It’s sometimes not entirely clear. Here are some people I know:

Here’s a start:

• KnowledgeTown (also Elucid8Design) – I subcontract for them.
• SpiderGraphics
• Singlebrook Technologies
• Gorges Web Sites – I promised when writing this post that I wouldn’t be biased. These people really have their stuff together, and their work is awesome. I broke my promise.
• World Design
• Ancient Wisdom Productions
• Pixel (ok…not a web design company, but Jim the owner is a programmer)