Glass “whiteboard”

Back when I worked for Frontier/Global Crossing, my cow orkers who had window offices often used them as whiteboards. That impressed me as such a good idea that when I went to SunGard and had a window office, I started doing the same thing myself.

Today, I needed to hash out some big diagrams, transaction diagrams and XML with a couple of other guys, and since none of us had very big whiteboards in our office, I suggested we use the windows in the break room. The people I was meeting with didn’t believe me at first, but went along with it once I demostrated that it wipes off as easily as on a whiteboard. But everybody who came into the break room while we were at work stared in disbelief and made sarcastic remarks.

Is using a window as a whiteboard really that unusual?

Some network benchmarks

I wanted to see how fast my rack is. Now, I think that one of my shares is doing a bittorrent at the same time, so this is a conservative test. For most of these, I’m doing a wget of the Rochester Road Runner speed test file at http://speedtest.rochester.rr.com/testlarge.zro

  • From RR.com to my home machine: 19:12:13 (392.85 KB/s)
  • From RR.com to my rack: 19:02:44 (493.74 KB/s)
  • From my rack to my home machine: 20:00:30 (364.74 KB/s)

(Yeah, I know the times and the given KB/s values don’t make sense. I just report them as wget reports them.)

That’s not bad. I think it shows that the rack system can keep the 10BaseT network connection pretty saturated. Both up and down.