I ran across MentoringNet in a recent renewal flyer from ACM. I'm interesting in all things mentoring, so I went to look. It's interesting, a matching service for mentors and proteges, but unfortuneately focused on college students mainly. It's also email based (unless you happen to live in the same city I guess). Hard to tell how well it works in practice, but it's at least a start. I wish they'd so something in the hands on technical sector, the jobs we all have! For now I'm going to have to file it under projects I wish I had time to tackle. Posting it here in case anyone is in college or has a child in college, and because maybe it will spur someone to build something really interesting to serve the technical community.

Time moves by and I was surprised to get a coffee mug in the mail from ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) announcing my fifth anniversary as a member, and also received an email with the same message. I joined ACM originally because it was part of a professional development plan posted on www.construx.com (don't see it there now, but they still have professional development plans for developers and project managers) and I've come to value it because it shows a world of computer science way beyond the kind of stuff I do every day! It's $100 a year to be a member so it's not the cheapest resource, but I think it's good value for the money. Does $100/year pay for a $5 coffee cup every 5 years? Sure, but how many organizations would bother?

Take a look at ACM and try it for a year, let me know what you think.

The most recent ACM Queue Magazine (Vol 5 #6, Sep/Oct 2007) had two really interesting articles. The first was about the ZFS file system and was framed as an interview it with the two inventors, both from Sun. I'd seen it mentioned a few times via blog and took the opportunity to learn more. It was interesting to hear that they built the file system to expect hardware errors, to never require a disk check, that they think storage really should be a pool that you can just add (much like a SAN, but at the file system level). They talked about the fact that all drives have defects at start and that errors are always occurring, its just a matter of which ones get passed up to the OS. You can see the article at http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=504&page=1. The second article (same issue) was about HDD's and was written by Jon Elerath of Network Appliance and really went into detail about how drives map and remap to handle errors, how the SMART functioin of drives isnt necessarily that smart, and some other good stuff too! More and more DBA's are insulated from storage but I think its a good idea to have a least some of idea of whats happening in the storage industry and how it relates back to us.