This & That

This & That

Making movies at Lucasfilm

At the recent Linux World Conference in San Francisco, Kevin Clark, director of IT operations at Lucasfilm, described the processing power needed for the company’s latest films. At the new digs at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, within the Presidio of San Francisco, Mr. Clark watches over a 10,000 sq ft data center.

Running Linux, Unix, and, Windows, the center has 400 Tbytes of network attached storage (NAS). It is home to 400+ 10G Ethernet ports, a whopping 10,000 1G Ethernet ports, and another 10,000 10/100G ports, and it has 700 miles of fiber and 2,000 miles of copper data cable.

‘Dating’ on Google

I few months ago I noted that while the Google search engine is great, it has one big flaw in that it does not show the date of the items in its result list. Now that has changed but you have to know how to do the search. If you select “Advanced Search” on the main page and then click the + sign by “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more,” you can select a date range. The great thing is the results now show the date in front of every item. Wonderful! Unfortunately, the articles real date does not always match the listed date, but this is still a big improvement.