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I'm not sure if there's a way of explicitly testing all of L2 on an x86 chip (it might be vendor-specific, if possible). However, anything that exercises large amounts of memory in certain patterns is liable to test CPU caches to a reasonable degree. I believe memtest86 does enable cache for some of its tests, so it might be a good idea if all you're worried about is L2.

L2 failure is one of those things that should eventually cause obvious instability with many tests and workloads, although the degree of instability can probably vary quite widely.

Some CPUs (e.g. PowerPC) have better specified cache behavior and document specific testing methods.

This may be quite old but I used it as a template for a project at my job. http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/SoulPad/soulpad.html the idea is to boot a small install of linux with necessary drivers and load a vm player. Once the player is loaded you start the xp vm. Gives you a desktop that is extremely hardware agnostic (we built it from Knoppix) and secure (if you include the encryption layer IBM specifies). Once up and running we saw a 5-7% performance hit depending on hardware. Once we started using cpu's with virtualization enabled that went down to 2-5%.

"There are no naked pre-cogs inside glowing jacuzzis yet, but the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!"

Now, consider IBM's press release, which seems to be the only news available on this subject, and is certainly the unlinked source of Gizmodo's fit. Previously, Florida State officials were using Excel macros to sort convicted juvenile offenders into different programs, and now they will use IBM's software to do it. Whether Florida's juvenile prosecutions or unjust or not, whether their programs are effective or not, has no bearing on IBM's part in this.

IBM has sold Florida some statistical analysis software, which they will (apparently) use to stick heavy offenders into more punitive detention programs, saving the spaces in more rehabilitative programs for newer offenders. You may think that that policy is ill-advised as well--but it is perfectly legal. At least the sorting will be (hopefully) less capricious than it was before. IBM is certainly not enabling Florida to enforce "pre-crimes" or anything of the sort. This is not even affecting the judicial sentences. Everyone being analyzed here has already been found guilty by a court.

Prior to predictive analytics, the organization used Excel for basic analysis on projections for the number of delinquency cases they would take in, which had limited functionality. They selected IBM SPSS predictive analytics due to the ease of use and the advanced analytic capabilities.

The organization will now utilize the new predictive analytics system as a component in many of the performance measurement analyses conducted and distributed to agency staff throughout the year. These reports assess the future of delinquency cases to evaluate what juvenile crime trends may look like in the immediate future. This information will help the organization to better plan and project staffing and other resource needs.

IBM recently also announced that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom uses predictive analytics to assess the likelihood of prisoners reoffending upon their release to help improve public safety. With predictive technology from IBM, the Ministry of Justice is analyzing hidden trends and patterns within the data. IBM SPSS predictive analytics has helped identify whether offenders with specific problems such as drug and alcohol misuse are more likely to reoffend than other prisoners.

It sounds like the Ministry of Justice might have something a bit more Orwellian (notice "public safety") in mind, but that will be a story for another day. Now take a deep breath, and control yourselves next time Kdawson posts a link to an inflammatory and ill-informed opinion piece. A worthier title for this event might have been "IBM enables Florida Juvenile Detention System to Become Slightly Less Cruel and Arbitrary."

http://www.watson.ibm.com/index.shtml

In 2009 88% (pdf) of IBM's pre-tax income came from services and software. Sun wasn't making money on the software - it was a value add.

Ten years ago IBM did a strategy shift from hardware to services and software. To buy Sun would mark a new strategy. Maybe it's time, maybe not. I'm thinking IBM didn't think so. This market has a bit more shaking out to do. Apple is now going where IBM once hoped to go, and Sun wasn't a good buy for them either. IBM has the benefit of time. They take the long view. They can - their founders retired 80 years ago and they've successfully transitioned from growth mode to the utilities model. That's a feat one in ten thousand companies achieve.

The IT wars are not over. The tyrants of the new era are gathering their forces. There are now three groups: HP, Cisco, and Oracle. Each hopes to have complete ownership of the server room including network, server, software and storage. Apple may yet choose to get into this fight. If there's a winner, it won't bode well for the rest of us. IBM transcended this fight long ago but there's an outside chance they could still stoop in. The prize is great - it's literally us. I don't think they will.

I think Apple will probably choose to win in the way that's been successful for them - in consumer electronics, content, in expanding ownership of the high end of new consumer markets, and letting other companies fight it out for the low-margin leavings. IBM will bide their time, and strike when the iron is hot. From the wounded they'll take the noblemen and heal their wounds. They'll fix up the folks who've been abandoned by dead or wounded technology providers or failed by active ones and be an isle of reliability in the storm. That's what they do, and they're good at it. They'll make good money, but they won't be the energetic driver of new technologies that they once were. HP does that now.

Power has almost 40% of UNIX market and growing every year. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/migratetoibm/systems/power/getthefacts/intel.html

I will be completely surprised if this works on the PS3 slim.
I understood that one of the ways Sony cut the price and reduced the size for the slim was that they did not include the IBM hypervisor that made the whole thing possible.
(see:
      http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-ps3-1/
      http://www.osnews.com/story/22073/Why_No_OtherOS_Option_on_PS3_Slim_Sony_Answers
for a few more details)

Without the hypervisor, its just not possible.

The reason IBM does this is that they license patents to companies too small to defend themselves and make a great deal of money doing so. My company had to license patents from IBM to stay in business.

I'm afraid you're mistaken for two reasons:

1. "garbage collection" has always been synonymous with "automatic memory management"; your ref-counting scheme is thus GC, albeit not a tracing collector.
2. Bacon et al. established that all GC algorithms are hybrids between reference counting and tracing. Ref-counting provides incrementality, tracing provides throughput and cycle detection.

Your original point was, "BTW, IMHO, all functions that use retain/release semantics should always return retained objects. The alternative is madness." I agree, because you are basically stating exactly what I stated earlier, which is that automatic memory management/GC dramatically simplifies the semantics of abstractions and thus should be pervasive.

Worldwide IBM employees: ~400,000 http://www.ibm.com/ibm/us/en/
US IBM employees: ~109,000 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9169678/IBM_stops_disclosing_U.S._headcount_data

They ARE well below 50%. For the remainder of your post, read IBM's annual report. They are in it for their shareholders. If that constitutes evil, then so be it.

What's _really_ interesting is that IBM instructs students competing the Master the Mainframe contest to download and use Hercules. At least they did in '06.

Incorrect.... as one of the finalists in the contest in 2006, I can say with certainty Hercules was not used in the contest. Rather the site instructed students to download and use the "Vista" terminal emulator software (same as the 2009 contest instructions).

I know this won't be popular, but IBM didn't break their promise. It's actually quite dishonest to say so.

IBM's pledge contains the following terms: "[The pledge] is irrevocable except that IBM
reserves the right to terminate this patent pledge and commitment only with regard to any party
who files a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights against Open Source
Software."

I actually think it's kind of stupid on TurboHercules' part to file an antitrust complaint against IBM and expect to still be covered by the patent pledge.

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf

What's _really_ interesting is that IBM instructs students competing the Master the Mainframe contest to download and use Hercules. At least they did in '06. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/students/contests/mainframe/index.html

Link

Java does basically no mallocs. Obviously there's an initial malloc to allocate the heap to the JVM but after that it's all managed by the JVM itself, and it's been demonstrated as being much faster than a traditional malloc/free approach. Assuming you set your Xms and Xmx sizes correctly the system malloc implementation is basically irrelevant to Java execution speed.

Actually, Java does the complete opposite. Java allocates a large chunk of heap, and then internally allocates its own objects on that heap. because the majority of objects are short-lived, a generational garbage collector can be used. Also, some allocations are done on the stack. See here

The big problem is what happens under 16nm.

Maybe 3D chip stacking will help prolong Moore's law for a while, instead of further miniaturization.

IBM has not defined what a PC is for decades now; they even abandoned it for a while back in the PS/2 days, with the whole MCA and OS/2 debacle. Not to mention they sold their PC division to Lenovo.

"IBM compatible" these days is something running System z.

I know you were talking about cheats -- aka, exploits -- but I was referring to hacking the device itself to run arbitrary code, i.e., 'hacks'. XBox, XBox360, Wii, PS2, PSP -- all have been hacked to my knowledge. The PS3 has not been. Hotz' "PS3 Hack" has only accessed the Hypervisor -- the rest of the system is off limits, and looks like it will stay that way for some time. He still can't access the SPE cores to modify process memory (even if he did, without the root key, I believe it would shut itself down).

Anyway, this article should provide a good overview. I know very little about the PS3, TBH, so take what I say with some skepticism.

It's always nice to see companies following local laws.

Also from the article:
"This section relies largely or entirely upon a single source. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations of additional sources. (February 2010)"

Also, IBM's response:
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/828.wss

Among the several distinct ways to alter Knoppix, the one likely to be of broadest interest is remastering, during which you can substitute your own software for a portion of that on the standard Knoppix CD-ROM

It's a great article. But it's not new.

I referred to it as a reference in something published by developerWorks in 2005.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec12/

Shouldn't "news" be, say, less than HALF A DECADE OLD? Oh, wait. It's kdawson, who has a nearly magical power for making bad decisions.

I'd say just a cheap desktop scrap... try disassembling and debugging an IBM System x3755.

bah... a new /. low ;)

It's nice if it gives you comfort to believe that but the fact is that by the 1920's, IBM had 3 manufacturing sites in Europe. That's a lot more than just "field offices". http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1920.html Fact is, they have been international in both manufacturing and sales for the better part of 100 years.

I've recently been using Mylyn to give me a focussed view on the code I'm working on. I love the way it automatically adds things to the context as I click around.

Then of course there's the rather gorgeous "Run unit tests in context" to give me feedback on the things I've been tinkering with.

One thing that Courier nails is the concept of using both fingers and pen. Go ahead, try it. There are two basic pen positions: a "writing" position that uses all five fingers, and a "resting" position where the pen is rotated 90 degrees, and held in place by a single finger, leaving the other fingers free. The writing position is vertical, resting on the edge of the hand. The resting position is horizontal, palm down.

The Courier UI mockup uses both of these hand configurations and orientations. Flat, horizontal motions such as flipping a page or image dragging are done in the resting position. Vertical motions such as drawing and writing are done in writing position. Switching between the two is very fast and natural-feeling.

Having a pen dispenses with the need for a QUERTY keyboard, but block-printing is not the solution either. For one thing, it's too slow: the average printing speed is about 15wpm. A better solution might be a stylus-based keyboard. Several years ago, IBM invented a shorthand named Shark (commercialized as ShapeWriter, I believe) that was extremely effective. After just a few minutes of practice with it, I was able to achieve 40wpm.

Depending on what you're doing, you could consider using a basic version of IBM Information Archive: http://www.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/archive/
It scales up to 304 TB (Raw Capacity)

We have some, and they work, but if you're a network jock and you have to carry Yet-another-cable-and-dongle in your bag, and something you have to setup each time you touch a kit in person, it gets to be a bit of a pain.

The last laptops I ordered my group for work I got primarly because they were lightweight, long batt, and had a serial port.

Unfortunately I don't see the serial port disappearing anytime soon, as there is way to much kit installed out there that requires it for in-person management. What's neat is on the Cisco network modules has a USB-format looking console cable (top most interface port on the pic) (yes, it plugs into a serial port).. the Serial Port may never die, but I'd be OK with making the format a bit more compact.

The story uses a stock photo captioned "Obsolete mainframe super computers in [Computer History] museum". I don't think the Secret Service uses IBM 2401 magnetic tape units

I'm working on a related system to what he describes towards the end of the article -- something that is a partnership between the individual musician and a the computer, to amplify musical creativity, for the Android Smartphone. It's almost ready to release...

People at IBM Research in the past (a decade ago) also did some things also to amplify musical creativity using computers, but unfortunately did not get as much support as they deserved:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/musicsketcher/
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_seminar.nsf/pages/sem_abstract_186.html

As David Cope says, part of our musical future may well be more about a partnership.

It's been said, "the woods would be pretty quite if no bird sang there but the best". The real reason to do music is because humans are musical creatures, however they want to express it.

The whole issue of "fame" or "income" is linked to dysfunctional social systems and dysfunctional economic systems. The real issue is that we need a "basic income" for everyone to reflect a human right to draw from the industrial material and informational commons, especially because more and more human labor is becoming worth less and less due to increases in automation, better design, and limited demand (as humans get enough stuff and move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualization which often can be done fairly cheaply). More ideas I helped put together here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
And here:
"Ideas for a brickfilm and video games to help avoid a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/cf4ee7f45d631838#

I think we are seeing that now with health care. Much human labor is no longer valuable enough in the USA to earn the money to pay for health insurance -- even as some very few medical specialists who practice medicine or make medical devices (including medical robots) can command vast sums of money for their expertise. Of course, we don't need that many more medical specialists (even if more might be nice), so there is no easy solution to that since we don't need everyone to be a doctor or medical robot maker; so, ultimately, the government will have to intervene more in a dysfunctional marketplace, once the populace moves past the secular religion of "The Market as God".
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
Capitalism won't work well unless wealth is widespread, and that means the government has to step in and keep money flowing. Otherwise, the rich just put excess money into a "Casino economy" of derivatives and currency speculation that has little relation to the real world. See:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

As robots can do more labor, whether creative as in putting together music or physical as in putting together food:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7VUqPE8AE
we will need a completely new economic ideology if we are to survive the irony of real starvation amidst theoretical robot-produced abundance.

People have been talking about this since 1964 and even before:

I'm working on a related system to what he describes towards the end of the article -- something that is a partnership between the individual musician and a the computer, to amplify musical creativity, for the Android Smartphone. It's almost ready to release...

People at IBM Research in the past (a decade ago) also did some things also to amplify musical creativity using computers, but unfortunately did not get as much support as they deserved:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/musicsketcher/
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_seminar.nsf/pages/sem_abstract_186.html

As David Cope says, part of our musical future may well be more about a partnership.

It's been said, "the woods would be pretty quite if no bird sang there but the best". The real reason to do music is because humans are musical creatures, however they want to express it.

The whole issue of "fame" or "income" is linked to dysfunctional social systems and dysfunctional economic systems. The real issue is that we need a "basic income" for everyone to reflect a human right to draw from the industrial material and informational commons, especially because more and more human labor is becoming worth less and less due to increases in automation, better design, and limited demand (as humans get enough stuff and move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualization which often can be done fairly cheaply). More ideas I helped put together here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
And here:
"Ideas for a brickfilm and video games to help avoid a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/cf4ee7f45d631838#

I think we are seeing that now with health care. Much human labor is no longer valuable enough in the USA to earn the money to pay for health insurance -- even as some very few medical specialists who practice medicine or make medical devices (including medical robots) can command vast sums of money for their expertise. Of course, we don't need that many more medical specialists (even if more might be nice), so there is no easy solution to that since we don't need everyone to be a doctor or medical robot maker; so, ultimately, the government will have to intervene more in a dysfunctional marketplace, once the populace moves past the secular religion of "The Market as God".
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
Capitalism won't work well unless wealth is widespread, and that means the government has to step in and keep money flowing. Otherwise, the rich just put excess money into a "Casino economy" of derivatives and currency speculation that has little relation to the real world. See:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

As robots can do more labor, whether creative as in putting together music or physical as in putting together food:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7VUqPE8AE
we will need a completely new economic ideology if we are to survive the irony of real starvation amidst theoretical robot-produced abundance.

People have been talking about this since 1964 and even before:

newer models prevent you from sliding in your card, instead feeding it in automatically in small movements.

Was trying to find a source because I couldn't remember where I had heard this and found :

"The card reader firmware is modified to change the way a card is read. On insertion of the card, it is moved back and forth, at different speeds, while the card reader is reading the information. This process will stop skimmers that require simple motion in order to read the card."

So unfortunately it looks like it will only work if the reader is correctly outfitted.

Exactly, logic says if you don't want it read by the public, don't host it on a public webserver. There are plenty of analogies here, but you're right, there was no lock or even a partially closed door. This doesn't equate well to the physical world unless you want to say they were invited into the room with no door on it, a room filled with artworks, and under a few of the paintings is a small sign with fine print that says 'please don't look at this painting'. Some of us are getting used to standards in web design and may attempt a uri by guess in case that common page is already created to save looking for it. This is not uncommon, so the practice of typing in a uri rather than clicking on links is not a felonious adventure. If you've already seen the painting, the fine print on the little sign is not going to be sufficient security. If you're not sure what I mean, try http://microsoft.com/search or http://ibm.com/search or http://any/ website/search I'm only guessing, but I bet the search box would have found the documents for them also?

There's a difference between implementing proposed components of yet-to-be-gold standards or specifications and implementing whatever the hell you feel like and expecting everyone else to conform. You can see that, can't you?

I work for IBM's Java Technology Center, and we develop IBM JDK for 12 combinations of platform/architecture - 32/64bit each of Windows,Linux* and AIX, z/OS(31/64).....and Linux on p-series(32/64) as well as Linux on System Z (31/64).

* - 64bit Windows/Linux refers to AMD64 not IA64.

I administer a POWER5 dual CPU box used for development that runs RHEL 4. IBM does provide Linux on its own hardware for compatibility/ease of use etc.
You can directly download IBM Linux JDKs here, but for Windows and 32bit Linux you have to get it bundled with the Eclipse developer kit, as those platforms are the same as Sun, and licensing forbids us from directly offering it for download on those platforms other than as part of another product.

I work for IBM's Java Technology Center, and we develop IBM JDK for 12 combinations of platform/architecture - 32/64bit each of Windows,Linux* and AIX, z/OS(31/64).....and Linux on p-series(32/64) as well as Linux on System Z (31/64).

* - 64bit Windows/Linux refers to AMD64 not IA64.

I administer a POWER5 dual CPU box used for development that runs RHEL 4. IBM does provide Linux on its own hardware for compatibility/ease of use etc.
You can directly download IBM Linux JDKs here, but for Windows and 32bit Linux you have to get it bundled with the Eclipse developer kit, as those platforms are the same as Sun, and licensing forbids us from directly offering it for download on those platforms other than as part of another product.

What I really wanted to do was get Linux on it, and Oracle even has a Linux-on-Power version of their database, but there seemed to be some grumbling from the IBM salespeople (according to my boss) that they discourage people from running Linux on Power....I guess you (according to them) need AIX to unleash the real "power" in the PowerPC.

Sigh, okay, whatever. back to Linux on x86-64.

If they don't want people to run Linux on Power, why do they sell these?

You might expect a Power6 to be at a bandwidth disadvantage when compared to the x5560 but when you look at the memory bandwidth specs they're surprisingly close. Once you move up to Power7 you begin to see a big difference.

Xeon x5560 memory bandwidth/chip: 32 GB/s [1]
Power6 memory bandwidth/chip: 32 GB/s (??? This may be wrong. I see references to 50GB/s but I believe that's peak)
Power7 memory bandwidth/chip: 100 GB/s [3]

Actually, PSI was acquired by IBM

USB adoption was slow prior to the release of the Apple iMac which spurred the growth of USB devices.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec7.html

The iMac presented a ready-made market of users who chose the Mac line for its graphics capability. In turn, the iMac offered a captive audience of users who would buy a USB peripheral but would not buy any other kind of peripheral. These users provided a market for USB peripherals that wasn't facing competition from other port choices. The result was a flood of USB devices in white-and-blue plastic. This was a crucial turning point that created a reason (tied to a proven system choice) to prefer USB to non-USB ports.

Exactly. The only thing this does is remove the HV restrictions on the OtherOS. That will in no way allow any sort of manipulation of the GameOS. The sad thing is that George actually believes he unlocked it saying... "The system isn't locked, you have access to everything now. The root key can't be dumped, it can only be used, and is similar to many other crypto engines on platforms that have widely been considered hacked, such as the iPhone and PSP" Obviously he didn't read up on how the Cell BE works and is completely delusional if he thinks it's anything like the iPhone or PSP. It's really not that hard for even a non-technical person to see that getting past the HV doesn't do any good by reading this http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellsecurity/

This is how it works in the specifications I deal with. You start with a set of customer requirements and they go into DOORS which is a crap tool, its just better than all the alternatives. Then from that you generate system specifications which describe your system at a high level and technical specifications which pretty much how it is going to work. At any point you can point and click to trace back to the source of a particular requirement.

Now all of that has nothing to do with climate change (apart from the horrible overhead of those big binary doors files we keep copying around) but the concept is pretty straightforward.

When you write your intermediate and final documents you somehow retain traceability back to the source of the information, so that if one of your conclusions is based on crap assumptions then you can easily identify the problem.

Its not hard. Just takes some experience in fairly professional technical writing. You don't have to use the craptastic tools. I have written doors like functionality into xslt, for example.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/ds8000/index.html

That's IBM, through and through. They finally come up with a good short pronouncable brand name like "WebSphere" and proceed to adorn it with products like "WebSphere ILOG Rule Solutions for Office" and "WebSphere Development Studio Client Advanced Edition for System i" and "WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation for z/OS" and... yeah.

Is the fact that most people program software by theories and think that they will get best performance when they apply their pet theories to a development project.

But what he really is saying is that in order to verify that the solution actually works it's also important to measure how well it works and time each stage in a process. That can actually yield some very surprising results and reveal that you lose a kiloton of performance on something that you never expected to be a problem.

I have several times encountered that kind of problems - network lag, missing database indexes, stupid compiler, horrible third party database libraries, slow disks... All revealed by timing the process.

So it's actually only part of the statistics process - the part where it comes to sampling data and understand it. There is often no need to do standard deviations and things like that when analyzing a software package. Many performance improvements are better than 10% when you tune your solution, rather you can get a 10 times improvement on some operation. But of course there are those that are small too, but those are usually not worth the effort.

And sampling of data can be done with things as simple as print statements or by using a package like Purify Plus.

And no - Zed Shaw isn't a total jerk, that's wrong. But he is a pain in the ass for some people. Especially for project managers and programmers.

He is right about the importance of analyzing a software, but it's not really necessary to plow into the realm of standard deviation and small differences when it comes to analyzing software. But it may be a good knowledge to have when developing a software package since you may not be able to throw your data into Excel for further processing.

And you shall also beware about trying to optimizing too much because one optimization may actually result in worse performance somewhere else. Just check where it will be most efficient from the overall perspective.

here's an example: William H. Maker: lol 5:38:00 PM Whatis Bot *Fu...: Found 9 results. (Buzz) Definitions Found (1) Laugh Out Loud (4) Limitation Of Liability (3) Loss Of Light (2) Laugh Out Loud (1) Laughing Out Loud (1) Lead Overlay Layer (1) List Of Lists (1) Log Of Log (1) Lots Of Laughs ... brought to you by Acrobot. http://acrobot.almaden.ibm.com/

Why am I the one posting this... (sighs) anyway this is all 20-20 hindsight but let it be a lesson to always follow the rules of security (Yes it's on technet, yes MS should follow their own rules). Failure to do so will result in this in this case you failed on.

• Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore
• Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

Regardless, you should get your own hardware in a co-lo you've background checked and have references for. Once you've done that you should do what every respectable admin has been doing for years, turn off direct root access, Set up Public Key Authentication, and for the love of all that is secure turn off password auth for SSH. If you do that then any unauthorized access to your box is in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030 and is punishable under the law.

On the flipside, it has hands-down some of the best documentation on the planet

...except for everything else. If you think PHP.net is nice, then you've never experienced something like pydoc (or any other system that makes it trivially easy - and common - to embed useful comments directly into the source). PHP.net is good for reminding you that foo_bar1($needle, $haystack) has a different calling convention from fooBar2($haystack, $needle) and giving visitors a place to argue about which is better.

Java is THE dominant platform if you want to program anything that works on pretty much all mobile phones on the planet. Apart from the iPhone, and some Windows Mobile phones, I don’t think there is a phone that can’t do Java.

Come to think of it, what WinMo phones can't do J2ME? Yes, it's not in the base platform, but the platform is open, and the development is all native code, so writing (or porting) an efficient JVM shouldn't be a problem, and it could be installed on any WinMo phone.

In fact, a quick Google search finds a bunch of existing J2ME-on-WinMo implementations, some commercial and some free, including one made - of all companies - by IBM (?!).

So presumably any WinMo phone can run J2ME apps, once you install the runtime. Or am I missing something?

Great question. Got me to thinking there must be an Eclipse or Firefox plugin for that. Found a few I'll have to check out now. MyLyn looks promising from IBM http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn1/ though it seems to more programming oriented than what you do.

For FireFox, maybe Quick ToDo list https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11386 or Time Tracker https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1887

Set up a quick Drupal http://www.drupal.org/ site with pages you can privately blog to as an online notebook. Use Time Tracker in Firefox to track time on each task page.

I dunno - just made all this up.