Today I got my new workstation shipped in from Apple, a dual quad-core Westmere Xeon running at 2.4 GHz with 26GB of RAM. This is the first time I've ever opened up a Mac Pro and my god, is this thing is beautiful. I've never seen the inside of a computer look so nice and well organized. Everything is machined aluminum and the only wires visible are the power to the 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770 card. The CPU backplane pulls out from the bottom exposing the sci-fi-esque CPU heat sinks and 8 memory slots, which I promptly filled up with 6 4GB Corsair sticks and a pair of stock 1 gig'ers.

A couple of days ago I was tasked with figuring out what was causing excessive memory usage in a Java application. Unfortunately, we are stuck running on a 32 bit platform, so no matter how much RAM is available on the machine, we are limited to 2GB of addressable memory, and we have been hitting that lately. After dumping a 2GB heap with jmap, I pulled it into my old friend Netbeans to start poking around (later I found that jvisualvm is the same interface).

After being my trusty steed for the last few years, I've finally sold my 1996 Suzuki DR650 to a friend that I used to work with. I honestly hadn't ridden it since I got my Aprilia, which is much more fun, but the DR was much more reliable... As long as I kept the battery up, which was not always the case.

Of all of the aircraft I've had the opportunity to fly, this one is my favorite.

Video of Greg and I riding Rampart Range. I'm on the red Aprilia RXV450, Greg is riding his Suzuki DRZ400.

When I was first learning database programming I thought that triggers were the coolest thing. Fire off some code when some specific modification happened on a table... Oooh, the possibilities were endless! In Oracle, you could do row-level triggers, where if you update 10 rows in a single shot, your trigger code got execute 10 times, with a couple of variables that represented the old and new versions of the row that changed. So simple.

Albeit a bit early, today I'm kicking off a new site to make public all the things in my life that I feel people might actually be interested in. Things like programming, security, hardware hacking, motorcycles and aviation. I also wanted to play with web development a bit, since my entire career has been focused on back-end and SQL development.

So here it is... markmanes.com. There should be much more to come so stand by, hold on, or just find another site to browse for a while until I get things up and running.