My things

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 27 March 2026 While working in New Zealand, my employer received several IBM enterprise-storage systems. The platforms were shared across multiple technology groups: the mid-range UNIX team; the Windows environment; and the mainframe organisation. A shared storage platform serving such different consumers needs to satisfy a wide range of performance, consistency, resilience and compatibility requirements. I wanted to understand how the systems behaved in practice, so I began running performance tests and comparing the results with other storage platforms available in the environment. The results were puzzling. Peak performance appeared to be capped at approximately the I/O throughput of a single Fibre Channel disk. For a storage system of that class, this made little sense. The hardware contained multiple drives, controllers, cache and paths. The measured result did not reflect the parallel capability suggested by the physical platform. ...

Business concept: This article is associated with my business idea for a Digital Security Twin. Why cybersecurity must move beyond alert severity and start understanding consequences A security team receives two new findings. The first is a vulnerability classified as critical. It affects an old server inside a tightly restricted development environment. The server contains no sensitive data, cannot be reached from outside the environment, and has no privileged connection to production systems. The second finding is classified as moderate. It affects a small internal service that few people recognise by name. However, that service is trusted by several applications, uses an identity with extensive permissions, and has an indirect relationship with an important customer-facing platform. Which one should be fixed first? The obvious answer appears to be the critical vulnerability. Its severity score is higher, its description sounds more alarming, and it may already be attracting ...

 

Today was another of those days when the renovation of our house managed to consume a substantial part of the day without us actually doing anything that would look particularly dramatic in a photograph. There was no new wall appearing, no roof disappearing and no major piece of construction machinery involved. Instead, we moved boxes, cleaned things, threw old things away, tested the new dishwasher and generally tried to transform another small part of a construction project into something that begins to resemble a home. These days are less spectacular than the major stages of a renovation, but I am beginning to think they are just as important. There comes a point when a renovated house has to stop being a collection of completed building jobs and start becoming a place where we can actually live. The kitchen finally starts becoming a kitchen We had quite a lot of kitchenware stored away in boxes, some of it for a very long time. Today we started moving a good par...

By the time Saturday was finally winding down, it was already well past 22:00. The New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc I had unexpectedly found in a Moldovan supermarket earlier that evening was now open beside me. I had a computer in front of me, a nice bottle of wine within reach and, more importantly, the entire Internet available for entertainment. There are probably more sensible ways to spend a Saturday night. I opened my family-tree database. That was the end of any realistic prospect of going to bed at a reasonable hour. The doctor with three wives One of the important unresolved points in the German side of my family tree concerns my great-grandfather — the father of my German grandfather. He was a medical doctor and, over the course of his life, had three wives. That much I knew. What happened around those marriages, however, had become obscured by the usual family fog that accumulates when information is passed verbally from one generation to ...

On Saturday evening, after what had already been a very long day dealing with the renovation of our house in central Chișinău, we made one final stop at a local supermarket. The objective was extremely simple: buy some wine, go back to Vita's parents' house and finally stop doing things for the day. Moldovan supermarkets are certainly not short of wine. Quite the opposite. The shelves can be packed with bottles from local producers, covering everything from very inexpensive everyday wines to considerably more ambitious bottles. So I was walking past what was, by now, a fairly familiar wall of wine when something caught my attention. New Zealand. I stopped and looked again. There, among all those bottles in a supermarket in Moldova, was a 2025 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, branded Blue Horizon . I had not been looking for New Zealand wine. In fact, I had absolutely no expectation of finding any. That was precisely why seeing it...