Data + Models == Insight

Al Bundy, of the TV show Married with Children, understood it and performance engineers should too. What am I talking about? The theme music for that show is the tune "Love and Marriage" as sung by Frank Sinatra. Just like the song says about love and marriage, so it is with measurements and models ... You can't have one without the other.

Gunther Interview - Part II

As a consequence of winning the A.A. Michelson Award at CMG'08, I was interviewed for CMG MeasureIT e-zine. The second installment appears in this month's issue. Free access, but requires sign-up if you're not already registered.


As you can see, I still have my Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, although it's showing signs of wear by now. It's open at the one experiment I could never get to work; making rayon. I'm now inclined to think there might be a bug in the recipe, but that never occurred to me back then. I just wanted to make it in the worst way.

Gunther Interview - Part I

As a consequence of winning the A.A. Michelson Award at CMG'08, I was interviewed for CMG MeasureIT e-zine. The first installment appears in this month's issue. Free access, but requires sign-up if you're not already a member.

Michelson Comes Home to California

At the CMG conference in Las Vegas last December, I was presented with the A.A. Michelson Award. It actually consists of 2 pieces: a framed citation, which you can see (and hear President Cathy Nolan reading) in the video of the ceremony, and a wooden plaque with lots of brass bits on it; including a ruler for performance measurement. :-)

NorCal CMG Meeting Location

For those of you who haven't attended before, the Feb 3rd (Tues) meeting of the Northern California CMG will be held in Suite 100 of the Compuware building in Pleasanton, California. Here's the Google map. Three talks will be presented:

• 9:30--10:30 Mongo Measurement Requires Mongo Capacity Management, Neil Gunther, Performance Dynamics Company
  
• 10:45--11:45 Wasted MIPS, Wanton MIPS: a MIPS Recovery Initiative, Tom Halinski, Compuware Corporation
  
• 1:00--2:00 The Apdex Index Revealed, Neil Gunther, Performance Dynamics Company
  

Breakfast starts at 8:30 am and registration is $25 at the door.

NorCal CMG Meeting Feb 3, 2009

If you're in the neighborhood, I'll be giving two talks:

1. "Mongo Measurement Requires Mongo Capacity Management"
   
2. "The Apdex Index Revealed"
   

at the next meeting of the Northern California Computer Measurement Group.

New Quantum Camera

Information is physical because it takes energy to create it and transform it. Instead of the digital bits that you're used to thinking about in the terrestrial computing world, quantum information technologies (QIT) involve encoding information as quantum bits or qubits. The photon has turned out to be a very amenable quantum particle for encoding qubits. For anyone following my progress in the world of QIT, here's the latest. Our invited paper: "A Quantum Imager for Intensity Correlated Photons," which describes a new type of camera has now been published in the European open-access publication New Journal of Physics.

Gunther Receives A.A. Michelson Award

At the annual CMG International Conference in Las Vegas last week, Dr. Neil Gunther was the recipient of the prestigious A.A. Michelson Award; the industry's highest honor for computer performance analysis and capacity planning. As he said in his acceptance speech, it was the fulfillment of a dream he had entertained at his first CMG Conference in 1993.