Well it seems my service provider, 1&1 has finally got the server with my content back up. It was quite frustrating because they never contacted me and when I contacted them the standard response was, it is a known issue and we have no further explanation. To make things worse they never sent me to a page to check on status or e-mailed me with updates unless I asked. I found out my site was up again by simply checking it every morning. It boggles the mind and makes me think they had some accident and didn’t want to fess up to it. Four days without an explanation is unacceptable.
However, in the four years I have been with them this is the first major hiccup but now they are on notice. If it happens again I may need to take my business elsewhere.
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Well perhaps not but I am taking off this weekend to a place I have been in spitting distance of but have never crossed the border. I find it strange that I have been all around the world and to almost every state in America and still have not bothered to visit our kind neighbours to the north. So with my roommates Bryan and Chris leaving this summer for far off jobs we decided to take a trip with a bunch of friends up to Montreal. I went down to NY last weekend for mothers day and to swap my car for my parents van just for this trip. It should be fun.
Oh and Les Halles, Anthony Bourdain’s home base, is fantastic. If you are down in New York City and in midtown I highly recommend it
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I’m not going to get into details because I have no interest in a pissing match but I am sure anyone who has been in any large Open Source project has had to deal with poisonous people. It sucks even more when that poisonous person trumpets themselves and actually has an audience of easily gullible listeners who’s eyes have wool pulled over and ears, cotton shoved into. It sucks yet even more when that person leaves the project, and then becomes self proclaimed pundit of the project, proclaiming to have the cure to all ills, as the person proclaimed when part of the project as well. And the total suck comes from the fact that that person, who was at first a trusted member of the project and given much responsibility, who failed on almost every single one of their given tasks, is one of the main reasons for any issues which said person now sells the cure for. We call people like this snake oil salesmen, charismatic people with no morals other than their own desire to get ahead at any cost, and it suck to see people like this still exist and still can pull one over on the masses. This day is the suxor.
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…and say hello to Cappuccino in a Cloud.
The Red Hat “Boston” office just moved into new diggs down the street from our old office space. This is the second move we have made since I got here four years ago and a needed one as the company continues to grow at a steady pace. Inevitably the discussion of coffee makers comes up every time we make a move (and quite frequently in the interim too) with a new coffee gadget showing up shortly after. We opted for the Flavia drink station this time around. This brings up the issue that any new gadget presented to a large audience will inevitably see high traffic for the first few days before the novelty wears off and the traffic reduces to a steady level of consumers.
There are many questions that need to be considered here. Will the machine stand up to the first few weeks of abuse? If it was engineered for a high peak capacity is it still economical to run when that traffic has fallen off? Do we just accept that the first few weeks will see some breakdowns, pissed customers who will not come back because of the failed experience and keep on chugging with the knowledge that our initial costs were low? If coffee making could be parallelized could it scale up and down economically and efficiently?
This is the Cappuccino in a Cloud problem. How do you make processes efficient and scalable for both high load peak and the inevitable lower day to day traffic? The travelling salesman problem dealt with efficiencies of one single entity (the salesman) finding the most efficient (read cheapest) single threaded route through a number of destinations. In today’s word the consumer comes to the buisness or service, sometimes all at once, and it is important to figure out the most efficient way (measured in the consumer’s satisfaction and producer’s bottom line) to handle that load.
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