Feeding The Machine

So, I was lamenting my lack of a decent place to put my headphones at work the other day. I decided it would be nice to have a hook on the side of the cabinet above my desk, but alas, I lacked a hook. To the office supply closet! One binder clip and extra large “super paperclip” later and we have:

Yay! Nothing beats the instant gratification of using office supplies in ways they were never intended…

I’ve moved my blog over to a self-maintained Wordpress setup. If you see this, you are looking at the new site. Oh, RSS might be broken too. Gonna have to update that I suppose. Anyway, if you can’t figure it out or something looks terribly wrong, email me. qhartman@gmail.com

So, the Internet has been full of people from all sides talking about what I’m beginning to think of as the most ironic IT failure ever. I mean really, would you trust your data to a company called “Danger”?

For those not paying attention, last week someone attempted to do some work on the servers that hold the data of every T-Mobile Sidekick customer. That person or persons really dropped the ball, and all that data is gone, possibly for good. This is clearly a pretty big deal. Lots of questions are being asked, one of the more amusing ones being, “Who is really responsible? T-Mobile or Danger / Microsoft?”. That should be entertaining to watch shake out. A lot of people are also arguing over whether or not calling this a “Cloud failure”, as in “Cloud Computing” as in “The Cloud” that everyone is supposed to be buying into, is fair or not.

The opponents to this view are saying that the infrastructure in question was not a cloud infrastructure, so this is not a cloud failure, but simply a very visible normal IT failure. And technically, they’re right. But guess what? That doesn’t matter. This feels like a cloud failure. The service is the model of a cloud application. I have my device “here”, but all my data, all the stuff I really care about is “out there”. Where supposedly it is getting taken good care of. Not the case this time.

I really feel for the people who are investing a lot of time and effort into getting cloud computing into the mainstream. Seeing this labeled a cloud failure must be infuriating. Because it’s not. But very few people, especially tech news people looking for headlines, are going to care about that. The Sidekick model is undeniably a “cloud” model, even if it’s got normal IT guts. Maybe that is why this is a cloud failure. It’s not a failure of a cloud computing infrastructure, but a design failure where a cloud application was run on a non-cloud infrastructure?

In any case, the whole cloud concept just got a big black eye, deserved or not, and it’s going to take a lot of work to shake it off. Particularly in the minds of the people who matter most, the non-techies who ultimately pay the bills.

So, ABC shows are available on Hulu now. Never doubt the power of complaining to the Internet! I’m sure my earlier post was instrumental in their decision.

Went Geocaching this weekend. Meant to try this out for ages, but only just now got to it. Turns out it’s a lot of fun. Totally addictive. I feel a new hobby coming on. Yay! Liz talks about it more over at Modern Crafter.

In other news, it seems that it has become the fashion among OSS contributers / bloggers / fans whatever to get offended on the behalf of other people for things that are said in conference presentations. The latest was an apparently off-hand ( can’t say for sure, I wasn’t there ) comment made by Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxCon. Talking about how things in Linux need to be improved to make it easier for him “to explain things to girls”.

This is something that I find irritating. Seriously people. Has our society really gotten to the point that we can’t let people stand up for themselves, and we have to assume offense for them? I suppose it’s possible that these people are genuinely themselves offended, but I find that unlikely. In any case, there are better ways to deal with it than demanding apologies in public spaces. How self important, petulant, and egotistical is that? I would say more, but a very eloquent summary of my thoughts has already been written over here.

The user experience of watching shows on your website sucks. Even on supported platforms, having to click through the ads is a pain. Why not let Hulu do it for you? They’re better at it.

Liz and I went on an impromptu field trip north today for berry picking and ended up stopping in Aurora. Really cool little town. Pictures up at Flickr. Liz will certainly be posting her highlights over there shortly. The highlights for me were finding a good deal on a 16GB micro SDHC and a real nice butane soldering iron / heat gun at Fry’s.

I help organize (peripherally, Hal really does 90% of the work) a local IT group called the IT Pro Forum. A couple months ago I did a presentation on the fundamentals of Subversion; what it is, why you might use it, etc. Pretty basic stuff. Unfortunately, the audience was already pretty familiar with VCS systems, and in a lot of cases SVN in particular so I don’t think the presentation went very well. In an attempt to keep it valuable I pretty much threw away the content I planned on presenting and dove into more advanced stuff that I hadn’t really prepared for. It ended up being an interesting “conversation” though, and I learned a bit, so it turned out ok in the end.

And now, finally, I am getting my slides up. I’m a slacker, I know. Mea culpa!

IT Pro Subversion Fundamentals

Tom Limoncelli put up yet another nice thoughtful post on measuring the performance of a sys admin team this morning. He talks about meeting SLAs, and that greatly exceeeding an SLA is a bad thing. I appreciate his logic here. Towards the end he remarks,

“Similarly, if they want to save money you can respond with scenarios that include fewer upgrades (higher risk of security problems, less productivity due to the opportunity cost of lacking new features) or by accepting a lower SLA due to an increase in outages.”

In slightly clearer terms what he’s saying here is, “If you want to stay on the cutting edge, you are going to have more downtime.”. This is something that I think a lot of people, particularly people in management, don’t often realize. This can be mitigated by running parallel systems, but the expense of that (both hard costs and soft) is rarely justified. Of course, this makes perfect sense once it’s pointed out. Truly seamless upgrades are hard to do. In many cases, they simply aren’t possible. To the sysadmins out there, next time you need to upgrade a service, don’t forget to remind people that there’s likely going to be an avaialbility sacrifice to be made. And to the managers, remember to account for that downtime when deciding whether or not an upgraade is worth it.

When I heard the latest from Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton this morning talking about how terrible the Internet is, I thought to myself, “Techdirt is going to have a field day with this…”. While I gleefully awaited Mike Masnick’s response, I thought about some of the possible angles that could be used to take Lynton’s stance apart, and came up with more than a few. Mike did not disappoint, dismantling most of Lynton’s argument more or less point-by-point. Good times. Sometimes I wonder how these people got into the positions of power thay they occupy.