An Engineering Group in Marketing?

Some lucky folks got to watch a space shuttle launch from a passing Air Canada flight. And they videotaped it too! I imagine the experience was much better in person, but it still conveys the excitement.

That's one thing on my big "to do" list - seeing a space shuttle launch from up-close-and-personal. I've always wanted to do that since I was a kid and my dad worked for Rockwell. I got to take a tour of the facility that built the shuttles here in California. It was truely amazing. At one point the tour guide pointed out that we were standing on the wing and the wall on the left was the shuttle's skin. Freaky stuff. I even watched them gluing on the shuttle tiles (talk about stunningly boring - it took at that point about 30 min to glue on one tile) Of course, I better get a move on - the shuttle is scheduled for retirement in 2010!

via [PointNiner]

This has got to be the coolest photosynth software I've ever seen. Changes between night and day, provides real-time navigation through a series of photos, etc. I wonder where I can get it?

I asked my operations manager to run some stats to determine the number of servers we have in production, and the results provided a pretty interesting graph... And very good justification for the increasing size of the operations group. It may not seem like a lot of servers in the larger scope of websites (some people running thousands of servers) but if you realize that most of the applications we run are on very few servers (2-6), suddenly it looks like a much bigger problem.

It's been a busy day today, OpenSolaris was announced and the downloads started coming in fast and furious. It overwhelmed our bandwidth locally, so we shifted our traffic to one of our CDN providers. I'm happy that we've built into most of our systems the ability to shift traffic dynamically. It allows me to balance budget vs. performance in near real-time. Ok, it's still not where I want it (where I can just tweak some knobs and have things magically work), but it's really dang close. 

Rama asked me after we fixed the problem "How did you know it was bandwidth?", to which I replied - "Experience". Ok, it was experience and paranoia - I watched the server dashboard light up (in a bad way) and I was thinking "gee, I wonder if OpenSolaris is going to get hit hard this AM..." Checked the network bandwidth graphs and sure enough, we were seeing some ugly flat spots, way up at 961mb/s. Yep, nearly a gigabit/second was being driven through the infrastructure.

Good news is the firewalls, load balancers, et. al. were doing fine; just couldn't go any faster. So Joe shifted some traffic to our CDNs and presto, we're back in operating territory.

From a link on slashdot, the 2008 submarine cable map 

I find with all the social media sites like twitter, facebook, linkedin and my personal blog, I'm not getting much time to blog for work. Well, that and figuring how much of the seedy underbelly of hosting the high volume websites for Sun I can really talk about (expose :)...

In some cases, I'd love to share parts of the hosting process/environment/challenges but the details I'd have to share might be considered security concerns. So instead, I just share what I can. Oh well.


 

How Not To Roll Cable Up Stairs - Watch more free videos

Just watched the space shuttle Atlantis land - cool to see as always; nice safe landing. When I was a kid, I'd watch all the Apollo missions I was allowed to watch. It was fascinating to me. What happened to the space program? Where did it go? I rarely see anything about the space program on the news (other than literally the last minute of the landing).

I guess it's a bit like watching paint dry for most people - "look, there's no gravity here... I'm drinking gatorade that's floating around the capsule..."

How do you balance work at your job? I have the traditional work that is my job, then I have the "other work" that I do because we're swamped, then I have the "fun" work I do that's related to my regular work, but not quite the same.

For example, my regular work is Director of the Web Platform Engineering group. I have a bunch of managers that report to me to run the actual projects. I keep on top of the projects through reporting and various other means. I set the strategy, interact with my other peers in my organization and throughout Sun. I do vendor negotiations for hosting space, support services, hardware evaluations, etc. Lots of work.

Then there's the "other work" - trying new technologies  because I was (gah, I have to say was, really) an engineer at one point and I used to write code every day. So I test certain things out as the core engineering group is swamped with day-to-day plus project work. So I try things like virtualization, early releases of Nevada (Solaris v.next), virtual appliances, various strange opensource software like joomla, drupal and other things.

Then I do the "fun" work - little projects for my boss Curtis (responsible for Customer Experience across the company). We're evaluating things like packaging for servers (you know, the boxes), how things fit together, etc. I never thought that could be fun, but it *is*. I get to buy and open server products from lots of other companies, and the thing I'm finding is that Sun puts together a really nice package. Ok, there's some work to be done on the number of boxes, but dang, if you've not racked one of our new x4450s, you don't know what you're missing. The rack kit *snaps* into a square hole rack. 30 seconds. It took me much longer to drag my boss in and show him the rack kit than it did to install the entire server. I can tell you an apple x-serve doesn't work that way (8000 screws on the floor, nothing fits really really well, the rack kit is *sharp* too...). I've gotten so used to having LOM available, I flat out don't know what to do when it's not there. People walk around with keyboard and monitors? What the heck is that about?

Wait, I was talking about balance. Yeah, that's it. Balance. It's hard to scale back on the things you like to do to get the required things done. But that's what you have to do. Someday I'll figure out an algorithm that provides the most amount of "fun," while still getting all the required bits out of the way. Or I can get up at 5am every morning. Dang. I do that already.

The other weekend I took my kids to the San Francisco Center for the Book on one of their Family Bookmaking Days. 

Wow. What a tremendous program. My daughter (5), is fascinated with making books, and this was pretty much heaven for her. She made 2 books in about 90 minutes. We probably would have done more if it wasn't (a) crowded as all get out and (b) lunchtime :)

The entire day was sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation and a national grant as well. Of course, my son (4) had a great time too - he was particularly fascinated by the printing presses, the typefaces (they have an entire wall of lead type) and a guillotine (for cutting *paper*). They were using the guillotine and we watched that for at least 10 minutes, talking about how it could easily cut fingers just like it was cutting that 1/2 inch thick stack of paper...

I hope they have another session soon - it was really fun!

I listen to KQED (NPR in the SF/bay area) regularly on my drive to/from work. Boring, yes, but heck, I don't get the newspaper any more as it was going from the front door to the back with no stop in between... My two small kids seem to take up any time I used to have to read the paper...

Anyway, this morning I heard a great show about tactile maps.

Human beings have
used maps to describe the world for thousands of years. Blind people
have used braille for about 150 years, but there's never been a way for
the blind to have easy access to maps of everyday places. Until now.

Essentially they're using a braille printer to make maps of neighborhoods. The tremendous organization Lighthouse SF is producing the maps for free to blind people. Dang, I wish I could figure out a way to get one for myself! 

Go listen to the program via KQED - really amazing stuff! 

Hey Rama and Allen  - here's more evidence of what Rama was talking about the other day - camera stabilization via a simple string no less. 

We've had ongoing debates over tripods and camera stabilization. I take lots of people shots, so I don't typically use tripods. Of course, I have several tripods and have been shooting forever, so I have an opinion on the matter. Rama and Allen both take outdoor landscape type pics, and have been discussing which is the best tripod.

Rama as always had some interesting things to say on the topic and mentioned that if you tie a string to the center column of even a cheap tripod, let it hang to the ground and step on it, you get a very stable platform.

Here's one better via BoingBoing

I've been using my yahoo email address forever as my non-work email address. I've never been a fan of using an email address from my ISP (which I could just as easily be using), mainly because I change ISPs like I change hardware (pretty darn often).

I'm not looking forward to changing email addresses and converting completely to google, but it certainly looks like that's in the cards. If MS buys Yahoo I'm likely to move. As much as MS says they won't change anything, I beg to differ. Look at hotmail, it was promised forever that they wouldn't change the interfaces, and then it went through iteration after iteration of significantly worse experiences until you get the complete piece of crap that is hotmail today (my wife is a longtime user).

I hope Yahoo stays free and separate - but I understand the financials as well - it's certainly a pretty sweet offer. If I was CEO it would be very hard to turn down.

I got my first look at a tesla roadster today. Even in the rain, it looked good, parked in front of my local Starbucks. Geez, I want one even more now.

It's rebuild the lab time! That's right - there was a little bit of end-of-the-quarter money and we were able to spend it on some much needed upgrades of our development and production lab. It's pretty exciting as the lab has basically been unchanged for years (other than changing up the hardware that is - the racks, HVAC and wiring was all the same).

 Here's a few pics for you lab fiends - I'm not saying it's a perfect lab, but it's mine... all mine... muahhhahahahahaa