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Four short links: 22 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 22, 2009
Eight Billion Minutes Spent on Facebook Daily -- you weren't using that cognitive surplus, were you? How We Made Github Fast -- high-level summary is that the new "fast, good, cheap--pick any two" is "fast, new, easy--pick any two". (via Simon Willison) Isaac Mao, China, 40M Blogs and Counting -- Today, there are 40 million bloggers in China and...
Four Tips for Avoiding VM Sprawl in the Public Cloud
By George ReeseOctober 3, 2009
You moved into the cloud to save some money. Now it's the first of the month and you're looking at your latest cloud provider bill. It's not at all what you planned. Welcome to the world of VM sprawl, the dark side of cloud computing.
Four short links: 7 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 7, 2009
App Engine Now Supports XMPP (Jabber) -- messaging servers, whether XMPP or PubSubHubBub, are becoming an increasingly important way to loosely join the small pieces. Google's incorporation of XMPP into GAE reflects this (and the fact that Wave is built on XMPP). (via StPeter on Twitter) Snakes on the Web (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- The best way to predict the...
John Adams on Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site
By Jesse RobbinsAugust 6, 2009
Twitter is suffering outages today as they fend off a Denial of Service attack, and so I thought it would be helpful to post John Adams’ exceptional Velocity session about Operations at Twitter. Good luck today John & team… I know it’s going to be a long day!...
Four short links: 9 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 8, 2009
Ten Rules That Govern Groups -- valuable lessons for all who would create or use social software, each backed up with pointers to the social science study about that lesson. Groups breed competition: While co-operation within group members is generally not so much of a problem, co-operation between groups can be hellish. People may be individually co-operative, but once...
Announcing: Spike Night at Velocity
June 19, 2009
Guest blogger Scott Ruthfield is a Program Committee member of the O'Reilly Velocity: Web Performance & Operations Conference. Web Operations is not for the casual observer: it's for a particular kind of adrenaline junkie that's motivated by graphs and servers spinning out of control. Jumping in, on-your-feet analysis, and experience-based-experimentation are all part of solving new problems caused by unexpected user and machine behavior,...
Four short links: 9 June 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJune 9, 2009
Drawing Inspiration From Nature To Build A Better Radio -- based on the design of the cochlear, this MIT-built RF chip is faster than others out there, and consumes 1/100th the power. Biomimicry and UWB radio are on our radar. Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon -- While it’s significant that...
Velocity 2009 - Big Ideas (early registration deadline)
May 8, 2009
(tag cloud created from Velocity session & speaker information using wordle.net) My favorite interview question to ask candidates is: "What happens when you type www.(amazon|google|yahoo).com in your browser and press return?" While the actual process of serving and rendering a page takes seconds to complete, describing it in real detail can take an hour. A good answer spans every part...
Four short links: 13 Apr 2009
By Nat TorkingtonApril 13, 2009
Worms, sorting, languages, and infrastructure: Twitter XSS Attacks (Lynne Pope) -- several incarnations of a worm spread quickly across Twitter this weekend. Twitter profiles are generated by themes, whose parameters users can change. The user-supplied value for the colour was used directly in the CSS color field without filtering, which the original worm strain used to end the CSS and...
AT&T Fiber cuts remind us: Location is a Basket too!
By Jesse RobbinsApril 10, 2009
The fiber cuts affecting much of the San Francisco Bay Area this week are similar to the outages in the Middle East last year (radar post), although far more limited in scope and impact. What I said last year still holds true and is repeated below: From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why...
It's Really Just a Series of Tubes
April 7, 2009
Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you're someone that, like me, has a [somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure](http://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity), you must watch this talk.
Four short links: 30 Jan 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 30, 2009
Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing: EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming -- Adrian Holovaty's project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that's about to run out. The software will be open sourced but he's inviting suggestions of business models that would enable the project team to continue working on it full-time. Having used and...
Trains, Planes and Automobiles: Or why Infrastructure IS an IT issue
By Kurt CagleJanuary 30, 2009
Before we load up on more highway projects, more unnecessary bridges, and more downtown renovation projects, it may behove us as a society to ask the question about whether it will be more beneficial in the long run to use our brains (real and virtual) and the marvellous networks that we have created with our brains to solve these pressing problems in a way that will benefit not only ourselves but our children's children.
Analysis 2009: Government Gets Into the Software Business
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
The incoming Obama administration has, even before taking office formally, pledged between $650 and $800 billion dollars worth of public works initiatives, a massive shift away from the laissez faire approach of the outgoing Bush administration. Of that, it...
Hawaii Power Blackout Emergency Preparedness Tech Grades: Is There an F-?
By Todd OgasawaraDecember 28, 2008
I gave a tech scorecard for emergency infrastructure after a major earthquake here two years ago. I return to that scorecard for the island-wide power blackout we had over the weekend. The results aren't good. The only bright spot was Twitter.
Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory for production services!
By Jesse RobbinsJune 18, 2008
Google App Engine went down earlier today. GAE is still a developer preview release, and currently lacks a public monitoring dashboard. Unfortunately this means that many people either found out from their app and/or admin consoles being unavailable or from Mike Arrington's post on TechCrunch. Google has a strong Web Operations culture, and there are numerous internal monitoring tools in...
Structure and Velocity
By Jesse RobbinsMay 10, 2008
Several people have asked me about the differences between Om Malik's Structure conference and our Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference. Velocity is on June 23 & 24th at the SFO Mariott, and Structure follows on June 25th in San Francisco. The conferences are complimentary: Structure discusses what is changing in internet infrastructure, and Velocity teaches how to make...
What is Web Operations?
By Jesse RobbinsMarch 30, 2008
Theo Schlossnagle wrote a brilliant summary of one of the biggest challenges we discussed at the Velocity Summit in January:What is this Velocity Summit thing? It was a bunch of web architects from highly trafficked sites sitting around talkin' smack. It was operated in Foo style. However, one thing that made me really appreciate this meet-up was the lack of...
Steve Souders asks: "How green is your web page?"
By Jesse RobbinsMarch 8, 2008
Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis: How green is your web page? Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great...
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