Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/30/cto-vs-cio/
[NOTE: For some time I have been considering a series of short “Deathmatch” style articles, contrasting similar-but-different words. This post is the “Pilot” for such a series.]
A geek speculates: what is the difference between a CIO and a CTO?
Google returns a lengthy definition, a Slashdot discussion, and other answers. But Sean enjoyed my answer: (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/25/365-main-oops-wtf/
Wow! It turns out that Tuesday was a great day to not be working as a SysAdmin in San Francisco:
http://laughingsquid.com/massive-power-outages-hit-san-franciscos-soma-district/
(I like what Yelp have done with their down page.)
The short story is that an underground transformer exploded downtown, and the 365 Main data center failed to automatically start their generators, and had to start them manually, cutting power for nearly an hour for some customers, many of which are smaller, trendier web sites like Craigslist, LiveJournal, Yelp and others. (I have interviewed with half of the companies mentioned in Scott’s post.)
You do not want to lose power across a production-class network. This can cause equipment failure, servers to delay boot because they need to run disk consistency checks, servers to stall boot noting a missing keyboard, disk errors, or whatever. Some services may wedge up because when they started they couldn’t talk to the database . . . in some cases you may have had machines running for a few years, which may have last rebooted three SysAdmins ago. The running state may be subtly different from the boot state, with no documentation . . .
A few years ago I had a chance to rebuild a production network from the ground up, with a decent budget to do everything the right way: redundant network switches, serial consoles, remote power management . . . I remember talking to my manager as to whether we might want a UPS in each rack. We figured that the data center is supposed to keep the power running, or else. Also, if the data center loses power then we lose our network access anyway . . . perhaps the whole point of this post is that data centers do lose power, so a UPS can be worthwhile. If nothing else, it may leave your systems up and ready to go as soon as the network is restored.
Data centers have UPSes too. Huge ones that you may get to walk through on a tour. The purpose of the UPS is to provide battery power between the time utility power fails and on-site generators begin to provide energy. I don’t know enough to comment on this particular case, but I do recall touring a data center in Emeryville, and the guy explained that batteries become less effective over time, and a lot of data centers fail to test their batteries regularly. When wired in series, one bad battery brings down the entire UPS, and so even though you have a generator on-site, the UPS can fail before you manage to transfer to generator power. While this stuff is beyond my expertise, I’m inclined to believe that this is what happened at 365 Main yesterday: a data center should not only test its failover-to-generator procedure on a regular basis, they need to ensure sufficient battery capacity to keep systems running during the time it would reasonably take to switch to generator power.
Update–July 27: Earth2Tech points out that 365 Main uses newer, ecologically-conscientious flywheel technology to maintain current between the switch from utility to generator power, and speculate that the flywheel may have played a part in the power failure. Their writeup is very good, overall.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/24/wordcamp-notes-day1/
On the weekend of July 22 and 23, I and about 400 other folks attended WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco. This is a conference about WordPress blogging software, and blogging itself. I am usually a bit wary of killing my weekend by spending the bulk of it with a bunch of nerds. Especially bloggers. But then, I am a nerd, and this is, I admit, a blog . . . that and registration was merely $25 and covered my food for the weekend. That’s a pretty compelling deal for the unemployed! Added value was found at the open bar on Saturday night at one of my favorite bars: Lucky 13.
Here are notes I compiled during the Saturday presentations. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/15/donated-equipment/
One habit that I have is that if I have gear I’m not using, I tend to give it away or lend it out to friends and acquaintances who might better use it. Especially with technology, this seems like a good idea: the utility of high-tech equipment degrades rapidly, and if a piece of equipment is going to become obsolete in the coming decade, someone ought to get the value from it.
Of course, right now I am stumbling around the apartment, looking for that DVD writer I bought a few years back. Where is it? Maybe I gave it away to someone. I guess the virtue is proper, but the accounting could be better. All the same, the reason this even comes up is because I am assembling a new workstation, mostly from retired equipment donated by friends. The DVD writer is not even mission-critical: I just wish I knew if it was in the house or not. If not, I can install a CD writer, which was donated to me some years back.
By the way, if you’re reading this: thank you Brian, Andrew, Michael, Lorah, Dennis, and everyone else!
And, if I ever gave you a 5.25″ Sony DVD writer, please remind me! =D
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/13/keiths-iphone-review/
Keith just posted his review of the iPhone. I appreciate it because he is coming off of a Sidekick 3, and he’s a Unix geek. It sounds like he really likes the web browser, and that the e-mail client is mostly good. He is still getting used to typing on the screen. Personally, I think I would have a hard time giving up the tactile feel of the Sidekick 2 keyboard.
I got to play with Ari’s iPhone last week. The web browser is pretty nifty. It handles Google Maps really well and you can click on elements within a web page and zoom in on them, turning the thing left and right to get a better view. Looks great for navigating when lost, or for casual web browsing on the train.
My take? (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/12/powerset-premier/
On June 28, 2007 I somehow found myself on a guest list of 35 people, “including top bloggers, top Web 2.0 companies, and members of the press.” We were guests of Powerset, to attend their premier public demonstration of their new natural-language search engine. Being as I must be, a top blogger I took notes on my Web 1.95 T-Mobile Sidekick.
I had previously applied to work at Powerset: where everybody gets a Mac. The offices are located near the Caltrain station, making them a reasonable commute for the Peninsula crowd as well as for those of us accustomed to public transportation. I had interviewed informally with a former colleague, who in sizing me up as a Systems Toolsmith, looked at me with pity when I confessed that my sole capacity for analyzing and expressing complexity is English, and not the formal notation Computer Scientists call “Big O.” (Why must they only hire smart people?)
He did, however, pique my curiosity. “The easy part” of building a new search engine, he had explained, was crawling the entire web. “The hard part,” he went on, was to bring in enough computing capacity to build natural-language indexes. To my ears, Powerset is pushing the envelope of what is feasible, which is cool. And as Google hath shewn, if you can build a better search engine, the world might beat a path to your URL.
I found the corporate headquarters on-the-corner-of-Brannan-and-Fourth with only modest difficulty. Powerset had a guest list to get upstairs, but the building security guard informed me that if I was here for the Steelcase party on the ground floor, I should just go right in. Given my duties to the blogosphere, I indulged in a bit of Gonzo Blogulationalism, and crashed the Steelcase party for 25 minutes. Steelcase apparently designs really innovative office furniture that would look right at home in The Container Store. They also had a great spread of tasty Asian dishes, origami kits, and booze. I made sure to tip the bartenders for my Sapporo, and for the Anchor Steam that I pocketed for the journey upstairs to Powerset, where they had not only booze, but special Kool-Aid, and blue pills.
I was among the first to arrive at Powerset. I swiped a handful of Red Pills, and then a handful of Blue Pills, washing them down like candy with my illicit beer. As I waited for the jelly beans to kick in, I found myself chatting with a voluptuous and extremely blond computational linguist with a cool Nordic surname. She was afraid of being misquoted by would-be top bloggers, but I assured her that I am terrible at remembering names, and besides I had been ingesting dubious substances. I got her to admit that she had always approached her work with enthusiasm, but now she felt as if she was working in a company where every last person had great talent and intensity, on a project that she felt could improve the ability of people to search the Internet, and thereby change the world. To a person, the Powerset staff came off as sharp and enthusiastic. It seems that they do drink their own Kool-Aid.
The Powerset lobby quickly became choked with geeks–standards nerds–top bloggers, members of the press–and someone (Powerset) was giving booze to these god-damn animals–and hors d’œuvre! The mushrooms were seriously tasty. Before long, the Beautiful Norse Computational Linguist surprised the milling herd of geeks with a stream of self-confident ejective syllables, and we were ushered into the Powerlabs meeting room, where we took seats, kibitzed, and prepared to be dazzled.
Steve Newcomb, (pronounced “Nuke’m”) the COO, and other Powerset staff introduced themselves. Steve explained the Powerset tradition that every Thursday, at 4:20, all Powerset staff gather in the room where we were now assembled, and are invited to ask questions. The only rule on these occasions is that Steve has to give some sort of answer. It is in this spirit of openness that Powerset sought to present their technology to us. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/06/listening-to-users/
I recall Tom Limoncelli giving a presentation called “Time Management for System Administrators” and he explained how, as part of his routine, he would walk over by his customers–his users within the company he worked at–and check in at a regular time. Some days, they might ask questions that would reveal to him potential improvements in the systems architecture, and other times they might ask simple technical support questions. Either way, by dropping in at regular intervals, the users came to feel good about their Systems staff. This can be damned handy when, as they occasionally do, the systems go down hard, staff scramble to fight fires, and users are left out in the cold with little more to work with than their innate feelings about the Systems staff. If they like you, they will feel sympathetic in your hours of stress. If they don’t like you, they hope the present outage may be a nail in the coffin of your tenure.
I was put in mind of this by the story presented in today’s Daily WTF . . . the user, who could be described as “dim” had been following a really complicated, error-prone process. She had no idea that a trivial change to the system could be made to make her life easier. The hero of the story happened to be walking by, hear her frustration, politely inquire, and five minutes later, make betterness happen:
Still, there’s a good lesson here that’s often missed; pay attention to what users are doing with the provided system and by unblocking minor bottlenecks you can become the hero.
Amen. Amen. Amen. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/06/28/thank-you/
I received an e-mail:
As I noted on Flickr: I just received my first "payment" for carrying Amazon.com advertising on my web site. Neat! This is hardly “f_ck you” money, but it is greater than zero.
For the record, I have been with Google AdSense for over a year now. That service brings in enough to cover the costs of my home DSL and then a wee bit more. Thanks to the generosity of friends, the hosting costs of my web site are nil, but I could probably cover that with revenue.
Of course, I am operationally “cash flow positive” but no financial incentive for content, just yet. No incentive beyond rhetorical diarrhea. :)
Pie-in-the-sky, my web site receives around 10,000 unique visits per month. I could probably “monetize” that better, but as I like to say, if I had 200 times more traffic, I could cover all of my living expenses.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/06/02/internet-radio-equality-act/
If you enjoy listening to Internet-based radio stations like SOMA FM, please take a brief moment to lobby your legislators. The Internet Radio Equality Act needs co-sponsors in the Senate. The aim of the bill is to override a March decision by the Copyright Royalty Board, at the behest of the RIAA, to drastically increase the royalty fees for music streamed through the Internet.
What is really upsetting is that the $20 billion commercial radio industry is exempt from royalties! Meanwhile, over on the Internet:
The six largest Internet-only radio services anticipate combined revenue of only $37.5 million in 2006, but will pay a whopping 47% (or $17.6 million) in sound recording performance royalties under the new CRB ruling.
Since a lot of Internet broadcasters are small, independent operations with shallow pockets, it is feared that many will be forced to cease operations. There is substantial fear that this will bring the funky weird planet known as Internet Radio more towards the monotonous monopolistic drone usually heard on traditional commercial radio. I would rather that not happen, so I dropped the following missives on my Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and I’ll share it here with you, too, in case you’d like to spend a few minutes to make the Internet a better place: (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/05/26/3m-tolerating-initiative/
A quote presented at Scott Berkun’s presentation last week, which I copied down. Apparently I wasn’t the only person in attendance who dug the quote:
As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.
Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.
Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And its essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.
William McKnight, 3M Chairman, 1948
One thing I have enjoyed about working for smaller companies in the Silicon Valley is the degree to which employees must be trusted to take the initiative. This can mean a lot of hard work, of course. But it also allows one to exercise the passion that they feel for their work.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/05/25/scott-berkun-the-myths-of-innovation/
I think it was last week that I attended a presentation at Adaptive Path, where Scott Berkun gave an engaging presentation based on the material he presents in his new book: The Myths of Innovation. He is a very engaging speaker and the presentation was a treat. He got me thinking about innovation, what it means to be innovative, and what to expect along the way.
Some ideas include:
What I found more interesting is when he talked about what people have done with this improved understanding of how innovation really works. He spoke about the 3M corporation: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. After some false starts with mining they ended up making good money selling sandpaper. Then an engineer, noticing the difficulty a customer was having at trying to paint cars two different colors, asked his boss if he could work on an idea to solve that problem. The boss resisted, but the engineer couldn’t let the idea go, and he eventually figured out masking tape, which was an even better product than sand paper. Management realized that allowing for some creative exploration was within the company’s best long-term interests, and worked to develop a culture friendly to creative endeavor. Post-it notes are another famous example from 3M: they had developed an adhesive that was too weak, but after some time this led to a creative solution to the question of “I would really like to make notes in my research without marking up these books.” (Actually, I think Google was what happened when Larry and Sergei wanted to create an annotation tool for the web . . . and now they are famous for their “20% time”.)
I bought the hardcover for nearly $30, and Scott was good enough to sign it for me. I am nearly finished reading, and since Scott is not only very engaging, but he also left work some years back to devote his entire energy to writing, I thought it good to plug his work. It is not some weighty, serious tome: he has fun along the way, gets you thinking, and then lets you off where you were with perhaps a bit better insight. I will share the very first paragraph from the preface, which made me smile, and if you choose to read further, it is all on you:
“Prefaces are often like bad first dates: too much talk, too soon. Books, like future significant others, should know how much to say and when. Chapter 1 gets the first slot for a reason: if I’ve done my job, you can start with the first sentence and continue until you hit the back cover. That said, I offer you the choice of skipping the rest of the preface and digging in, or skimming around. It’s the only way to know if we’re right for each other. I hope we are, but if you don’t like what you find, it’s me, not you.”
If Scott’s words intrigue you, you can explore a bit further: read a sample chapter (pdf), check out a “teaser video” that Scott produced, or buy the book online from Amazon.com.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/05/25/buddybulletin/
I was sitting around, minding my own business, when I got some weird-messages-from-friends via this AIM screen name “buddybulletin”. I wrote back and it walked me through sending a “blast” to a group of friends–I’m sorry about that. Then a friend inquired as to buddybulletin’s parentage.
Danny: I dunno, I’m sure you can Google it.
Duncan: I did. Unless it’s very new and Dutch, there’s nothing.
Duncan: So it’s very stealth; real-time viral only and very stealth.
“Interesting,” said I, checking with Technorati . . . nope . . . all I can find is:
The Sidekick ID looks potentially neat. It looks like something between a Sidekick 2 and a Sidekick 3: without Bluetooth, camera, MP3 player, card slot or USB port. This way, it retails for $99. It also looks more rugged, like the Sidekick 2. So, if I’m ever in the market for an upgrade . . .
Interesting viral marketing, anyway. They should have some sort of “opt-out” doohickey for those of us who associate with curmudgeons.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/05/16/whats-up-with-jpg-magazine/
So, I was checking up on my Flickr buddies when I saw Malavagma posted a screenshot, showing that she had deleted her JPG Magazine account. Why? Because the founders had been pushed out. Derek Powazek tells his account of how JPG came to be as an effort coordinated between he, his wife, and a guy named Paul. But as things evolved, the guy named Paul quietly managed to take things over, and recently, Paul decided to rewrite history. Derek’s post explains:
. . . once we looked at the spec for JPG 2.0, we realized that, if we built that tool, we could make a magazine on any topic. The opportunity we had before us was really “Magazine Publishing 2.0.”
. . .
Paul and I talked about all the different magazines we’d start, but ultimately decided to begin with JPG. The brand had two years of momentum behind it and a strong community. 8020 bought JPG from Heather and I for a modest sum.
. . .
We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing.
Why? The reasons are complicated, and the purpose of this post is not to air dirty laundry – it’s just to let the community know why the founders of JPG are no longer there. We owe you that much.
In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.
Here’s where the whole “not lying” thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any business sense to me. Good publishing companies embrace their founding editors and community, not erase them. Besides, we’d published six issues with participation from thousands of people. There’s no good reason to be anything but proud of that.
We had a long meeting with Ron. I tried to compromise. I suggested we add text to the website, explaining the difference between issues 1-6 and the new issues. I wanted to embrace the truth: Tell people how we started, how we grew, and what we were now. It’s the story of how a successful, organic community begins. It’s the story of how authentic media gets made. And it has the added benefit of being true. Compromise could not be reached.
It became clear that we could not continue to work together with this fundamental disagreement. And because he was the CEO, I was the one who would have to leave. I still own a percentage of the company, so I hope to see JPG continue to grow and prosper. Unfortunately, it will be without its founding editors.
Note: Typos corrected and the emphasis is mine.
So . . . having recently subscribed to JPG Magazine, and having my own account, I had to consider . . . what do I do? (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/05/11/hubpages/
So, I have lately been doing more research than usual on interesting startups. One that seems particularly interesting to me is called HubPages.
The Nifty
The idea is to make it easy for people to write up an ever-growing collection of informative articles, and to give them incentive to contribute their knowledge. They provide a nice, dynamic interface that allows authors to very easily mix written content with images. Users then get a chance to vote on what content they like, which should allow for quality control, as well as ego stroking, since authors can then rise in popularity through an online social network.
HubPages then cranks it to eleven by making it trivial to integrate your Google AdSense or Amazon.com Associates accounts with their infrastructure, which allows you the chance to share in the revenue opportunities that HubPages might gain from your writing! I gave it a try, and I found the linking surprisingly easy. This looks like a really easy way for authors to earn a little money by contributing knowledge.
Neato. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/05/06/in-yer-toobs/
Adapted from a blog comment I just posted:
Regarding Mountain View burrito restaurants, if I recall correctly, La Costena annoyed me because it involved driving and too many choices, so I’ve always been a Los Charros guy. I think we had La Costena the day Tellme had its first round of layoffs. We were in mourning for a fallen comrade and we needed to get AWAY so we got burritos and ate them in the park. Since it was on the company tab, Joe ordered their very largest burrito, which was, as he described it “about the size of a baby.” It took him two days, but as I recall he says he ate every bite.
Citing the ever-awesome Maciej Ceglowski, I then offered a link to his recent write-up of the most impressive burrito-related public works project our nation has ever undertaken:
The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel
A must-read for anyone who digs burritos, tunnels, tubes, advanced physics research, or refried beans.
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