Large-Scale Problems Are Different

So I had kind of a weird moment yesterday.  While we were discussing storage for our site, we made a semantic shift that was very important, though I didn’t notice it at the time.  We stopped talking about storage volume, and we started talking about time.  As in, how long before we run out of storage at our current content creation rate, and how much money it would cost to extend our storage by, say, six weeks.

Let me tell you, it’s scary.  Really, really scary.  And very exciting.  We’re not the first people in this kind of situation, but the neighborhood is getting smaller and smaller as the site develops.  I have to say that even if we fail, the experience is … life-altering.  I don’t think I can go back to the standard corporate drudgery after this, though I suppose at some point I might tire of the constant demand for innovation and problem-solving.

Yamaha C3 – Mileage Update

114 miles on .98 gallons – most of which was my trip to Fayetteville.  So driving at full speed does have some impact, but not a lot. :)

Yamaha C3 – Long Trip

The ride yesterday was beautiful, if a bit long.  The C3 ran great, though I think my fuel efficiency was low – we’ll see on the next fillup.

Lessons learned:

• The C3 needs more padding on the rear end of the seat. It may be possible to do this aftermarket.
• Heavy backpacks are bad for long trips.  I’m going to have to find a way to put my laptop securely in the cargo compartment or strap it down somehow.
• The helmet works much better at dealing with condensation than I would have believed.  I had no trouble driving home last night, even though the air was cool and damp.  I did manage to fog up the faceplate, but it immediately cleared as air flowed into the helmet.
• The high beam on the headlight needs redesign.  It illuminates the distance ok, but up close it’s much worse than the low setting.  I ended up leaving it on the low setting most of the time because I actually needed to be able to see the road.

I will admit that last night was pretty scary.  The route I take to Fayetteville is down Highway 55, then onto 401 at Fuquay and on south to Fayetteville.  There’s a good bit of four lane, and about forty miles or so of two lane.  I had a number of cars pass me on blind double-yellow curves, as well as through suicide and left-turn lanes.  One driver that was behind me for a bit became extremely agitated, honking and yelling when he was finally able to pass.  I had several people pass two or three vehicles in order to get around me – and one who ended up with less than fifty feet of clearance between the truck and an oncoming SUV.

GW had it wrong – Americans aren’t addicted to oil, they’re addicted to speed.  Velocity.  Freedom, narrowly defined as the ability to drive as fast as you desire – and sometimes beyond.

Oh, and I broke 1000 on the odometer last night.

Yamaha C3, Warts and All

On Wednesday I had my 600-mile break-in service done.  After I filled up on Thursday ($3.86), I’ve been pushing the C3 hard to test its limits.  For the first time, I ran into the RPM-limiter.

At what I believe is 8000 rpm, the throttle just stops responding.  I read about this when searching for aftermarket parts, but now I can’t find it again.  (It was an aftermarket computer that listed one of its features as removing the 8000-rpm limit.)  I tried letting off the throttle a bit, but that didn’t change anything – I kept running at full speed down a steep hill, with gravity overcoming the drag of the engine.  Letting the throttle completely off slowed the bike enough to get throttle response back.  This isn’t a bad thing, but it was disconcerting the first time it happened, so be ready for it.

I pushed cornering pretty hard, but not to full.  I’m still not a good enough rider to deal with the consequences of a bad corner, so I played it safe.  The C3 had no troubles – very smooth, very stable, and even a bit of braking in the middle of the turn didn’t cause any issues.  I feel comfortable maneuvering now.

Acceleration at full throttle is good – good enough so that cars don’t feel the need to immediately pass me, until I cap out my speed and they realize that I am going slow.  At which point they generally floor the accelerator and race around me in an insane blaze of burning gasoline, only to brake hard at the next light.  It would be funny if it wasn’t so frightening.

The C3 runs easily at full throttle, and this does not seem to be straining or stressing the engine at all – it feels good, and the bike seems happy to run at that speed.  I’m going to do a better test today, because I’m going to ride to my Mom’s place in Fayetteville – should be about a two-hour ride.  Hopefully the evil sun will stay mostly behind the clouds.  I’m also interested in my fuel efficiency at that speed and RPM – so far on this tank, I look to be tracking for about 110mpg, but we’ll have to see how it plays out on the trip.  Last tank was 120 miles on .95 gallons.  I’m willing to bet that if I push hard with the basic hypermiling techniques, I can get it up to 130 mpg.  Unfortunately, the engine gets in the way of this, since it’s very difficult to coast – you can’t disconnect the transmission from the engine, so even down a steep hill, if you let off the gas you will feel the engine drag.  I need to find out if I can shut the engine off while coasting without risking damage.

Enough talk – off to ride to Fayetteville.

How To Name Servers

How do you go about naming servers?  The neophyte might say, “name the server for the job it’s going to do.”  The journeyman might say, “name the server for its location – it might have more than one job”.  The experienced sysadmin says this:

Name your servers something memorable, simple, and unique – but unrelated to service or location.

Why is this?  Because experienced sysadmins know that nothing stays the same forever.  If you name a server after the service it runs (Exchange-1) then when you change things, the name becomes non-sensical and confusing.  If you name it after a location (Durham-427), when the server is moved the name becomes misleading.  On Unix machines, changing the name is relatively easy, unless you’ve done something like point people to it via DNS for a website: exchange1.example.local.  On Windows machines it pretty much requires a re-install to get it right.  Even seemingly simple naming “schemes” quickly become complex and meaningless unless you have the “key” to their designation – and people always want to add the server’s job to the scheme, which leads back to the name being misleading after a while.

Example: My old company bought a piece of another company.  They had a lot of hardware.  We ended up shutting down their entire site, and moving everything to Durham.  This caused all kinds of confusion in machine naming.  some of their servers had names like ABC123-ABTU4, which were meaningless and hard to remember.  What do all those letters and numbers mean?  Can you remember off the top of your head?  Exactly.  Others had the same name as machines we had (exchange1), which is ALL KINDS OF BAD in the Windows world – we ended up re-installing them for no reason other than their name.

Memorable: I usually pick a broad theme like video game characters or ancient gods (traditional).  For larger sites, a short string will usually do the trick, especially if the first part is a good mnemonic.  Anything will do, as long as when you go to talk to someone about the server, they know what the heck you talking about and can remember it.  Compare:

“Hey Joe, did you track down the disk problem on MAILA33-DAL yet?  No, A33.  Yeah, it was moved to the Fort Worth office three months ago.  Yeah, he’s a webserver now.  Ok, thanks.”

“Hey Joe, did you track down the disk problem on Artemis yet?  Ok, thanks.”

“Hey Joe, did you track down the disk problem on alpha-472 yet?  Ok, thanks.”

Simple: At 3AM, it’s going to make you angry to misspell Nyarlathotep for the third time trying to SSH into the box.  Apply the KISS principal intelligently.

Unique: This is is a lot easier to achieve than you might imagine.  Even a four-character string has a lot of uniqueness; probably more than any company or group except the very largest will ever need.  Anything more than that and you’re golden.

Once you’ve got names like this, you can then use DNS to assign service names at will.  mail.example.com is an alias for Ryu (or Itchy, or alpha-472).  The machine name stays the same forever.  This vastly simplifies a lot of things – inventory, physical moves,  re-imaging, management: all made easier by an independent server name.  It’s especially important with OS installs like Gentoo, which will never be re-installed again if you can help it.  People learn machine locations, and can easily transition their mental image when it inevitably gets moved.  There is never any confusion between the name of a server and the services it provides or its location, giving you the flexibility to move things around at will without your users being impacted in any way – they always just go to mail.example.com and all is well.  You can even tie DNS aliases to physical location (row6u17), and adjust DNS as necessary when things are moved.

Now of course, name collisions between companies can still happen, and people can still choose bad names.  But it’s a lot less likely if your naming themes are different, and easier to deal with, since changing the machines does not involve user re-training.  Happy naming!

Oh Joss

Why dost thou tempt me so?  No talk.  Go watch it.  NOW.

Halo 3 Duck Hunt

You can add “Duck Hunt” to your list of game types for first-person shooters:  Halo 3 Duck Hunt.  Great concept and an interesting execution.  Game Developers: neat things come out of allowing people to alter and re-mix your creation!  Of course, you also get other things, but those show up everywhere anyway.

Whatcha Got Cookin?

I decided to try a different tack with my guitar lessons, and delved into some classic Hank Williams: Hey Good Lookin’.  The song is deceptively difficult for me – alternating base notes and somewhat complex fingering.  The alternating base on the C chord is the most difficult, as it actually requires finger movement to hit both base notes.

But, by far, what I’m having the most trouble with is the C to F transition in the third “section” (what is the name for this? It’s a 32-bar ballad, AABA, the C to F is in the B).  This transition is best accomplished by holding the third finger still on the A string, 3rd fret, and moving the fourth and second fingers into place for the F and then barring the first fret with the first finger to complete the F.

I swear my brain does not process this movement correctly.  I’ve tried and completely failed to make the movement multiple times, even after careful thought.  I can do it one finger at a time, but not all at once.  I’m better with the F-to-C transition, but still not good.  If I practice for a bit, I can sort-of do it, but then I come back the next day and can’t do it again.  Very frustrating.

It also does not help that my barring is miserable.  My knuckle joint falls right on the B and E strings and they both just completely die when I strum the F.  Sigh.

The Semantics of Friendship in a Zero-Cost World

A friend of mine recently released an album of electronic music. My first impulse, when I heard about the initial release of a few songs, was to go buy them from Amazon.

This is exactly the opposite of what has traditionally happened. Traditionally, friends and family receive a gratis copy of whatever it was that was produced, because there was someone else who was doing the marketing and production and everything produced had a physical cost associated with it. And my friend did, in fact, make the songs available to his friends free, and even got us CDs from the initial production run.

But the more I think about it, the more I think my first reaction was the right one. In a world where art, music, software, and many other intellectual products can be increasingly be had for free, It is a mark of respect to pay for the product. I am your friend. I know you. I think you made something worth paying for, and here’s the proof.  You are worth supporting.  This music (or art or software) is worth supporting.

I mean, really, how would you feel if even your friends wouldn’t pay for your art?

That’s the sign of something really great in the new world – something that people pay for not because they have to, but because they want to.

Watching the Watchers

Magnus Frater in its natural habitat

About two months ago I was driving to Southpoint from my home and noticed a camera mounted on a telephone pole where Barbee Road crosses over I-40.  Hmmm, interesting – what’s that doing there?  It seems that these cameras were installed all along I-40 by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, with the purpose of monitoring traffic as part of North Carolina’s Intelligent Transportation System initiative.  You can see some of the views from the cameras at NCDOT Travel Information and the WRAL Traffic Camera site.  Pretty cool.

Then, while doing research on these cameras, I ran across this.

Durham’s 911 Center Now Links to NCDOT Traffic Cameras

Center Can Now View 200 Cameras on All Major Durham Roads

Durham, N.C. – Durham motorists in distress can now take comfort that more than just good Samaritans passing by can send help thanks to a new partnership that grants the City of Durham access to more than 200 cameras on all of Durham’s major roadways.

The Durham Emergency Communications Center (DECC), in cooperation with the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) and the City’s Department of Public Works, now has a direct link to all of the NCDOT’s cameras in the Durham area.

According to James Soukup, director of the DECC, this new capability allows 911 telecommunicators to monitor accident scenes first-hand.  “Whenever there is an incident near a traffic camera, we can switch to that location and monitor what is occurring,” Soukup said.  “The zoom capability is outstanding.  We can read license plates and look inside cars to see if someone appears to be in distress and send the appropriate help accordingly.”

Now in the DECC, four, 40-inch monitors scan approximately 200 NCDOT cameras on all major Durham roads.  “We have the ability to pan, tilt and zoom in on each camera and monitor four different roads at any given time,” Soukup said.  “I want our motorists to know that our telecommunicators can now directly monitor accidents that can be seen by these cameras and send appropriate help.  In the past, we’ve had to rely heavily on other motorists giving calm and accurate descriptions of an accident situation and location.  Now, we’ll be able to see many of these incidents ourselves, which can speed up emergency responses significantly.”

According to Soukup, since the link to the NCDOT cameras was installed in October, his operators have already been able to take action quicker than in the past.  “Since having access to these cameras, we recently witnessed an accident where a vehicle flipped off the roadway and were able to dispatch emergency vehicles before anyone even contacted us,” Soukup said.  “These cameras have also helped us determine the correct jurisdiction for dispatching help for another accident that occurred near the county line.”

The NCDOT linked their camera network to the DECC at no cost to the City.  For more information about the new camera monitoring system in the DECC, contact Soukup at (919) 560-4191 or by e-mail at james.soukup@durhamnc.gov.

About Durham Emergency Communications Center
The Durham Emergency Communications Center (DECC) is dedicated to providing Durham’s citizens with the fastest and most efficient response to emergency calls possible while insuring the safety of police, fire and EMS personnel.  The DECC provides 24-hour, seven-day-a-week 911 access to citizens and user agencies in and around Durham County.  To learn more about DECC, visit the City’s Web site at www.durhamnc.gov/departments/911/.

Nifty! Wait … what?  Read that again:

“The zoom capability is outstanding.  We can read license plates and look inside cars to see if someone appears to be in distress and send the appropriate help accordingly.”

“We have the ability to pan, tilt and zoom in on each camera and monitor four different roads at any given time,” Soukup said.

So … there are now high-resolution surveillance cameras observing all major Durham roads, with the capability of looking inside cars and reading license plates.  Along I-40 and I-85 the coverage is practically complete, almost with line-of-sight from each camera to the next.  They clearly can be pointed in any direction, which means they observe not only the highway, but also the roadways crossing the highway where they are placed, and anything else within range.

Also note that the NCDOT linked the DECC into the system for no cost.  This implies two things: One, it’s probably fairly cheap to do it, and two, the system is probably set up to allow a number of people to access it at the same time. This definitely bears further research.