BoingBoing pointed out a hidden nugget at the bottom of Last.fm’s robots.txt.
That is an awesome geek easter egg. A little bit of history if you are into that sort of thing.
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MacBook Pro Stickers
I stripped off all of the stickers from my MacBook Pro and started over. Now it has just a single sticker:
I slid the WordPress sticker into the bite portion of the Apple logo, turned out to fit quite nicely.
Twitter Salt Lake City Data Center
Last week Twitter announced they were working on a new data center in the Salt Lake City area. I live in Sandy, Utah (about 30 minutes drive south of SLC) so I saw plenty of local talk about this new development.
No word publicly on where the location of the new data center will be, though The Salt Lake Tribune reports on speculation of a Bluffdale location. From a work force stand point that is a nice location, with fairly easy access to both Salt Lake and Utah counties (two of the main population centers in Utah).
Data center issues sure have changed over the years. It used to be that getting access to a high capacity facility meant going to where the bandwidth was (remember when MAE-West as king?). Bringing high capacity connections out to other areas was difficult and expensive. Now other operation costs have become the major issues, like how to keep thousands of servers cool.
From the perspective of cooling a SLC data center certainly makes sense. We’ve had snow at my house as early as September and as late as May. I wouldn’t be surprised if for half the year they won’t need any air conditioning at all, simply vent out the hot air and bring in the outside air. Check out the average monthly temperatures for Sandy and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Those are just the averages, there are a number of days during the winter where the high was below 25. Last winter it wasn’t unusual for it to be in the low single digits when I took Alice to school in the morning.
I’ve seen a few people speculate that Twitter will be bringing developer resources to the SLC area as well. I don’t see that as being very likely. I expect that their developers will still be mostly based in San Francisco. The Twitter jobs that do come to SLC will be nearly all operational in nature. Exactly how many jobs? I have no idea, but there are plenty of universities and colleges in the area that will be looking for the answer to that question as well.
I’m curious to see how this plays out, potentially it could be very good for SLC. And as a long time systems and network geek I have a special place in my heart for big buildings with lots of servers, routers, switches, and networking cable. Oh, and Evan Williams, if you are reading this, I’d love to get a tour of your new data center when it is done. :-)
Update:
Ash Buckles mentions that the Twitter DC is next door to seo.com ( next door, confirmed ). That would be with in the ball park of the Bluffdale rumor, just off I-15 about 15 minutes drive south of my house.
Here’s the seo.com location:
This makes me curious about the network connectivity situation. And will this attract other DCs to the area?
FamilySearch – Granite Mountain Records Vault & Indexing
FamilySearch.org posted some interesting information recently.
First up, videos about the Granite Mountain Records Vault:
The vault is in Little Cottonwood Canyon, about 15 minutes from my house. Too bad they don’t do tours, I’d love to see that in person.
One hundred years initially to scan all of those images, ouch! Bringing that number down to ten is huge. Even at ten years though, that is a tremendous amount of work. Talk about your large data sets. I wonder if they produce graphs of the data size over time. No matter how you look at it, that is an amazing challenge.
And if catching up with the already collected data isn’t enough, more is coming in every day. The indexing project has added 100 million new records during the first half of 2010 and expects to hit 200 million by the end of the year.
It’s neat to see all this data come online. Somethings I can’t figure out though, like why http://pilot.familysearch.org/ is done entirely in Flash. They appear to have recreated HTML using Flash, with less usability. Yuck! It’s 2010, I know you can do better than that!
And what’s up with those crazy URLs, http://blog.fsbeta.familysearch.org/node/861? Friendly URLs are good for people and search engines. No reason for a blog not to have friendly URLs; the first post on blog.fsbeta.familysearch.org is January 2009, well after pretty much everyone else figured this out already.
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Tagged family-history, familysearch, granite-mountain-records-vault, lds
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The Standards Chicken and the Egg
David Recordon commenting on the first Federated Social Web Summit, Standards are best served second:
At times it felt as if people were starting with the technologies and protocols and only then trying to find a product that needs PubSubHubbub enabled JSON hCards federated via OStatus!
The Diaspora talk jumped out to me as they twice said, “we’ve implemented this product feature as a prototype, it works, and now we want to talk about the standard version of it.” That’s the right way to build standards. Have a product problem, solve it, and then iterate with others on an open specification.
I think this is a good rule of thumb to follow. Knowing when to make use of an existing standard/protocol vs. starting over can make all the difference in the world.
Why WordPress Themes are Derivative of WordPress
Mark Jaquith has an excellent post describing Why WordPress Themes are Derivative of WordPress. Mark is one of the lead developers of WordPress and makes a living by doing freelance WordPress consulting (Covered Web Services).
What Mark points out is that WordPress and themes “run as one cohesive unit”. It’s a good read, I highly recommend it.
How Will You Measure Your Life?
Clayton Christensen (author of The Innovator’s Dilemma) spoke to the graduating class from Harvard Business School on How Will You Measure Your Life?. Here are a few pieces that I particularly enjoyed:
On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
As I was reading through this the first time I thought he was kidding about the staying out of jail bit. It’s important to remember that no one is free from temptations to go down a road they didn’t initially plan for.
Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
It has been nearly 20 years since I graduated high school and too many of the friends I grew up with have fallen to similar fates. None of us had these types of unhappy goals as we left high school and went off to college, yet for some it happened any way.
I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.
I really liked this particular approach to humility.
There are several other gems in his talk, I recommend reading the whole thing.
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Star Wars Subway Car
“Galactic Rebellion for Dummies” :-)
More info on the Improv Everywhere site.
XHR / AJAX Performance – GET or POST?
During the summer of 2009 I posted about XMLHttpRequest (XHR) using multiple packets for HTTP POST, but HTTP GET requests only used one (in most cases). This led to several people recommending HTTP GET requests for AJAX when possible, to maximize performance.
Fortunately someone (Load Impact) took actual measurements to see what this looked like in the real world – AJAX GET or POST – which is best?. For details check out their analysis report (PDF) (warning, contains gory geek details). The short version, what they observed is that not only was HTTP POST (multiple packets) not slower, it was faster. This is definitely contrary to the basic mental model of how this should work.
If you are into front end performance and or TCP/IP go check it out, it would be great get solid explanation of why they are seeing these results. On the flip side, if there is a flaw in the testing it would be good to identify that and come up with a new test.
