Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Month: April 2004

  • The Google Platform

    I’ve already seen several links to this today (the first from UtterlyBoring), and it’s too interesting not to point to.

    The post in question posits this: Google is a platform. Not a “platform,” used in the same sense that Amazon and eBay are platforms (custom Web applications that allow some programmatic user interfaces), but an actual computer/operating system/development platform—something I had suspected for some time, but I’ve never managed to coalesce my thoughts this succintly.

    What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers….

    Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

    While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

    It’s one of the better tech reads I’ve seen in awhile. Very eye-opening.

    Now, of course, my curiosity is taking hold, and I’d love to take a crack at developing for that platform!

  • Portland Spring Beer Fest

    From /dev/beer I just read about the Spring Beer & Wine Fest going on in Portland this next weekend, April 9 and 10. Over a 100 different beers to sample. Sounds like fun, I haven’t been to a brew fest in ages. Too bad it’s short notice, though. Damn.

  • Imperfect end to an imperfect week

    I couldn’t even get myself to post yesterday, I was just done. This last week was the shit week for computer troubles. After spending the first half of the week struggling over my wife’s computer, and Thursday reformatting and reinstalling Windows on a coworker’s computer, Friday was the kicker.

    The hard drive in the boss’s computer at work died. Yeah, the Boss. I get to work Friday morning, find a note on my desk: “Computer says ‘Disk boot failure, insert system disk’ since last night.” Ohhhhhh, how I hoped the problem was simply that there was a disk in the floppy drive.

    There wasn’t.

    Nope. Machine won’t boot; hard disk clicks when it has power. That’s never a good sign. Can’t usefully boot to the floppy; the bootable floppy disk I have is for Windows 98 (yes, almost all of the computers in the office are still running Windows 98), and this is a newer eMachine running Windows XP, so the Win98 boot disk can’t recognize the NTFS partition. Contemplate for a moment running the restore CD, but that will wipe out all the data on the drive, and that can’t happen.

    Of course, like all good, responsible IT persons, I make sure any critical work and files in the office are on the network, right? Right. And the network data is backed up to tape every night, right? Right. So, there really should be no problem, right? Just restore Windows XP (though it’s a bad drive, remember, and really should be replaced), and all the data is safe, right? Well, almost.

    Friggin’ Microsoft Outlook stores all of its data—emails, contacts, events—in a single .PST file on the local machine, not on the network. Uh-oh. And for the Boss, email is the lifeblood of communication in the company; he’ll send out 40-plus emails in any given day. Double uh-oh.

    But no, wait, hold on: like all good, responsible IT persons, I have batch files running on individual workstations that back up the Outlook data files to the network daily, so that they’ll be backed up to the tape each night. This was instituted months ago, after the CFO of the company suffered a major email loss and we identified Outlook as a Major Point of Weakness in the company’s data integrity.

    Whew! Run to the network, open up the appropriate user folder where the Outlook data file should be, check the timestamp on the file.

    Time freezes.

    Somewhere nearby, a cat meows in slow motion. A trillion water molecules in the Deschutes River ricochet off one another in a brilliant cacophany of sound not unlike that of billiard balls on the break. Deep in my brain, a synapse fires and a single drop of sweat languidly rolls down my spine.

    January 30, 2004.

    Not April 1, 2004. January 30. I have never in my life wished more for something to be an April Fool’s Day prank.

    So what happened to my carefully crafted plan of a batch file running at a scheduled time each night?

    The Boss shuts down his computer each night before it can run.

    And that, of course, is the punchline. The rest of my day at work—literally, all but about an hour of it—was spent trying in vain to access the hard drive, just to pull the email from it. No love. A computer place in town that does data recovery was able to see the drive, sort of, but were unable to pull anything from it. The only option left is to shell out up to two grand and have a professional data recovery outfit like Ontrack retrieve the email. I don’t know if we’ll go that route, though.

    By the end of the day, I felt I was about to stroke out. Visions of myself convulsing on the floor seemed oddly appealing. The saving grace of it all is that it was Friday, and the kids were being watched so my wife and I were able to go out to dinner and a movie. We saw “Secret Window,” which was pretty good.

    I’m hoping next week will be better.

  • Bend.com RSS

    Just in case anyone missed it (and unless you’re an avid reader of comments to my blog, you probably missed it :) ), Bend.com now has an RSS feed. Gentlemen, start your aggregators!