radartower

Server naming standards?

spiderman mifuno timeaxe rhineheart trinity zira cornelius ursus zaius caesar These are the names of the firewalls (well, with -01 and -02 designators because, ya’know, the firewalls be clustered) in the giant financial services firm where I work [on contract]. I had this notion that career technologists stopped naming servers after dwarves, blade runners, and pixies as soon as the I.T. team grew larger than a WoW clan. Guess I’m wrong. Fuck it.

Sell me yer 2G iPhone or I'm waiting for Android

I broke the LCD on my aging Nokia 6681 this weekend. (Seems like that sort of thing always happens when I’m enduring non-existent coverage in the mountains / islands / scrub country.) Given the timing (it’s almost like I planned the “failure” of my Nokia), grabbing a 3G iPhone seemed like the best possible plan. Alas, iPhone Elvis done left Seattle on Friday. I need a new phone now-ish and I don’t want to be held hostage to Apple’s replenishment schedule. New plan: find a used Nokia N-series on Craigslist, plunk down the same change that I would’ve spent on a 3G iPhone, and twiddle my thumbs until an Android device hits the shelves. Not a bad option, except for my impatience. Anyone want to sell their 2G iPhone for $250?

Outcome? Failure.

Until Sunday, we had a pair of Bewick’s Wrens and their five babies living in a nest box in our back yard. The only down-note of Father’s day: the discovery that all of the young birds had died within the last day. I haven’t seen the adults since Friday. I’m very disappointed. Bewick’s Wrens have huge personality for such little animals. It’s all in the tail. Look left (tail flip). Look right (tail flip). Left again (flip, flip, flip). The very caricature of cuteness. Secretly (on the Internet), I dig it.

I put the nest up in February. I started waiting. When a House Sparrow selected the nest, we assisted the native birds with a bit of HOSP management. I watched the Male Wren select the box, court a mate, and haul grasses and fur all the live-long day. It got so that I looked for the birds every morning before work and every evening when I returned. Bird stewardship is new for me; I was stung with the over-enthusiasm of the n00b.

Discovering the Cornell NestWatch program (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/birdhouse), I started tracking the nest data. [Citizen science programs are cooler than almost anything. Megadeth, for starters.] NestWatch is a good example of such science, holding down the #2 Google search ranking for “citizen science”. Almost 80,000 nests have been monitored since 1997.

Once signed up, the site guide you towards a “certification” test. This is a transparent tactic to ensure that you read their (helpful) Code of Conduct for hawtch-hawtchering nests. I read it. I learned something. I took (and passed) the ten-question test. Then I configured my sites: one nest box (lat / long) near human-modified terrain. One pair of Bewick’s Wrens inhabiting the aforementioned box. One clutch of five eggs, laid in late May.

I entered data every week. Now I have a final result. As Cornell phrases it: “Outcome: failure”.

Yeah.

Seattle scales

Back (a few hours ago) from the Google Scalability Conference. Most of my colleagues no-showed, but Brandon delivered. Highlights included Swapnil Patil’s talk on GIGA+ massively scalable directories for shared file systems (billions of files). PDF here (a bit out of date compared to the updated version we received at the conference, but certainly good enough). This quote describes some of the magic of the system:

A novel property of Giga+ is that each client caches its own partition-to-server map (P2SMap), without using a traditional, synchronous cache consistency protocol. As the directory grows, at high insert rates, the directory is partitioned on more servers. Clients will not immediately know about the partitions created at the server due to an operation sent by another client. As a result, all clients will end up having different, out-of-date copies of the P2SMap. Despite the inconsistent copies of P2SMap, Giga+ ensures that the clients’ requests are forwarded to the correct server

Also very interesting was Vijay Menon’s efficient and perfectly clear presentation on Transactional Memory. Vijay provided an overview of TM, in hardware and software, and proceeded to peel the onion a bit on software-based TM. Of special note were some of the troubles (TOCTTOU, for example) that can occur with previous attempts at concurrency, including Java synchronized methods. Vijay stressed that there are a number of research and implementation issues to be addressed around TM. Performance, fairness, and semantics (especially where rollback is not feasible) were all identified as areas of improvement. Doug Lee’s work related to concurrent hashmaps was discussed during the Q&A as particularly interesting, using methods similar to “true” TM. In a day full of presentations on clusters and clouds, Vijay’s presentation illustrated that scalability is a concern for even solitary machines.

Notes from another attendee can be found here.

I snagged two Google LED throwies for my boys. All attendees received a Y Power Splitter because, well, I don’t know.

Google conf on scalability

I had the kids this AM. Now running to catch up with the Google Scalability conference at the W Hotel in Seattle. Bus should put me there in time for the 11:15 breakouts, but I’m most interested in the after-lunch sessions. More later.