The Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center (IDTWDC) will shortly be decommissioned. I first wrote about this in June 2012, when it looked like I could migrate all the apps running on my servers to Azure quickly. (It actually took until March.)
Now, however, I'm done. And now I have about 100 kg of equipment to remove from my apartment.
So: does anyone want some equipment? Here's the inventory:
- Two Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U servers with 1.6 GHz Xeon dual-core processors. One has 4GB of RAM, the other has 2GB. These were my Web and database servers.
- Another Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U server, but with a 1.8 GHz Xeon single-core processor and 4 GB of RAM. This was my Exchange server.
- A Dell PowerEdge 860 1U server with a 1.8 GHz Xeon single-core processor and 2 GB of RAM. This is my PDC.
- All four servers have SCSI PERC RAID controllers.
- A Netgear gigabit switch with 24 ports.
- A 42U steel rack, as pictured, with removable shelf.
- A 17" LCD screen, Dell keyboard, and 4-port KVM switch.
- Assorted network cables, power cables, and APC battery backup units, some of which may need new batteries.
Since I'm essentially giving these things away (except for the rack, for which I'm asking $50), they're conveyed as-is, no liability. And again, the servers will not have disk drives.
If you want these, or know anyone who might, let me know through Inner Drive feedback.
This weekend's cover story in New York Times Magazine looks in detail at Google's grand plan to map everything:
Street View cars have already mapped six million miles. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a quite a lot (equivalent to 12 trips to the moon and back) or not much at all (only one-tenth of the world’s estimated 60 million miles of road). Either way, Google’s huge investment in the camera-equipped cars — not to mention trikes, boats, snowmobiles and, yes, rafts — has yielded the most detailed street atlas on earth.
Early last year, Google’s United States market share for where-type queries topped 70 percent, and Google started to get serious about recouping the fortune it has been sinking into making its map, putting a tollbooth in front of its application programming interface. Henceforth, heavy users would be charged for the privilege.
Today, Google’s map includes the streets of every nation on earth, and Street View has so far collected imagery in a quarter of those countries. The total number of regular users: A billion people, or about half of the Internet-connected population worldwide. Google Maps underlies a million different websites, making its map A.P.I. among the most-used such interfaces on the Internet. At this point Google Maps is essentially what Tim O’Reilly predicted the map would become: part of the information infrastructure, a resource more complete and in many respects more accurate than what governments have. It’s better than MapQuest’s map, better than Microsoft’s, better than Apple’s.
The article also looks at Open Street Map, the Wikipedia of GIS, and wonders whether Google's proprietary database will ultimately win.
Oh, you betcha:
On a year-over-year basis, average connection speeds grew by 25 percent. South Korea had an average speed of 14 Mbps while Japan came in second with 10.8 Mbps and the U.S. came in the eighth spot with 7.4 Mbps.
Year-over-year, global average peak connection speeds once again demonstrated significant improvement, rising 35 percent. Hong Kong came in first with peak speed of 57.5 Mbps while South Korea came in at 49.3 Mbps. The United States came in 13th at 31.5 Mbps.
Yes, South Korea has the fastest connectivity in the world. This I gotta see.
Plus, you know, clients.
Aw, buggre alle this for a Larke.
I'm all in favor of upgrades, but for Foucault's sake, don't break things. I'm trying to upgrade a .NET project to Entity Framework 6, and I want to smack the developers.
Under previous versions, you could set the retry manager through configuration. This was really helpful for unit testing, when you might want to change the configuration and have the application block load a transient fault handler automatically.
With Entity Framework 6 (EF6 — yes, this is blatant SEO), you have to set up the default transient fault handler in code:
[TestFixtureSetUp]
public void TestFixtureSetup()
{
var strategy = new FixedInterval("fixed", 10, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(3));
var strategies = new List { strategy };
var manager = new RetryManager(strategies, "fixed");
RetryManager.SetDefault(manager);
}
I mean, really? With EF6, you've got to put this code in every unit test sequence in your solution. Basically, that means you need to put it in every unit test file. Before, it had its own defaults.
Despite being all in favor of upgrades, I do get impatient when (a) the upgrade breaks existing code and (b) the entity performing the upgrade is one of the wealthiest entities in the history of business.
All right, then. Bring on the copy pasta...
Jakob Nielsen's company has written a detailed analysis of how the Federal Health Exchange screwed up usability:
The HealthCare.gov team has suffered what most web professionals fear most: launching a broken web application. This is particularly harrowing given the visibility of the website in question. The serious technical and data issues have been covered extensively in the media, so we won’t rehash those. Instead, in this article we focus on how to improve the account setup process. This is a user experience issue, but fixing it will also alleviate the site's capacity problems.
Account Set-up Usability is Mission Critical
Account setup is users’ first taste of a service. A suboptimal account setup can spawn 3 problems:
- Increased service cost: When people can’t self-service online and you have no competitors, they call you. Call-center interaction is more expensive than web self-service. In 2008, Forrester estimated call-center calls to cost $5.50 per call versus 10 cents for a user who self-services online.
- Increased cognitive strain: The instructions for creating usernames and password in this flow (which we address further along in this article) require a great deal of concentration, and if users don’t understand the instructions, they will need to keep creating usernames and passwords until they are accepted.
- Halo Effect: Account setup is the first in a series of web-based interactions that users will need to conduct on HealthCare.gov. A poor experience with this first step will impact how people feel not only about subsequent interactions with the site, but how they feel about the service in general and the Affordable Care Act as a whole.
The discussion around our office hinges on two things other than usability: first, give us $2 million (of the $400 million they actually spent) and we'll build a much better site. Second, the biggest problems come from the insurance companies on the back end. Users don't care about that; they just want to get health insurance. As Krugman says, though, there really wasn't a way to get the insurance companies out of the equation, and that, more than anything, is the foundation of all these other problems.
Once again, here's a list of things I'm sending straight to Kindle (on my Android tablet) to read after work:
Back to work. All of you.
I am agog at a bald impossibility in the New York Times' article today about the ACA exchange:
According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size.
There were three reporters in the byline, they have the entire Times infrastructure at their disposal, and still they have an unattributed "expert" opinion that the healthcare.gov codebase is 33 times larger than Linux. 500 MLOC? Why not just say "500 gazillion?" It's a total Dr. Evil moment.
Put in other terms: it's like someone describing a large construction project—a 20-story office building, say—as having 500 million rivets in it. A moment's thought would tell you that the mass of 500 million rivets would approach the steel output of South Korea for last month.
The second sentence is nonsense also. "A large bank's computer system?" Large banks have thousands of computer systems; which one did you mean? Back to my example: it's like comparing the 500-million-rivet office building to "a large bank's headquarters."
I wouldn't be so out of my head about this if it weren't the Times. But if they can't get this right, what hope does any non-technical person have of understanding the problem?
One last thing. We, the people of the United States, paid for this software. HHS needs to disclose the source code of this monster. Maybe if they open-sourced the thing, they could fix it faster.
The Chicago technology scene is tight. I just had a meeting with a guy I worked with from 2003-2004. Back then, we were both consultants on a project with a local financial services company. Today he's CTO of the company that bought it—so, really, the same company. Apparently, they're still using software I wrote back then, too.
I love when these things happen.
This guy was also witness to my biggest-ever screw-up. (By "biggest" I mean "costliest.") I won't go into details, except to say that whenever I write a SQL delete statement today, I do this first:
-- DELETE
SELECT *
FROM MissionCriticalDataWorthMillionsOfDollars
WHERE ID = 12345
That way, I get to see exactly what rows will be deleted before committing to the delete. Also, even if I accidentally hit <F5> before verifying the WHERE clause, all it will do is select more rows than I expect.
You can fill in the rest of the story on your own.
I've never had much user for LinkedIn. Apparently I'm not alone:
The site’s initial appeal was as a sort of self-updating Rolodex—a way to keep track of ex-coworkers and friends-of-friends you met at networking happy hours. There’s the appearance of openness—you can “connect” with anyone!—but when users try to add a professional contact from whom they’re more than one degree removed, a warning pops up. “Connecting to someone on LinkedIn implies that you know them well,” the site chides, as though you’re a stalker in the making. It asks you to indicate how you know this person. Former coworker? Former classmate? Fine. “LinkedIn lets you invite colleagues, classmates, friends and business partners without entering their email addresses,” the site says. “However, recipients can indicate that they don’t know you. If they do, you’ll be asked to enter an email address with each future invitation.”
This frenetic networking-by-vague-association has bred a mordant skepticism among some users of the site. Scott Monty, head of social media for the Ford Motor Company, includes a disclaimer in the first line of his LinkedIn bio that, in any other context, would be a hilarious redundancy: “Note: I make connections only with people whom I have met.” It’s an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder.
I'll keep my LinkedIn profile active, of course, because I have to in my industry. But it's not like I'm hard to find online.