I don't know what to do with myself the rest of the day. I've just deployed the completely-redesigned Weather Now application. I feel 10 kilos lighter.
Check out the preview on Windows Azure.
The application started in mid-1997 as a feature of the now-defunct braverman.org, my proto-blog. The last major changes happened in 2006, when I gave it a face-lift. I've occasionally pushed some bug fixes, but really, until today it has looked and acted essentially the same way for 6 years. (The GetWeather application, which downloads and parses data from outside sources, hasn't changed significantly since 2002.)
So what's new? In sum:
- The application now runs on Microsoft Windows Azure, up in the cloud. (Check out the preview!)
- This means it also runs on Azure SQL Database instead of on-site SQL Server.
- Since I had to port the database anyway, I completely re-architected it.
- The database rearchitecture included moving its archives to Azure Storage, which will pay benefits once I update the UI to take advantage of it.
- The ancient (1997, with revisions in 1999, 2002, and 2005) GetWeather application, which downloads weather data from outside sources, got rebuilt from byte 0 as well.
- Finally, I fixed 35 bugs that the old architecture either caused or made fixing overly difficult.
There are a few bugs in the preview, of course. This morning I found and fixed 6 of them, all related to architectural changes under the hood that the creaky user interface didn't understand. And just now, I discovered that it thinks the sun never shines anywhere—again, almost certainly a problem related to changing from using the broken System.DateTime object to its replacement, System.DateTimeOffset. Always another bug to fix...
Still: I'm done with the port to Azure. I'll bang away on it for the next week, and if all works out, on Saturday I'll finally, finally, finally turn off my servers.
I've just finished—I mean, finished—the Weather Now worker role. The worker role runs in the background and performs tasks like, for example, downloading the weather from outside sources, parsing it, and storing it.
I have three tasks left to enable me to publish the new version of Weather Now to its new home in Windows Azure:
- Create a script to initialize the lists that appear on the site's home page;
- Upgrade the existing ASP.NET website to an ASP.NET web application; and
- Create an Azure Cloud Service Web role to house the application.
I believe I will be done today sometime. But first, Parker is demanding a trip outside.
I'm just a day from losing my mind (or "loosing," to all you Facebookers out there), a day from my workload returning to normal levels, and a day from deploying Weather Now to a test instance in Azure. Then, maybe, I'll have time to take all these in:
Watch this space for a sneak preview of Weather Now 4.0, possibly tomorrow. The GetWeather utility has run with only minor hitches for a week, and with two more (quick) bug fixes it's ready for production. That just leaves about 6 hours of work to move the ASP.NET application up to Azure...and then, you get to beta test it. If all goes well I'll cut over to Azure on the 9th or 10th, and finally—finally!—retire my last two servers.
After a couple of days in which I'm glad we keep bourbon in the 10th Magnitude office, Scott Hanselman's examination of working remotely seems timely:
I see this ban on Remote Work at Yahoo as one (or all) of these three things:
- A veiled attempt to trim the workforce through effectively forced attrition by giving a Sophie's Choice to remote workers that management perceives as possibly not optimally contributing. It's easy to avoid calling it a layoff when you've just changed the remote work policy, right?
- A complete and total misstep and misunderstanding of how remote workers see themselves and how they provide value.
- Pretty clear evidence that Yahoo really has no decent way to measure of productivity and output of a worker.
All this said, it's REALLY hard to be remote. I propose that most remote workers work at least as hard, if not more so, than their local counterparts. This is fueled in no small part by guilt and fear. We DO feel guilty working at home. We assume you all think we're just hanging out without pants on. We assume you think we're just at the mall tweeting. We fear that you think we aren't putting in a solid 40 hours (or 50, or 60).
Because of this, we tend to work late, we work after the kids are down, and we work weekends. We may take an afternoon off to see a kid's play, but then the guilt will send us right back in to make up the time. In my anecdotal experience, remote workers are more likely to feel they are "taking time from the company" and pay it back more than others.
I like working from home when I have a lot of creative or intense work to do, but generally I prefer working in the office. I've also been thinking about the compromise solution of moving to within, say, 500 meters of the office, so I can get home in 5 minutes if I need to.
Meanwhile...back to work.
I don't have time to read these must-read articles:
Back to the mines...
From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
From this week's news:
If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension, one theoretical physicist calls “boring.”
“It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,” [theoretical physicist Joseph] Lykken [of Fermilab] added, referring to an invisible field of energy that is believed to exist throughout the universe.
“Essentially, the universe wants to be in different state and so eventually it will realize that. A little bubble of what you might think of an as alternative universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us. So that’ll be very dramatic, but you and I will not be around to witness it,” Lykken told reporters before a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston this week.
And...has this happened already? We can't possibly know...but Douglas Adams might have known all along.
Microsoft has suffered some unfortunate outages this week, first affecting SQL databases on Monday, and then yesterday storage:
On Friday, February 22 at 12:44 PM PST, Storage experienced a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS traffic due to an expired SSL certificate. This did not impact HTTP traffic. We have executed repair steps to update SSL certificate on the impacted clusters and have recovered to over 99% availability across all sub-regions. We will continue monitoring the health of the Storage service and SSL traffic for the next 24 hrs. Customers may experience intermittent failures during this period. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.
The outage caused problems throughout the Azure universe, because SSL-based storage underpins just about everything. Without Storage, for example, any VM that goes offline can't restart, because its VHD is kept in Storage. Web sites and Service Bus were also hosed. My customers were annoyed.
These problems can affect any computing system. The problem with Azure Storage going down was the scope of it: millions of applications. Even the largest colo data center only has tens of thousands of computers. With so many people affected, the outage looks like a disaster.
I'll be watching Microsoft closely over the next few days to see what more they can tell us about the outage. But if this was all do to certificates expiring, wow.
Security guru Bruce Schneier examines Papal election security:
Probably the biggest risk is complacency. What might seem beautiful in its tradition and ritual during the first ballot could easily become cumbersome and annoying after the twentieth ballot, and there will be a temptation to cut corners to save time. If the Cardinals do that, the election process becomes more vulnerable.
A 1996 change in the process lets the cardinals go back and forth from the chapel to their dorm rooms, instead of being locked in the chapel the whole time, as was done previously. This makes the process slightly less secure but a lot more comfortable.
There are also enormous social -- religious, actually -- disincentives to hacking the vote. The election takes place in a chapel and at an altar. The cardinals swear an oath as they are casting their ballot -- further discouragement. The chalice and paten are the implements used to celebrate the Eucharist, the holiest act of the Catholic Church. And the scrutineers are explicitly exhorted not to form any sort of cabal or make any plans to sway the election, under pain of excommunication.
Of course, no amount of security in the world will prevent the electors from replacing Joseph Ratzinger with someone at least as out-of-touch and reactionary as he is, given the constitution of the cardinality these days.
Over the past two days, Microsoft Azure had two outages they're still investigating. The first, from 18:26 CST through 20:00 CST Monday (0026 to 0200 UTC Tuesday), and the second, from 13:50 to 15:27 CST (1950-2127 UTC) yesterday, affected SQL Database and related services in the Azure datacenter outside Washington, D.C.
I noticed the Monday evening outage as it happened, because when a database goes down, a number of applications start sending me emails. A couple of people had minor inconveniences, but as it happened on a holiday evening, the damage wasn't too severe.
I did not notice the Tuesday afternoon outage, which did affect a lot of people and made some of my clients very angry, because I was on an airplane. When I landed and turned on my phone, I had 300 emails from various applications and mercifully only 4 from angry clients. (Welcome home!)
Microsoft hasn't determined reported the cause yet, but given the maintenance they had planned, started, and then backed out on Sunday night, they may have a clue. They have a second round of maintenance planned for tonight at midnight CST (0600 UTC). I'll be watching carefully tomorrow morning.
Via Sullivan, a catalog of strange things we do with gadgets:
You’re on your cell phone, talking to a friend, pacing in circles, fidgeting with your hands, checking your cuticles–whatever it is you do while you’re on the phone. They’re odd, pointless behaviors, but we do them nonetheless, and a group of designers from the Art Center College of Design has taken it upon themselves to illustrate and document all of them (sort of like that Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology).
There’s the “Security Blanket” (checking your smartphone for no particular reason when faced with the slightest discomfort in a social situation), the “Halfway Courtesy” (taking one earbud out in order to show a person you’re listening to them), the “Haunted Interface” (performing actions an interface can’t react to, like shaking a video game controller), and many others. All of the actions are collected in a free ebook called Curious Rituals. Researcher Nicolas Nova explains in the book’s introduction.
Meanwhile, I'm doing my strange ritual of camping at Peet's Coffee before dawn to make sure I stay reasonably close to Chicago time for the weekend. Otherwise, Wednesday will be hell.