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You’re not a snowflake!
In: In the news| Rants
22 Jul 2010As I was checking in today on the latest tech news, I found out that Twitter has announced that they are building their own data center.
Death to the fail whale they are calling it. Maybe so, but what really got me was this.
Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs.
Uh, what?
What could possible be unique to your power and cooling needs opposed to well, ANYONE ELSE RUNNING A FUCKING DATA CENTER?
Sure they have a metric crapton more users than you or I will ever have. But unique cooling and power needs?!?! Bullshit!
Yes you have servers, routers, SAN cabling, racks upon racks of gear. We get it, you’re a big site. But that doesn’t make you suddenly special. Just because you have a lot of cooling and power needs doesn’t make you suddenly unique to the rest of the world.
I work for a company that has several large data centers. We host more companies than I probably even know about. And you know what, we use a LOT of power and cooling. Why you ask, we’re a freaking data center, its what we do.
While building a data center gives you other benefits which you have listed (customization and flexibility), its doesn’t make you special so stop acting like it.
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- Tags: Rants, snowflake, Twitter
Question Everything!
Its been a while since I have posted something so here is a nice bit of advice that everything could use from time to time. Keep up the good fight!
World Cup
In: Cool Videos
11 Jun 2010The theory of competition states, just because they’re the strong, doesn’t mean they can’t get their asses kicked!
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- Tags: Cool Videos, World Cup
SSH Timeouts
In: SysAdmin| Tips & Tricks
4 Jun 2010Do you work in an environment where you bounce through a bunch of firewalls? Do you hang out on idle ssh connections that often times get dropped after a certain amount of idle time? I do and it has always annoyed me. To the point that once I connect to a box that I will be coming back to, I will run top and move on. Well, not anymore. You can set your SSH client to automatically send a bit of data over your connection every X seconds. Here is how it is done for Mac and Linux boxes.
In your home directory, edit your .ssh/config file. If you don’t have one, that’s not a problem, simply create a new one. Then enter in the following line:
ServerAliveInterval 60
And you’re done! Now wasn’t that easy?
Happy terminal camping partner!
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- Tags: OSX, SSH, SysAdmin, Tips and Tricks
Software development isn’t about implementing every feature that a customer requests. Its about implementing what is right for the product. And a lot of times that involves cutting existing features and more time than not, simply saying no to a feature!
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- Tags: Apple, Software Development
I’ll fully admit, I may be one of the few people that doesn’t watch Glee. I may catch clips from time to time, but never on a regular basis.
So with that baseline set…here’s something that I’ve noticed recently. iTunes has definitely started pushing more of the cast albums at me in their weekly “what’s new” marketing emails. Here’s the thing about the Glee cast versions of songs…when listening to the sample track, it doesn’t get me to buy the song. Instead, it makes me search to find the original song because their cover reminds me of how awesome the original version was.
Does this happen to anyone else?
Interruptions
In: Tips & Tricks
11 May 2010How often are you interrupted during the day? Do you have the new email notifier turned on? How often is that thing going off? How often are you seeing IMs coming in, both personal and professional? Twitter? facebook? Yup, those too are major enemies to productivity.
You may not have it that bad. Your company may lock down some of the social media services which eliminates a lot of the distractions. For many of us out there we are getting bombarded by interruptions. And as a programmer, it is horrible for productivity.
I think Jason Fried from 37Signals has summed it up best in this snippet from his BigThink interview.
So do yourself a favor, turn off your IM, your email etc. Avoid tapping your co-worker on the shoulder when an email will work out just as well. And get back to getting stuff done!
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- Tags: 37signals, GTD, Interruptions
Coming soon!
In: Site News
3 May 2010You know you have been slacking on your blog posts when you have 15 posts in the drafts folder.
More posts coming soon…promise!
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Priorities
In: Rants| Tips & Tricks
19 Mar 2010If it is important enough to you, you will find a way. If it is not, you will find an excuse.
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- Wow, a user trying to circumvent paying an extra $3 a month for an exchange account. Its 2.95 vs 5.95 Seriously people? #cheap #SOB
- RT @iapp100: Get your free bumper here - iPhone 4 Case Program http://bit.ly/bExmC8 #iphone #free #bumper
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- Window 10 (ms3) killed. Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die... #funny #error #messages #screen
- Not shocking that a local news cast talking about pregnancy is talking more about c-sections than natural childbirth. Wrong path folks.