Lego Factory Downtown

I have yet to spend a day or evening working from home. I planned to
do so a couple of weeks ago but just went downtown in the end. It is
far more distracting working in an office. What I miss the most about
the home office are the kids working quietly in the Lego Factory.

Today Jack spent the whole day with me. We took the 8:04AM R5 from
Daylesford. We got a Dunkin Donut and registered at the Comcast
Center. SpongeBob and Jimmy Neutron replaced news on my TV and Jack
met some other children in CIMcity, played PingPong and RockBand and
raided the kitchen for some candy. We managed to get the Xbox360
running.

In the end, what Jack spent hours doing was building a Lego kit on the
floor of my office. I put some news on, dug into some email, and it
was like being back in the Lego Factory even though we were really
downtown.

R5 Paoli Local Never Smelled So Good

It doesn't matter how old and dismal a SEPTA regional rail car is,
when you are riding out on the platform between cars because it's
beyond standing room only there is plenty of fresh air. This morning
the trains were late and screwd up. I heard on KYW 1060 that it was
due to dew on the rails and wet leaves. All I know is that a few
commuters starting at Daylesford were surprised (and unsafely stunned
standing close to the tracks) when the late train from Paoli raced by
and skipped our platform. This evening platform 4B at Suburban station
was jam-packed. The 6:09 Thorndale express was way behind and the 6:12
Malvern local was at least 15 minutes late. THE LAST Phillies World
Series game was coming on soon and everyone wanted to get home. It's
7:20PM and I am halfway home. I left Comcast Center at 6:04PM.

I was almost the last person on the train boarding at Suburban. We
squeezed onto the platform cab. I felt bad for about one second for
the ton of folks at 30th Street Station who didn't stand a chance. One
tenacious lady budged in - she must have been from New York.

At Overbrook, the conductor insisted on dropping the hatch to the
stairs and we had to squeeze in further and then ridevin the air.
After a couple stops the capacity reduced enough to get folks off the
platform cab. And I grabbed a seat and took this shot over my head.

This commute is really going to get old this winter. Lesson learned
though. In this economy you either get a warm seat on SEPTA or you
get cool fresh air - never both.

7:36 ...

That MLB.com iPhone application may earn it's keep yet ...

Day in the Life Washington Metro Style

When I get a chance to tag this entry it will be not far from the truth. Right off the early Amtrak into Union Station, I tried to move swiftly through the Metro station. I was heading over to the
Marriott Metro Center to attend Splunk Live! I purchased a One Day Metro Pass with a credit card which immediately f'd me in the turnstyle - "see station manager". Apparently, the "one day pass" only works after 09:30. WTF kind of day epoch is that? Actually, I will need another tag ...

I bought a second $2 Fare Card and finally got along.

How ironic that on my way to a Splunk technology briefing, , on my way to talk with experts who understand time epochs better than most, that a mis-apportioned time epoch screws me out of
eight bucks and 10 minutes.

(if you know what a log file is and you do not know about Splunk it is time to stop using grep and download Splunk - spend some more time with your kids)

There was a day, when I literally wore a bat belt for iPlanet (i.e. two SkyTel text pagers), that I was fed up with the virtual ( ha ha ) slap in the face of operational awareness by the Java VM engineers. If the paucity of information in the GC logging was bad enough, there was no time stamp in the GC log messages. If you system traced the VM more time() system calls would fly by than you could shake a stick at and these guys weren't generous enough to drop a LONG into a printf().

I asked for a timestamp. I bitched for a time stamp. About as much time went by as there were VMs signaled SIGQUIT. One day on my way to gaining weight

"hissss...would you like any fries with that timestamp?...click"

I left the Java DriveThru with my

-XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps

and ... Huh? WTF? These guys don't print a UTC time stamp, they don't print a formatted time value. They print an unconventional duration since the epoch of the VM/GC runtime start. I guess if you live in a virtual world the epoch of the VM start means something (look everyone! The VM ran for 87,000 seconds!). In the real world it is almost worthless. When the rest of the real world treats time as a standard you might as well live in The Black Sun if you devise
your own time epochs.

Tape n Scissors

One gauge of our systems is to track web resources (URLs) over the
time domain measuring cache hits, origin hits, response codes,
response time, total hits and total bytes. it all comes from
telemetry. Telemetry represents change in state over change in time.
In simple terms telemetry indicates events. Logs provide telemetry
because logs record an event - the state of a component at a point in
time. A web server access log record HTTP response message
exchange events - the final state of a dispatched HTTP request. At any layer
from browser to data source, telemetry from the logs anchor the
complexity of our architecture in the simplicity of time and
uniformity of web resources identifiers.

I am working on cGauge but took some time today to try and get more
eyes on the data.

There is something more powerful than web server access logs. Try adding an event for the initial state of a dispatched HTTP request!

Picasa 3 beta WebAlbum Syncing Looking Good

I downloaded and installed Picasa v3 beta a couple of weeks ago and was very excited by the features and UI improvements. My long list of issues with Picasa 2 such as lack of display of "keywords" other than through CRTL-K have been addressed. I Googled around for testimony on the Picasa WebAlbums syncing features and found some claims of problems which causes duplicate images/albums. I was little afraid to try on existing folder in Picasa which had already been uploaded to WebAlbums in version 2. I gave it a try today on a small album of some Ground Zero shots I took from PATH station last December.

My starting condition was that Picasa 3 did already have "Uploaded" (green up arrow) badging and the "View Online" link above the thumbnails worked. I would assume that if you don't have that starting condition, then you may be off on the wrong track to syncing. First I clicked on Web Sync Icon and the confirmation dialog confirmed that an existing WebAlbum was in place. I heard some disk activity after selecting OK but I did not have a visual indication of what I accomplished. I assumed that I was synchronized now and proceeded to test some edits. If I added a new keyword to a photo, the new tag appeared on the WebAlbum. (as I type this message I can't recall if I did anything to push the sync - I think it just happened after a delay). I then went to the Web Album and added a caption to an photo and saved it. Well, unless Picasa 3 opens a GMail like comet connection (he he) it really can't get an event from the web now can it. I found an online action menu (scoped to a photo or to an folder) and clicked on "Refresh Online Status". This synchronized the caption from Web Album. I then added a tag to a photo on the Web Album and again "Refresh Online Status" pulled in the web tag to the EXIF keywords.

More testing to come. I fear not finding the necessary "starting condition" described above. I don't see any reconciling features explicitly in the UI yet.

Telemetry Enables Command and Control

It is 48 degrees(F) and falling. I am in a sleeping bag, in a tent, in
my backyard. There is popcorn debris in my sleeping bag. I will have
symptoms of a cold virus by Monday morning because at least one of
these third graders in the tent is hacking up a lung. It is 2:47 in
the morning. I can hear the deer milling around in the woods prior to
their morning muster to devastate any landscaping I have left. I can
hear the bucks scraping their antlers.

My son Jack fashions things out of nothing. Recently he has been seen
carrying all manner of components into the woods where he "has a fort"
and is making stuff. Things have been disappearing from the garage.

Tonight these kids bent a tent pole and I had to make a splint. I had
to wake up Jack and ask him where the duct tape was. Half asleep he
knew exactly what beech tree in the woods he left the tape last.

I had snapped this shot Friday morning after Jack showed me the "Fire
Control Panel" of his latest device. (fiuor is how he spells 'fire') I
still can imagine where he got that minature IBM keyboard.

I am working on something special to help (others) manage the
complexity of a large URI namespace. If you want to get vectors on
how your systems and resources are performing - if you want actionable
information - you must have telemetry. The simpler and more discrete
(on the time domain) the better.

I have been thinking a lot about early lessons learned about
complexity and scale. Jack, who is "John", reminded me of my studies
of Panama Canal construction and how the engineer who finally
conquered the jungle and scale did it.

Thanks Jack! Now I know what I will name the application. cGauge

Jack and I will know what "gauge" really refers to and for everyone else
it will hopefully make sense that we are measuring stuff.

Fancast Commercial on Fox News

I haven't worked on web app that was promoted on TV.