Jim Panttaja

Arthur Bergman posted on O’Reilly Radar about the power failure in San Francisco on Monday (Failure Happens). I was corresponding with the Network Manager for Sapias (now with Wireless Matrix), Jeff Dao, and he had the following lessons learned (fortunately, the Sapias production systems were not in the floors that lost power at 365 main): 1) Do a dry run to see how your failure strategies will work (see 2)). 2) Don’t trust anyone to tell you how great their data center is, and how it can’t possibly fail 3) although there are advantages to being ‘just up the street’ from the data center, maybe the data center should be a long way away (Jeff did encounter issues in the corporate data center – which was impacted by the power hits, and was pleased that he didn’t have to be chasing production issues at the same time).

When Sapias first went live (almost five years ago), we were hosted at a data center that claimed that their building had not had a power outage in 40 years. Dual paths – dual everything. Generators on the top of the building. Within a month of going live – they had a power outage. They ran on generators for months as they coped.

Yesterday, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat published a Q/A between Nate Halverson, staff writer at the Press Democrat, and me, titled Make information technology work for you.

I use Adium on my Mac – and have my Yahoo and AOL accounts on it. I also use iChat – thought not as much. Because I have an older PowerBook – I don’t have a built in camera. iChat wins when I want to use the camera – but it means unpacking it (and finding it first)… Most of the time, I use Adium.

The key features I look for are the basics. The ability to maintain multiple conversations simultaneously (and asynchronously). Also the ability – offered in Adium – to have ‘group chat’. We found these very effective at Sapias when we were doing deployments – everyone was listening in – and adding their status and questions. This is available in other tools as well.

Today I looked at Velvet Puffin. The following is from their web site:

Socially Active Instant Messenger
VelvetPuffin is a new kind of instant messenger, built on the idea that IM can be more intuitive, real-time, and socially active.

Through an Instant Messaging interface
Chat, share photos, blogs, videos & polls with friends
View your friends’ photos, blogs, videos and polls.
Receive instant alerts when friends share new content
View/share videos from YouTube, Google Video & Metacafe

Mobile Access
You can do all of the above on your mobile phone with
VelvetPuffin Mobile. (If the phone is Java based)

Velvet Puffin covered the basics (though I didn’t see the group feature). The key aspect is the ability to share pictures and videos with the people you are IMing with. There is value here from a social networking perspective – but I didn’t see any particular value added for the business setting.

I received my iPhones last night (one for me, one for Mary). I bought the beer and held down the fort at the Thirsty Bear while colleagues relieved the line-sitters at the San Francisco Apple Store, and made the purchases.

The device is small and beautiful. The activation process is through iTunes (a newly available version 7.3). The process was mostly clear as I made my choices.

I decided to use a family plan for the two phones, and on a whim (and perhaps against my better judgement) decided to move my existing phone number from Sprint. The bottom line is that “Your activation requires additional time to complete”. “Service is scheduled to be disconnected on your current phone at or after 12:31 AM EDT on July 01″.

So for the moment, I am waiting patiently.

The iPhone has the attention of many of us this week. The 20-minute video on the Apple website certainly provides a good overview (I suggest only viewing it in small mode), as does the article in today’s Wall Street Journal (a transcript appears at Just Another Phone Blog on blogspot).

One item pointed out in the Wall Street Journal article is the lack of Flash support. This means that applications written in Flex (for example, the Sapias Mobile Resource Management services) will not work on the iPhone – for now. This should be easily fixed by Adobe and Apple.

Since third-party development is limited to Safari, I assume that Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) will not work on the iPhone. AIR is looking like a good development environment for occasionally connected applications.

From watching the examples in the video, the iPhone is not location aware. There is an example of finding a sushi restaurant, and then getting directions to it. The starting location is chosen from a list of bookmarks. Although the iPhone does not appear to have a GPS chipset – it could still determine location (AT&T has to be able to provide the location of the phone in support of E911 – so somewhere that location is known). But it doesn’t appear to take advantage of that information (from the demo – or other articles I have seen).

As a follow up to my entry MySQL: Twelve Days of Scaleout, I listened to the webinar:
Scale-Out & Replication Best Practices for High-Growth Businesses. This one hour webinar gives a brief overview of different replication approaches to support scaleout. It was a good introduction. The slides are also available (slides). On many of the pages there are references to white papers or other pages that elaborate on the topic at hand.

The following is the agenda for the webinar:

• Introduction to MySQL
• Scale Out Overview
• Replication Fundamentals
• Statement vs. Row-Based Replication
• Replication Topologies
• Other Replication Strategies
• Case Studies
• Additional Resources Conclusion

The companies highlighted in the feature 12 Days of Scaleout used a variety of the techniques highlighted in this webinar. The techiques each have their unique advantages and disadvantages. For a complete solution you will likely need to use DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) with Linux Heartbeats to have complete fail over and manage inconsistencies in the case of failure, utilize application partitioning (also called shards) to manage which ‘partition’ of the database to access, and add simpler replication to provide read-only copies for further scalability. There is no one size fits all – it depends on the data, and the application. But MySql has a wealth of techniques (some just becoming available in the lastest release – 5.1 – which is still designated as beta on most platforms) – and you should be able to find an appropriate combination them for your application.

One last link - Top Five Scale-Out Pitfalls to Avoid. This offers some food for thought in approaching your scaleout solution. Some of this I found familiar – but the rapid scale that can be required in a Web 2.0 application requires planning and architecting from the beginning – and these tips will be helpful.

PCs and now the web have offered many powerful ways to visualize data. On the PC Excel (and its predecessors) have given us very powerful ways to view data. The web has contributed to this ability in several ways. New visualization tools have appeared, but data is also becoming more available. Some of this data is ‘public’ data that people are making available on the internet (government data among others), and some is now individuals create data and making it available.

I have looked at a lot of analytic tools in the past, but in this entry would like to present some information on some web based visualization tools.

We had dinner with Bob Zurek of IBM over the weekend, and one of the things that he pointed us at was IBM’s Many Eyes, and the somewhat related Swivel.

Many Eyes let’s you upload data (which becomes public), and then use your dataset, or another existing one to apply various visualizations. Some of these are the usuals (pie charts, bar charts), and some are creative and experimental. I am attaching two below.

One of my hobbies is genealogy. I have been creating my genealogy (and the genealogy of various ‘related’ (pun intended) families for about forty years, ever since my two grandmother’s each independently gave me a family bible, along with other documents and notes. I now have about 8000 people in my database (at some point I will write more about the tools that I use, but the core database is part of Family Tree Maker).

I decided to take a list of the surnames from my database, and display them using two of the visualization techniques.

The first is called a tag cloud. It displays each surname a different size, based on the number of occurrences of that surname. If you click on the following snap shot, you will be taken to Many Eyes, and can view, and interact with the visualization. Note – on a Mac, this will work better if you open it in Safari rather than Firefox.

A Couple of insights here. The first is that the surname that stands out is Scudder. This is my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. It was the place that I started – with one of the family bibles that I was given. In addition, the Scudder Association has tracked back the family to the 17th century. So it isn’t surprising that I have the most data there. Somewhat surprising is the occurrence of Mary. This is not a surname in my database, but when I extracted the data – Family Tree Maker tried to determine the last name based on a single name field that include first, middle and last names. The occurrence of Mary on this list means that I have lot’s of Mary’s for whom I do not know the last name. I am surprised that it is as many as it is.

My second example is a bubble chart. This based on a similar data upload – essentially the surnames, and the number of people with that surname. These bubbles are to scale – so it allows you to compare instances where the data varies dramatically in scale. In this particualr example, there are so many surnames, that there is not room to display the names themselves on most of the bubbles.

These are instances trying to get insight in to data that I have. Many of the examples on Many Eyes are of data that is interesting to a larger number of people. And a major goal of the site is to have lot’s of people look at the data, and try to gain insights from it. There is also a commenting feature that let’s people manipulate and annotate their insights.

Mary has also blogged on Many Eyes.