AlexHopmann.com

Dare Obasanjo posted an excelent description of the essence of the REST architectural style. Very good write up and it includes some good history and theory.

If you miss any of the key Olympics events it looks like you can catch most of the 2008 Olympics on Amazon Unbox.

MacWorld did a comparison of the golf-scoring apps for the iPhone and ranked TeeShot “Best of the Bunch”.

TeeShot is by my buddy Chris Evans and it rocks. Its great to see how the iPhone provides a great opportunity for talented developers.

So I have a nice new storage array going for my home using the Sans Digital ESATA case, 4 WD Greenpower drives, and the Silicon Image ESATA card that came with the Sans Digital enclosure. The card comes with software called SATARAID5 that appears to mostly work just fine- it was easy to setup a RAID5 array with my 4 disks, and while I can’t dynamically add more disks too it (it looks like there is some other newer software that supports that kind of thing), overall it works well with one major exception. Before I mention that I should add that I’m just looking for some good reliable mass storage. This isn’t a “backup”, it doesn’t need the highest performance storage possible (although faster is always better), and all that. I’ve tested yanking a hard drive out of the array in mid-file copy and putting it back in later and it rebuilds (takes about 24 hours) but is fine.

The big catch is that everytime I reboot my system it does a rebuild- the management app has a nice UI that says that “Group 0 Volume A was not shutdown properly”, and it kicks off the rebuild which takes a very long time. So far those rebuilds have worked great but its really annoying to have degraded performance and reliability after every reboot.

Anyone have any experience with this stuff or ideas? Is there some way to manually shutdown the volume before I reboot? Some bug fix version that fixes this issue (I’m running SATARAID5 version 1.5.2.1 on Vista 32-bit).

The newspapers today are reporting that Cisco has acquired Pure Networks. Congrats to the team, and to Cisco/Linksys which is getting itself a fine group of people and some great technology. Pure was always in a complicated marketplace but it makes a ton of sense to me that an industry leader like Linksys would see Software as a great advantage in making Networking easier for their customers. Plus it makes me feel like my decision to buy that Linksys WRT600N a few weeks ago was the right one.

Speaking of which- so far the WRT600N is performing really well, and I’m also using it with a WGA600N which is a dual-band N bridge that I’ve got to hook up equipment downstairs (the XBox, the Wii and the TV). There are two main problems I’ve had so far with the WRT600N. The first is that I named both my 5.4ghz and 2.4ghz networks with the same SID and its sometimes really unpredictable which network a given device has joined (and usually difficult to tell which one its connect to). This is partly a problem with the devices which don’t really communicate well which band they are on, but the router could help a lot here too. Its really confusing to figure out which devices are going to work best on which bands (between trying to balance distance, penetration through walls and media-playback performance). Messing around with it sometimes my TV (which acts as a media extender) works with awesome HD capability and sometimes its just crap. This seems like one of those things some intelligent home network management software could help with (hint hint).

The bigger problem is that for some reason its tunneling isn’t working. I love to use the remote access client to connect in to my home machines and I just can’t get that to work with this router. I can’t tell if its bugged or I’m doing something wrong, but the interface to set it up is actually less intuitive than normal (which is saying something).

Building a silent PC- you failed!

On Friday I finally got all the bits together for me new home RAID array. This one is a Sans Digital TR4M 4-space ESATA enclosure plus 4 Western Digital GP 1TB drives. Building it as Raid5 it looks like the total capacity will be 2.8TB (as the computer measures it, not as the drive companies market it).

I started it formatting, skipping the “quick format” option. That was over 24 hours ago and its at 36% right now. Which points out one of the biggest problems with large drive arrays (or any kind of large storage)- if you aren’t careful managing it can be a total mess. This does make me a bit happy that I decided to go with just the 4-drive array rather than holding out for a full 8- the bigger one would be even more of a mess to manage at times.

For my media-PC I purchased a silent video card. Gigabyte makes the SilentPipe series for several of the Nvidia models and it seemed like a good idea to be able to get a card with decent graphical power (not top, but at the time it was better than any of the other cards I had) and no noise.

The catch is that when building a Media PC you need to keep in mind the overall system. The SilentPipe GF8600GTS has two problems- first of all its form factor is kind of big- the cooling fins stick about a half inch over the normal height of a PCI-express card. In a full sized case this would be fine but in the Zalman media-case I have there is only the exact room for full height cards and the extra half inch means the top of the case doesn’t really fit right.

The second issue is heat. The card runs correctly, but overall it does run pretty hot and since its not blowing the hot air outside the case itself it places extra heat load on the rest of the system + relies on the existing case fans to create air moment through its fins and out its vent. I suspect this results in my overall case fans running higher more of the time, so in the end I fear that I’m actually running a more noisy system for trying to use a silent video card. Instead of adding one relatively slow running video card fan I’m pushing the main fans faster and higher RPMs create a lot more noise.

Cool site with focus on Seattle music happenings….

Back in March Dare Obasanjo said he was going to stop blogging. Luckily it seems like he didn’t carry through his threat very well and has had a ton of great posts recently.

Dare posted on functional programming, Map/Reduce/Filter in C# 3.0 including some nice background on the topic. I’ve been getting into Python lately which has some really elegant support for anonymous functions, list/collection operations, and specifically things like map/reduce/filter. This is also an interesting approach on some similar techniques in PHP.

Dare also did an interesting post on techniques to dark launch / gradually ramp up new features. The idea is that you want to try out a new feature without risking taking down your entire user base at once.

Some other really simple approaches include putting a hidden iframe into existing pages that access the new feature. Its a really easy way to isolate it from the rest of what is going on for your site. One thing to keep in mind is that as you dark-launch a feature its really important to figure out how you can throttle it up/down. If you have 20 front end servers, maybe you can deploy it only on a certain set of them or else your pages can only serve it up a certain random percentage of the time. This way you can start it up on a very low load (say 1% of the requests) and slowly increase it to try it out more. If you start having some performance problems in your data center, just kick it down a couple of notches.

Deploying to only certain specific servers can be especially interesting because it can (if done right) focus the load on those servers. So those servers behave the way the whole system will once the system gets fully turned on, but don’t have the same risk of taking your whole environment down.