Working with the Chaos Monkey

We’ve sometimes referred to the Netflix software architecture in AWS as our Rambo Architecture. Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.

If our recommendations system is down, we degrade the quality of our responses to our customers, but we still respond. We’ll show popular titles instead of personalized picks. If our search system is intolerably slow, streaming should still work perfectly fine.

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

Which, let’s face it, seems like insane advice at first glance. I’m not sure many companies even understand why this would be a good idea, much less have the guts to attempt it. Raise your hand if where you work, someone deployed a daemon or service that randomly kills servers and processes in your server farm.

Now raise your other hand if that person is still employed by your company.

Who in their right mind would willingly choose to work with a Chaos Monkey?

Jeff Atwood – Coding Horror

Guy Kawasaki on Android

Use the best tool is probably the best “tech-philosophy” out there. I think a good deal of company managers forget that most people think like that and assume that consumers are some sort of “herd” you possess and that won’t go away, no matter what stupid decisions you make to screw them over.

I do disagree on Guy on his opinions on widgets and the rest of Android all-over-the-wall approach though. But i strongly feel that it’s basically a matter of personal preferences and focus, not exactly what’s better technological wise. I’m a strong minimalist / just want it to work effectively /no fuss kind of guy when it relates to my phone.

I will rather have a simple cheap phone that does what a phone should do really well than have a crappy cheap Android phone that might be a reasonable pocket computer but a lousy phone. I love general purpose “full computers” but for some items i just want them to work really, really well. No fuss! My brief experiences with iOS were perfect on that matter. My experiences with Android were everything but that.

I have no doubt that my “first” smartphone will be an Android, though. iPhone’s current prices are absurdly expensive for my very slim wallet, and even though i had some hopes for WebOS and Windows Phone 7 (and even Blackberry) they all managed to drop the ball one way or another, (( considering my ideal of a phone )) which is a damn shame. However every time i open up my browser on my carrier’s available smartphones, i never find a single phone that i simultaneously really want or can afford. Maybe Blackberry with its recent skydiving prices and it’s new BB10 OS will do that i strongly doubt it.

PS: For any marketing department out there that somehow want to influence “all of the 20 daily readers” this website has, i’m perfectly happy to receive a free sampling of your smartphone line for analysis! (wink wink)

Nuclear Management

Aceita também que não utilizará estes produtos para qualquer fim que esteja proibido pelas leis dos Estados Unidos, incluindo, sem limitação, o desenvolvimento, a concepção, o fabrico ou a produção de armamento nuclear, mísseis, ou armas biológicas ou químicas.

iTunes Terms of Service in Portuguese for the Portuguese Store

The (most?) stupid thing about iTunes’s “Nuclear clause” is not that it exists or it’s present on a player/media manager program. It’s that Apple has effectively paid translators and, i assume, national lawyers to translate this nonsense onto each national language where the iTunes store operates.

Just out of curiosity, does this mean that, if i would be building a “Nuclear/Chemical/Biological Weapon”, i couldn’t use iTunes for it’s deployment control system (( a capability that iTunes is worldwide known for )) or that i couldn’t use iTunes to listen to music while i was engineering such Weapon of Mass Destruction?

Thinking the Unthinkable

On the intake form, under the question, “What are your expectations for treatment?” I wrote, “I need help.”

And I do. This problem is too big for me to handle on my own. Sometimes there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.

I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map). Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number of mentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, and it continues to rise—in fact, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times greater (56 percent) than in the non-incarcerated population.

The Anarchist Soccer Mom

The US federal government spends 8.1 billion dollars on the Toilet Safety Administration, but somehow can’t manage to get a proper mental health medical program for it’s citizens. (( or provide States with the funds for it ))

I’m not an american citizen but if i were, i would say that you’re doing it wrong. Terribly wrong.

Building my Own Laptop

We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.

This is a lengthy project. Fortunately, ARM CPUs are getting fast enough, and Moore’s Law is slowing down, so that even if it took a year or so to complete, I won’t be left with a woefully useless design. Today’s state of the art ARM CPUs — quad-core with GHz+ performance levels — is good enough for most day-to-day code development, email checking, browsing etc.

We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It’s booting linux, and I’m currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I’d share the design progress with my readers.

Of course, a feature of a build-it-yourself laptop is that all the design documentation is open, so others of sufficient skill and resources can also build it. The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology. You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs.

bunnie’s blog

State / Province

One of the infuriating thing when dealing with US based companies / institutions is the mandatory insistence on the “State / Province” field on Address insertion. For God’s sake, how hard is it to understand that not the entire world revolves around / is based on the same logic as the U.S.?

If you state yourself as an “international” agent/player/service/provider, then act internationally! Some countries, including my own, don’t actively have any State or Province. We just need the unique Postal Code and Town name. Seriously. It. Works. That. Way.

Don’t make me go around and invent something out my magic hat to write there. I don’t have a State or Province, besides my National State (AKA Country).

Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac | Xamarin Blog

Today we’re proud to announce Xamarin.Mac, which makes it possible to use C# to build self-contained Mac OS X apps suitable for publication in the Mac App Store.

Smiling Macs with Xamarin

With the release of Xamarin.Mac, it is now possible to build apps in C# for over 2.2 billion devices worldwide: 1.2 billion Windows devices, and using Xamarin, 1 billion Android, iOS, and Mac devices.

Xamarin.Mac allows developers to build fully-native Cocoa applications for Mac OS X with C#. Xamarin.Mac exposes native platform APIs, making it possible for developers to build sophisticated apps that integrate with platform conventions and leverage the rich spectrum of platform-specific functionality that make Mac apps so beautiful and distinctive.

Xamarin Blog

Not being a professional developer, I still haven’t understood what advantages exactly has C# and .Net over something else like Java or Python and QT, (( Speed probably? )) but i find Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza efforts to bring this set of technologies everywhere laudable.

And if it can truly increase and speed up the development of cross-platform applications then it should be embraced / helped. There really shouldn’t be a single (( or a duo of )) dominating operating systems. The easier it is for everyone to use several different Operating Systems, the better, richer and safer the technology world will be.

The unlikely persistence of AppleScript

What makes it so surprising that AppleScript survived and remains a fully-supported-by-Apple technology today (including in OS X Mountain Lion) is that it was never loved by anyone. It was a fine theory and noble experiment, but it turns out that an English-like programming language didn’t really enable a large number of users to become programmers. And conversely, AppleScript’s English-like syntax often made (and to this day continues to make) things more difficult and confusing for scripters, not less.

Put simply, the number of programmers in the world who consider AppleScript their favorite language could fit in a very small car, or perhaps even share a bicycle. But, as noted, AppleScript was the only OSA scripting language that ever gained any traction.

Macworld

Automator, Services, Applescript and it’s UNIX base which allows other automation sequences using UNIX pipes, is what i love most of Mac OS X, and why i currently consider it the best (( or at least the less bad )) current operating system.

Applescript is indeed hard to master because of its lack of resemblance with any sort of standard programming language but Automator very decently allows for a quick way of putting an automatized workflow in place.

Just hope that Apple not only not kills it with its iOS’ification but takes some time to make it stronger, correct its deficiencies and implement some other decent scripting language support, such as Python.