Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I got an email from Google the other day that describes a change in terms for users of their Google Apps service . Previously the "free" tier let you have up to 50 users accounts for your domain. As of May 10, that will be dropped to 10 for new accounts. Says Google, " As of May 10, any organization that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users ." Although I can see the reasoning (small businesses were probably using the free personal account) but it's still sounds grasping. This will not affect existing accounts, so if you were planning to use Google Apps for your vanity domain, I'd get in there and do it now. That being said, even with only 10 accounts, Google Apps are pretty cool.

Amazon has finally released a detailed post-mortem that describes what happened during last week's outage at their Northern Virginia data center (US-EAST) and why it took so long to fix (short version: we screwed up and things snowballed out of control ). It makes for a long, technical, but interesting read. Complex systems make for complex failures.

Microsoft filed a suite against Barnes & Noble for alleged patent violations in their Nook reader - they take exception to the open-source Android OS that powers the Nook. Rather than humbly submitting, B&N has fired back a blistering response ( PDF ). You can read more about it on Groklaw . Most outstanding move was B&N's steadfast refusal to sign a NDA (non-disclosure agreement), which Microsoft insisted on before outlining the specifics of their complaint against them. Huh? Here's a sample from B&N's response: On information and belief, to perpetuate this scheme, Microsoft and its agents, including spokesman and chief executive officer Mr. Steven Ballmer, have publicly stated that through its patents Microsoft can dominate, control, and exclude from the market the AndroidTM Operating System, other open source operating systems, and open source applications such as Google Chrome. These statements are unjustified in view of the scope of Microsoft...

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, an oppressed minority decided they'd taken all the shit they were going to and rose up against their persecutors. The scene of this uprising was the Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-owned bar in Greenwich Village in New York that catered to a primarily gay clientele. The spark that ignited this was a police raid on the Stonewall Inn. The end result was 3 days of sometimes violent demonstrations against police persecution by patrons and neighborhood folk. In the words of one anonymous participant, "Tuesday night was the last night for bullshit... Predominantly, the theme (w)as, 'this shit has got to stop!'" The Stonewall Riots are often identified as the beginning of the gay rights movement in America. PBS recently aired an excellent documentary about this watershed event called Stonewall Uprising which can be viewed online (at the present) on the PBS website. It should not be missed. Watching it places current strug...

Here, in one easy-to-read place, is the timeline for Thursday's Amazon Web Services FAIL in their Northern Virginia data center. In case you are interested my phone started ringing at 3:15 AM, CST, about 20 minutes after the error (still not disclosed) that started this whole sorry mess.

Far be it from me to deny someone the joy of seeing a bad movie. There are plenty of films that I've gone out of my way to see that a mainstream audience would find utterly boring. That said, it is telling (in my mind) that my Libertarian friend, The Whited Sepulchre, starts out his " review " of Atlas Shrugged by exclaiming, "they didn't screw it up!" but by the end of it says, "they didn't totally screw it up." In some circles this is known as damning with faint praise. I respect his honesty. Other online reviews pretty much panned it. What was amusing was the comments by the True Believers, who were convinced in every case the reviewer was some liberal scoundrel for failing to see the film's elusive virtues. It never occurred to them that, politics aside, the film...just...sucked. Even my friend, the WS, admitted the screenplay, acting, directing, and effects were not particularly good. So what's left? Ayn Rand's philos...

By now, if you keep up with all things geekish, you may have heard about Amazon's big outage yesterday . No - this wasn't their online store: this was their other business --  selling their excess capacity as "cloud computing" services. So-called "cloud computing" (also known as utility computing) is all the rage today, and like a lot of things, it's not an entirely new thing. It works by setting up virtual machines in Amazon's massive datacenter. Usually everything works just dandy. But not yesterday . I got a call from one of my internal customers in the UK at 3:00 AM (my employer, the Sisyphean Corp is a global operation) who, in a panicky voice, informed me his Amazon-hosted site was gone. I spent the next 15 hours working to recover it. Amazon has not yet offered a detailed explanation of exactly what happened. My sources, however, have found the reason for all the trouble:

Gizmag (which I've not visited before) has an article entitled " EU plan to phase out 'conventionally fueled' cars by 2050 ," which describes a whitepaper outlining plans to reduce reliance on foreign oil imports, cut emissions by 60%, and increase the availability of public transportation. Those damned socialists! Of course we never need to worry about that happening here. Look at the uproar from the various factions of the Sorehead party when people proposed phasing out incandescent bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient light sources. Force them to give up their gas guzzlers? Hell no! No...we'd rather breath brown crap while creeping forward at 5 miles an hour on freeways that look like parking lots. And continue to destroy our shorelines and wilderness area by drilling for ever-dwindling oil reserves, while paying god-knows how much for a gallon for gas. Because no one can tell *us* what to do!

We had several days with temperatures in the mid-teens this winter and the big stand of cactus in my side yard took a bit of a hit. But it's roaring back now. Check the buds out on these: I ended up potting several of the fallen which will end up on my deck eventually.

Glenn Beck is now officially too crazy for Fox News. Who'd a thunk it? While the Washington Post trumpeted  in its  Entertainment section  the split between Beck and Fox would "dissolve a 27-month marriage beset by outside pressures and internal tensions,"  the Fox News website  tactfully noted in the  Business News , "the show has been losing viewers recently." Who says advertiser boycotts don't work? Well, this is old news. What I'm wondering is what the Mad Prophet will do next? Radio is an obvious answer, but without Beck's visuals (chalkboard, tears, pacing the set), that's bound to get boring before long. Americans may have have a love affair with freak shows but they like to see the object of their affection in living color. My prediction is this will play out as it does with other celebrity freak shows: escalating crazy (until the public gets bored with that), followed by a reboot of the story arc in the form of some so...