I have had a horrible experience with my e-mail vendor. Yes, you might ask why I am not using Google or something but I am not and it is mostly a historical thing. Anyway, they decided to migrate to a new mail server architecture. This apparently justified essentially screwing up everyone's e-mail for a week or so: first flaky and then dead altogether and a slow recovery. If they were shooting for five-nines then they will need to be failure free into the next millennium in my opinion. Anyway, to make things worse, during this "planned outage" e-mails from the same provider were not being delivered about the fact that one of my domain names is about to expire. Now I know that I am certainly to blame for not renewing early and all of that but the consequences of my failure were dramatic: they shut down my site, tossed the domain forwarding information, and started sending undeliverable bounces back to whomever was trying to send me e-mail, meaning, of course, that I would not get that e-mail. It took me a bit of time to figure out that this was not another symptom of the "planned outage." To make things worse, they charged me a $25 reinstatement fee. I will be changing providers for that simple injustice.
What is the point of this rant? It seems to me that E-mail is as vital in our modern age as electricity and gas and the providers should view it as such in all of its ramifications.
Firstly, and most obviously, it should be utterly reliable and when it fails there should be a darn good reason. For example, our electricity occasionally goes out and it is usually essentially always an act of nature - a powerful windstorm or an avalanche or ice in the mountains where the power lines bring hydro power to Seattle. I have never in my life experienced a "planned outage."
Secondly, when a customer screws up they you don't just rip up their environment - you give them grace time. I have screwed up more then once and have failed to pay my gas bill and the gas company sends ominous warnings but acts slowly to turn off the gas. This is as it should be - people screw up and the consequences of a single screw up should be small, not catastrophic.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Five nines, Live Tennis, and Trust
I don't have a TV so when I want to watch some sports event, I usually go to my local pub to watch and have a few beers until I have satisfied my thurst for sports. Being somewhat of a tennis nut, Wimbleton is a definite event that I enjoy watching. Unfortunately, in Seattle, the final started at 6am - not really a time for a trip to the pub. So instead, I went online to NBCsports and was pleased that they were "live-casting" the game over the Internet. While the resolution was not great, it was adequate given the circumstances.
That is, until during the final set the browser starting showing an ominous "reconnecting" black rectangle in the middle of the image. It would then repeat the previous 10 seconds of the match, show "reconnecting", and then show the same 10 seconds again; kind of like the movie "Groundhog Day". Eventually, the browser went black with a notice of technical failure and a suggestion to try again later.
I think we as humans watch live sports because we want to imagine ourselves at the event itself and "liveness" gives an approximation of this. Even when the event is delayed by a small amount of time, as the browser seems to do to properly buffer the data, is still seems "live." But when the whole thing collapses we are annoyed and frustrated. The "technical difficulty" was eventually resolved but I missed 30 minutes of the longest fifth set in finals history. Worse, the sense of liveness was totally destroyed and I pretty much gave up, thinking to myself: "I'll watch the rest later."
Five nines is the way people like to talk about the level of reliably - five nines means that 99.999 pecent of the time a service is up. To recover "five nines of reliability" after a 30 minute technical failure would seem to imply that the service now needs to go uninterupted for the next 5+ years. Few services are five nines but the goal is there because the utility of a service is tied our degree of trust that it will reliably function. TV, for example, is much more reliable then "Internet TV."
Other items in our life are surprisingly reliable. Cars are a good example. Even in those cases, we often choose a car maker based on the level of reliability that the manufacturer has demonstrated. This is a good indication of how much we value reliability. The struggling US automakers did not seem to have taken seriously enough this expectation and when the Japanese attained a level of quality that sufficiently surpassed the US makers, many Americans switched and never went back.
In my opinion, until "live Internet broadcasts" attain a significantly higher level or reliability, they will not attract much of an audience. This problem plagues many "utility" aspects of Computer-based services. The company that takes five nines seriously might expect to reap significant benefits.
That is, until during the final set the browser starting showing an ominous "reconnecting" black rectangle in the middle of the image. It would then repeat the previous 10 seconds of the match, show "reconnecting", and then show the same 10 seconds again; kind of like the movie "Groundhog Day". Eventually, the browser went black with a notice of technical failure and a suggestion to try again later.
I think we as humans watch live sports because we want to imagine ourselves at the event itself and "liveness" gives an approximation of this. Even when the event is delayed by a small amount of time, as the browser seems to do to properly buffer the data, is still seems "live." But when the whole thing collapses we are annoyed and frustrated. The "technical difficulty" was eventually resolved but I missed 30 minutes of the longest fifth set in finals history. Worse, the sense of liveness was totally destroyed and I pretty much gave up, thinking to myself: "I'll watch the rest later."
Five nines is the way people like to talk about the level of reliably - five nines means that 99.999 pecent of the time a service is up. To recover "five nines of reliability" after a 30 minute technical failure would seem to imply that the service now needs to go uninterupted for the next 5+ years. Few services are five nines but the goal is there because the utility of a service is tied our degree of trust that it will reliably function. TV, for example, is much more reliable then "Internet TV."
Other items in our life are surprisingly reliable. Cars are a good example. Even in those cases, we often choose a car maker based on the level of reliability that the manufacturer has demonstrated. This is a good indication of how much we value reliability. The struggling US automakers did not seem to have taken seriously enough this expectation and when the Japanese attained a level of quality that sufficiently surpassed the US makers, many Americans switched and never went back.
In my opinion, until "live Internet broadcasts" attain a significantly higher level or reliability, they will not attract much of an audience. This problem plagues many "utility" aspects of Computer-based services. The company that takes five nines seriously might expect to reap significant benefits.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
A pristine machine, remote desktop, and unity
I finally had to wipe clean my Windows XP 64-bit edition. I had no idea that Microsoft would orphan an OS to the extent that they have this one; so far as I can tell, the only way to "upgrade" is to do a complete install of a different OS. So that is what I did. I dreaded having to install all of the apps that I had before. Then I had an epipphany - why install anything other then a web browser? So I decided to do that and use Remote Desktop to access my e-mail from my main development machine in my office.
There is something quite lovely about this setup - e-mail is totally readable in this manner and I no longer have two Outlook in-boxes to cope with. There is a nice feeling about having a minimal machine - perhaps this feeling is really a response to the crufty state my machine had gotten into over a number of years. I'm sure that I will install more apps but for now, I am enjoying the simplicity.
I wish that Remote Desktop had a "unity mode" ala VMWare. This would allow a smooth integration of remote and local functions. Arguably, this should be easier then Unity if the local and remote desktops are the same OS - one can have a notion of local and remote apps and you simply launch them locally or remotely and that is that. You might want to merge the desktops.
The bliss of this situation will of course vanish as soon as I have to go out of town but perhaps I'll simply use web access to my e-mail. Alternately, I could screw around to make remote desktop accessible from the web - something that seems worriesome.
The main realization I have from this experience is that my laptop is for the most part an e-mail and browsing machine. And yet, it would not be adequate for it to be limited to these functions. Remote desktop gives me a window into a richer environment and that may be all I need - time will tell.
In contrast, my development machine, which has three screens that make it a much more "information expansive" machine then the laptop. The cheapness of LCD monitors has made this setup really very practical (I tend to by the monitor size that is just one or two steps below the "state of the art" and, as such, vastly cheaper). It is interesting to me that the many monitors environment really makes a laptop (even one with a large screen) seem ackward for any kind of serious development activity: I do mechanical, hardware, software, and some graphics design and it appears true for all of these scenarios.
I now have four major "computer-like" devices that are in different form factors:
iPhone
Kindle DX
Laptop
Desktop with many monitors
I can imagine the Kindle DX and the laptop merging in some way - particularly if remote desktop were sufficiently performant. The iPhone and desktop appear to hold useful niches - very compact and information rich. This makes me think that this "middle area" will be the most exciting one in the near future.
There is something quite lovely about this setup - e-mail is totally readable in this manner and I no longer have two Outlook in-boxes to cope with. There is a nice feeling about having a minimal machine - perhaps this feeling is really a response to the crufty state my machine had gotten into over a number of years. I'm sure that I will install more apps but for now, I am enjoying the simplicity.
I wish that Remote Desktop had a "unity mode" ala VMWare. This would allow a smooth integration of remote and local functions. Arguably, this should be easier then Unity if the local and remote desktops are the same OS - one can have a notion of local and remote apps and you simply launch them locally or remotely and that is that. You might want to merge the desktops.
The bliss of this situation will of course vanish as soon as I have to go out of town but perhaps I'll simply use web access to my e-mail. Alternately, I could screw around to make remote desktop accessible from the web - something that seems worriesome.
The main realization I have from this experience is that my laptop is for the most part an e-mail and browsing machine. And yet, it would not be adequate for it to be limited to these functions. Remote desktop gives me a window into a richer environment and that may be all I need - time will tell.
In contrast, my development machine, which has three screens that make it a much more "information expansive" machine then the laptop. The cheapness of LCD monitors has made this setup really very practical (I tend to by the monitor size that is just one or two steps below the "state of the art" and, as such, vastly cheaper). It is interesting to me that the many monitors environment really makes a laptop (even one with a large screen) seem ackward for any kind of serious development activity: I do mechanical, hardware, software, and some graphics design and it appears true for all of these scenarios.
I now have four major "computer-like" devices that are in different form factors:
iPhone
Kindle DX
Laptop
Desktop with many monitors
I can imagine the Kindle DX and the laptop merging in some way - particularly if remote desktop were sufficiently performant. The iPhone and desktop appear to hold useful niches - very compact and information rich. This makes me think that this "middle area" will be the most exciting one in the near future.
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