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perspectives.mvdirona.com Nov 26, 2007
The choice of GoDaddy as a hoster is hard to explain these days but, back in 2002 cloud computing didn't exist, few options were available, and GoDaddy was a only a five-year old and still somewhat nimble start-up. They may have never been great from a customer service perspective but they did offer good value. And, in the end, as long as the site was up I didn't really need or even want customer service. That choice worked fine for many years. Looking at the rest of technology stack, I chose Das Blog as the blog software, a common option at that time. I chose to use an all Windows stack since I worked at Microsoft and I really ought to use what our customers were using. We also started a boat blog at the same time at blog.mvdirona.com.
mvdirona.com March 11, 2003
The last 5 years with GoDaddy have been tough. About once a year, some administrative error or unannounced administrative action takes down the web site. I know that 100% uptime is truly difficult to achieve and I don't expect 5 nines (99.999%) of availability. 3 nines would be fine and, hey I'm not unreasonable, if they could hit 99.5% availability and not make me spend my entire life on the phone with support, I might even have been able to live with it. Sadly, last year was a 1 nine performance. For someone whose entire focus at work is large system scalability, cost, and availability, it's somewhere between depressing and embarrassing to not be able to get even close to 99% availability.
But, in many ways, it was a good experience in trying to find time to move the blog in that it closely parallels the decisions enterprise customers have to make when deciding what to do with older workloads and when they should be moved to a new platform. You might think that whenever there is a better choice available where the service is better or the cost is lower, customers would just jump on it. But the truth is, we are all super busy and unless the pain is catastrophically high or the economic gain material, the app stays where it is and we just have to endure the pain. That's why it is super important to choose the right technology and the right technology partner when you do make a decision with a new application. No matter what you think going in and even if things go badly almost from the start, invariably the relationship ends up being a long lasting one. Moving costs money and time. Companies have businesses to run and re-platforming applications isn't the top priority for customers or shareholders. On a much smaller scale, the same is true of me. I've got a life to lead and, as much as I would like to be on the latest technology stack, I've got a full time job and other commitments that keep me fairly busy.
This decision that I knew I had to make just hung around for nearly 5 years. During that period, I knew I absolutely had to migrate the site but more pressing commitments always won. Moving forward to a couple of weeks ago, it's 2015, and I have a blog still running on Das Blog which is getting to be a pretty tired old choice. I could move to WordPress but I'm running on Windows and I really would prefer to be on Linux for the superior cost structures, higher reliability, and the productivity of the administrative environment. But moving from Windows to Linux is a lot of work in dealing with all the file path separator issues, file system case sensitivity problems, and the large number of differences between IIS and Apache. I could have made all these changes and stayed with GoDaddy. But fresh off another unnecessary and lengthy outage, I was now ready for whatever work is required to migrate the site.
Looking past the poor operational record at GoDaddy, the economics aren't looking as good as they used to either. When an administrative action or inaction takes down the site, there is no way anything will ever happen unless they are called repeatedly and near constantly. At times, I have even resorted to cheating and directly contacting members of the GoDaddy leadership team that I happen to know. It's tiresome, I hate having the site down, the personal time cost is annoying and, making it worse, the 7 day outage in 2013 happened while we were at sea in a small boat between the Society Islands and Tonga, and all the calls back to GoDaddy were via an expensive satellite phone link. Considering all the costs and poor operational results, it was clearly time for a move.
The transition is now done, I hope you like it, and wow, what a relief. I know there will be downtime again in the future but I'm almost looking forward to it at this point. Just being able to log in and make whatever change is needed rather than calling support and trying to convince someone that it really isn't working, no I didn't change anything, no I don't want to upgrade to the new premium service, yes I'll hold on the line, thanks I do know my call is important, no I really haven't changed anything, no it's not the case that it's coding error on the site, …. There is quite possibly nothing worse that talking to someone who will talk to someone else for you who will eventually open a trouble ticket that will only be looked at a couple of days from now by an over-worked system administrator. I'm sure the administrator that eventually reads the trouble ticket will do their level best but for lack of context, insufficient detail in the ticket, and possibly lack of time, they probably will miss the mark on the first interaction. When 72 hour turnaround on site outage events is policy, the process is slow and very frustrating. Ironically each failed interaction with the site still down yields a fresh request for a customer service survey response.
It was a ton of work to move from Das Blog to WordPress, from ASP to PHP, from Windows to Linux, from Goddady DNS to Route53, and from GoDaddy hosting to Amazon Web Services but it is wonderful to have it done. I just love that it's all open source and that it all can be changed, reconfigured, and there are thousands of experts running the same software all around the world and many are happy to help.
It's great to finally step into this century and, for all those out there trying to figure out when it is the right time to move to cloud computing, get going! It's so nice not to be "owned" by your provider and to have control back in your hands. It's wonderful to be on new technology where new features are coming out every week, where there is a healthy ecosystem of companies adding services on top, and where there are experts all over the world. What a relief to be in control and be able to make changes or get issues corrected quickly. Here's to at least 2 1/2 nines!
Committing the last change that severs the links to GoDaddy]]>
Back in 2007, the audacious RE<C project was started. The goal of RE<C was simple: make renewable energy less costly than coal and let economics do the hard work of converting the worlds energy producers to go renewable. I blogged the project in Solving World Problems With Economic Incentives summarizing the project with "the core idea is that, if renewable energy sources were cheaper the coal, economic forces would quickly make the right thing happen and we would actually stop burning coal. I love the approach but it is fiendishly difficult."
Unfortunately, RE<C really was fiendishly difficult and the project was subsequently abandoned in 2011. But I still love it partly because it was attempting to address an incredibly important world problem and partly because I like the use of economic incentives to solve world problems. Anytime we can make it financially advantageous for companies and countries to do the right thing, it's far more likely to happen. Economic incentives are one of the best ways to influence governments of all sorts. Democratic governments, autocratic regimes, and pretty much all forms of government in between. With economic incentives aligned, lobby groups are far less likely to successfully block progress. Admittedly, even the obvious transitions with clear benefit still take time but there are few forces more powerful at forcing global change than economics.
Moving down from the global level to that of individual companies, I've long advocated the use of economic incentives to drive innovative uses of computing resources inside the company while preventing costs from spiraling out of control. Most IT departments control costs by having computing resources in short supply and only buying more resources slowly and with considerable care. Effectively computing is a scarce resource so it needs to get used carefully. This effectively limits IT cost growth and controls wastage but it also limits overall corporate innovation and the gains driven by the experiments that need these additional resources.
I'm a big believer in making effectively infinite computing resources available internally and billing them back precisely to the team that used them. Of course, each internal group needs to show the customer value of their resource consumption. Asking every group to effectively be a standalone profit center is, in some ways, complex in that the "product" from some groups is hard to quantitatively measure. Giving teams the resources they need to experiment and then allowing successful experiments to progress rapidly into production encourages innovation, makes for a more exciting place to work, and the improvements brought by successful experiments help the company be more competitive and better serve its customers.
I argue that all employees should be limited only by their ability rather than an absence of resources or an inability to argue convincingly for more. This is one of the most important yet least discussed advantages of cloud computing: taking away artificial resource limitations in support light-weight experimentation and rapid innovation. Making individual engineers and teams responsible to deliver more value for more resources consumed makes it possible encourage experimentation without fear that costs will rise without sufficient value being produced. And, because cloud computing is so inexpensive and comes without a long term commitment, a single engineer to do a trial run of a 1,000 core analysis to improve supply chain logistics without appreciable financial risk. If it works, keep doing it and reap the economic gain. If it doesn't work, little was spent and it may have been a failed experiment but it was an inexpensive failed experiment. Economic systems are very powerful at driving innovation. That's one of the reasons why the venture funded startup community has been successful innovating faster than some even very well-funded big companies.
Returning to the RE<C project, two engineers from the project recently wrote up what was learned on the project for the IEEE Spectrum article "What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change." The article talks briefly about the project, it's goals, but rather than digging into why it failed, they instead discuss why the project succeeding wouldn't have achieved the overall goals of reducing climate change. The latter is surprising in that how could producing energy less expensively than coal possibly not succeed in the project goals of reversing climate change? Technically the goals of RE<C were to drive down the cost of renewable energy below the cost of coal rather than to reverse climate change (RE<C Initiative) so it actually isn't 100% correct to speculate that it could succeed and yet simultaneously fail at that definitional goal. But, the authors of this article are arguing an important point that RE<C could actually have succeeded and yet still have failed to reverse climate change which was clearly at least a motivator for the funding of the RE<C effort.
How could renewable energy less expensive than coal possibly fail to reverse climate change? There are two primary factors in place the first of which is fairly obvious and the latter perhaps less so. Looking first at the more obvious reason, the RE<C project ended up deciding to focus on solar power and solar has the downside of not producing around the clock. Solar arrays produce far less on cloudy days, generally are poor producers in geographies with non-favorable weather patterns, and don't produce at all during the night. Coal produces 24×7 so beating coal requires that the renewable energy either be produced on demand or that it be efficiently stored to support load through lower production periods. Getting both power storage and power production costs less than coal is an even harder problem than the simple RE<C goal. However, there is still no question in my mind that delivering on RE<C even without a high-scale storage solution would have still had a phenomenally positive impact on the world climate problem. There is already an abundance of good work going on in utility scale energy storage using a flywheels, Li-Ion batteries, compressing air, and lifting large volumes of water amongst other solutions.
The second reason why RE<C successful might not have been sufficient to reverse climate change is the core focus of the article (What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change). The authors present data and argue that the limit of carbon dioxide concentration in earth's atmosphere to avoid global warming is around 350 parts per million (ppm). We are already at around 400 ppm and steadily worsening so, to reverse climate change, not only must we stop putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere but we must also remove 13% of the CO2 already in the atmosphere.
I enjoyed the article and generally found the data presented credible but I don't look at the problem with quite so binary a perspective. Delivering RE<C but not finding a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere would be a tremendous success. I would love to only have face the carbon sequestration problem :-). I also don't view research that drops the costs of renewable energy but fails to get it below the cost of coal as failure. The closer we get to these goals even if they are not fully met, the more likely industry is to choose the cleaner solution. Good article, great topic, and, whether alive or dead, I still love the RE<C project.
· Summary of the RE<C Project: https://www.google.org/rec.html
· IEEE Spectrum article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
–James Hamilton, http://perspectives.mvdirona.com, email@example.com
In the Amazon Web Services world, this has always been a busy time of the year. Busy, because, although we aim for a fairly even pace of new service announcements and new feature releases all year, invariably, somewhat more happens towards the end of the year than early on. And, busy, because the annual AWS re:Invent conference is in early November and this is an important time to roll out new services or important features. This year is no exception and, more than ever, there is a lot to announce at the conference. It should be fun.
I enjoy re:Invent because it's a chance to talk to customers in more detail about what we have been building, learn how they are using it, and what we could do to make the services better. It's always exciting to see what customer have done with AWS over the last year and I like the fact that customer presentations are a big part of the conference. It's great to hear from an engineer how a service should work but almost always more interesting to see how customers are actually using the service. Each year there are more customers who have decided to move aggressively and go 100% cloud hosted and there are more and more stories of large, mission critical applications that have been moved to the cloud. It's good to hear the details behind these decisions and how they were executed.
Andy Jassy who leads AWS will give the conference keynote Wednesday November 12th at 9am. If you can't be at re:Invent in person, it will also be available via live streaming. This session is always packed with new service and major feature announcements so, if you can only watch one session, this is it.
Later that day at 4:30, I'll be presenting AWS Innovation at Scale which will also be available via video streaming. In this session, I'll be putting some quantitative numbers on current AWS growth rates. Then I'll focus on two main areas: networking and database. Networking is interesting because it's an area that is running counter-Moore and actually getting relatively more expensive while the rest of the industry is going the other way. And, at the same time that is happening, network traffic is increasing at rates faster than server deployments. We'll lay out how we have fundamentally reengineered our network for more capacity, lower latency, and reduced jitter while lowering costs. Database is my second area of focus. It's another area where we feel substantial new engineering investment can give developers better solutions at far lower costs partly based upon open source, partly based upon shifting the bulk of the complexity of database administration to AWS, and partly based upon new engine development optimized for cloud deployments. There is lots to cover in both networking and database but I'll also show how AWS processes 10s of millions of records per second internally and how this solution has become an externally available cloud service.
I'll post the slides I present once available to: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/work/
Live streaming for select sessions available at: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/livestream-reg.html
–James Hamilton, email@example.com
Waste heat reclamation in datacenters has long been viewed as hard because the heat released is low grade. What this means is that rather than having a great concentration of heat, it is instead spread out and, in fact, only warm. The more concentrated the heat, the easier it is to use. In fact, that is exactly how many power plants work. When the temperature of the cooling medium is several orders of magnitude cooler than burning fuels such LNG, Petroleum, or Coal, extracting useful energy becomes challenging.
However, data center heat reclamation si clearly a problem well worth solving since just about 100% of the power that enters each facility is released as heat into the environment. Ironically, not only is almost all the power that comes into the data center released to the environment as heat energy but, a considerable amount of energy is actually expended getting rid of this energy. The cooling plant, pumps, fans, water towers, etc. all take more power with their only contribution being to effectively remove all the power that we just finished buying.
Many ways have been proposed to greatly reduce the cost of datacenter cooling including the elimination of process-based cooling. A great example of this is the Facebook Mechanical System Design. This is good work that I still like today because it's getting the cost of cooling down closer to zero. Similar approaches using water rather than air as the heat transport media can be even more efficient. For example, the Deep Green Datacenter near Zurich that uses cold water from a lack to cool the facility (46MW with Water Cooling at a PUE of 1.10). These systems get rid of the waste heat efficiently.
But, returning to waste heat reclamation, what about actually using the heat released from a data center rather than attempting to discard it at very low cost? Great effort has been expended attempting to generate power from the low grade waste heat from a data center but this hasn't yield great results thus far. What has been effective is using the heat in another useful process. In the past, I've proposed the use of data center waste heat in the growing of high value crops like Tomatoes in climates ordinarily too cool for this crop. Another example of data center heat reclamation I recently pointed out was a proposal to use the heat from a datacenter to heat sea water prior to entry into a desalination plant. This increases the efficiency of the desalination plant while providing near free cooling for the data center (Data Center Cooling Done Differently). Yet, another approach I recently came across that appears to have potential was a proposal by Teracool to use datacenter waste heat as part of the heating process in Liquid Petroleum Gas vaporization.
LNG is seeing rapid increase of use in world energy markets driven by it being much cleaner than coal and it is available in large quantity driven by hydraulic fracking. LNG, like all petroleum products is often shipped via large sea-going cargo ships. But, unlike petroleum, LPG is delivered for consumption in gaseous form although it is shipped in its liquid state. To liquefy it prior to shipment, it must be cooled to below -260F which, of course, requires considerable energy. On the delivery side, the liquid must be heated to return the product to its gaseous form. Ironically, this again requires considerable energy. In fact, some vaporization plants consume as much as 1.75% of the product in vaporization. What Teracool proposes is using this cold (absence of heat) to cool data centers. Going a bit further, they propose the waste heat from the data center to drive vaporization and then, as the product expands 600x from liquid state to gaseous state, use the power of expansion to drive gas turbines to generate power further reducing the energy loss and supplying at least part of the data center power requirements.
Research in the data center world has swung from doing excellent work in getting rid of waste heat to focusing on recovering this vast store of energy. I expect we are going to be seeing many interesting examples of how data centers can be run more efficiently by harvesting the energy released by the operation of the data center.
A related article on Teracool: Teracool's Audacious Idea: Data Centers Next to LNG Plants
Teracool Presentation with more details: Recovering Cryogenic Refrigeration Energy
–James Hamilton, email@example.com, http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
Dileep Bhandarkar put together a great presentation for the Computer History Museum a couple of weeks back. I have no idea how he got through the full presentation in under an hour – it covers a lot of material – but it's an interesting walk through history. Over the years, Dileep has worked for Texas Instruments, Digital, Intel, Microsoft, and Qualcomm. As a consequence, he's been near the early days of semiconductors, the rise and fall of the mini-computer during his 17 years at Digital, the rise to dominance of the microprocessor in his 12 years at Intel, the emergence of high-scale computing during his ½ decade at Microsoft, and he is now at Qualcomm.
I'll touch on some of the high points but you should really read the through the presentation in its entirety. Well worth it: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/DileepBhandarkarAmazingJourneyFromMainframesToSmartphones.pdf.
From 2,300 transistors to well over 1 billion in less than 40 years:
November 15, 1971, while I was still in high school, Intel released the world's first microprocessor the 4004.
Also in 1971, Intel delivered the 1103 DRAM memory and the move from core memory to DRAM had begun.
The IBM S/370 and the DEC PDP 10 were both iconic systems both of which I have used. In the case of the PDP 10, that was the system I used as an intern at the National Research Council in Ottawa. In 1986 working on an Ada Compiler for IBM in Toronto, I used a S/370 Model 600J the biggest water cooled S/370 IBM ever produced.
In 1977, Intel released the 8080 the processor that powered the Altair
In 1977 Digital Equipment Corporation introduced the enormously successful VAX 11/780. I used that system running BSD as I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria. It was actually an 11/785. Essentially an 11/780 with a floating point unit. A correction from Dileep: The 780 was built using standard TTL SSI from TI and had a cycle time of 200ns. It included the FP780 (4 boards). The 785 was a quick release using Schottky TTL which allows us to reduce the cycle time to 133ns. Star became SuperStar.
In 1979 Motorola released the 68000, one of my favorite instruction set architectures of the time.
1985 marked the release of the venerable Intel 386, Intel's first 32 bit processor initially operating at 16Mhz.
In 1987 Sun introduced the incredibly successful SPARC architecture.
Mobile processors are now where the volume is with over 7 billion smart phones expected to ship between 2013 and 2017.
It's an excellent presentation and a super interesting slice through history. Check it out in full at: From Mainframe To SmartPhone and the video is at: http://youtu.be/7ptXpNFY3XM.
–James Hamilton, http://perspectives.mvdirona.com, firstname.lastname@example.com
Over the last 10 years, there has been considerable innovation in data center cooling. Large operators are now able to operate at Power Usage Efficiency of 1.10 to 1.20. This means that less than 20% of the power delivered to the facility is lost to power distribution and cooling. These days, very nearly all of the power delivered to the facility, is delivered to the servers.
I would never say there is no more innovation coming in an but most of the ideas I've been seeing recently in data center cooling designs are familiar. Good engineering and often more somewhat more efficient than pass approaches but still largely the same as previous work. However, in recent discussions with DeepWater Desal, I came across an idea that I really think has potential. In this approach the co-location of a desalination plant and data centers is used to reduce the power consumption of both.
DeepWater Desal plans to build a desalination plant at Monterey Bay. Desalination produces drinking water from sea water. Given the abundance of sea water in the world and the shortage of drinking water in many parts of the world, these plants are becoming more common. They are fairly power intensive techniques but still used extensively throughout the world especially in the Middle East.
Deep Water Desal proposes to mitigate the power consumption of desalination in a very creative way. Rather than reduce the power required to desalinate water, they proposed to co-locate up to 150MW of data center facilities on site and reduce the power required to cool the data center. Essentially the desalination plant and data centers would be symbiotic and the overall power consumption of the combination of the two plants together would be lower.
Here's how it works. In order to avoid plankton and other life forms that plug up the plants filters and increase operating costs, the desalination plant will be drawing water from 100' below the surface in Monterey Bay. This water will have upwelled from even deeper down the canyons of Monterey bay and will be quite cold.
Taking water from lower in the bay reduces the potential for negative impact on the local ecosystem by putting the intake below the majority of it but this has the downside of sourcing much colder water. Cold water is less efficient to desalinate and, consequently, considerably more water will need to pumped which increases the pumping power expenses considerably. If the water is first run through the data center cooling heat exchanger, at very little increased pumping losses, the data center now gets cooled for essentially free (just the costs of circulating their cooling plant). And, as an additional upside, the desalination plant gets warmer feed water which can reduce pumping losses by millions of dollars annually. A pretty nice solution.
There have been many examples in the past of data centers cooled by deep water cooling. For Example: 46MW with Water Cooling at a PUE of 1.10. There have also been examples of data centers cooled using salt water: Google Opening Saltwater-cooled data center. What's different and interesting in this case is someone else is covering most of the data center pumping costs and there are additional and quite substantial gains in delivering warmer water to the co-located desalination plan.
Since Desalination, even when done efficiently, is a power intensive business, a new municipal utility is being created that will delivery to the co-located data center facilities, power at 6 to 8 cents per kWh which is higher than some geographies but is actually quite a good rate for data center commercial power in California.
If you are interested in siting a data center in Monterey that is better for the environment, cheaper to operate, and not a bad place to live, contact Grant Gordon, COO of DeepWater Desal (email@example.com).
–James Hamilton, email@example.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
We all know that when designing and operating applications at scale, it is persistent state management that brings the most difficult challenges. Delivering state-free applications has always been (fairly) easy. But most interesting commercial and consumer applications need to manage persistent state. Advertising needs to be delivered, customer activity needs to be tracked, and products need to be purchased. Interesting applications that run at scale all have difficult persistent state problems. That's why Amazon.com, other AWS customers, and even other AWS services make use of the various AWS database platform services. Delegating the challenge of managing high-performance, transactional, and distributed data management to underlying services makes applications more robust while reducing operational overhead and design complexity. But, it makes these mega-scale database systems absolutely critical resources that need to be rock solid with very well understood scaling capabilities.
One such service that is heavily used by AWS, Amazon.com, and external services is DynamoDB. On the surface, DynamoDB looks fairly simple. It has only 13 APIs and has been a service that is being widely adopted due to its ease of use and doing the undifferentiated heavy lifting of dealing with disk failures, host issues or network partitions etc. However, that external simplicity is built on a hidden substrate of complex distributed systems. Such complex internals are required to achieve high-availability while running on cost-efficient infrastructure, and also to cope with rapid business-growth. As an example of this growth, DynamoDB is handling millions of transactions every second in a single region while continuing to provide single digit millisecond latency even in the midst of disk failures, host failures and rack power disruptions.
Services like DynamoDB rely on fault-tolerant distributed algorithms for replication, consistency, concurrency control, provisioning, and auto scaling. There are many such algorithms in the literature, but combining them into a cohesive system is a significant challenge, as the algorithms usually need to be modified in order to interact properly in a real-world production system. In addition, we have found it necessary to invent algorithms of our own.
We all know that increasing complexity greatly magnifies the probability of human error in design, code, and operations. Errors in the core of the system could potentially cause service disruptions and impact our service availability goals. We work hard to avoid unnecessary complexity, but the complexity of the task remains high. Before launching a service or a new feature to service like DynamoDB, we need to reach extremely high confidence that the core of the system is correct.
Historically, software companies do this using a combination of design documents, design reviews, static code analysis, code reviews, stress testing, fault injection testing and many other techniques. While these techniques are necessary they may not be sufficient. If you are building a highly concurrent replication algorithm that serves as the backbone for systems like DynamoDB, you want to be able to model partial failures in a highly concurrent distributed systems. Moreover, you want to capture the failures at design level even as these might be harder to do in testing.
This is where AWS teams and Amazon DynamoDB and transactional services teams embarked on a path of building precise designs for the services they are building. While one can argue that traditional methods of writing design docs serve a similar purpose we found that design docs lack precision. This is because they are written in prose and diagrams and they are not easy to test in an automated fashion. At the other end of the spectrum, once we have implemented the system in code, it becomes much too complex to establish algorithm correctness or to debug subtle issues. To this end, we looked for a way to express designs that will eliminate hand waving and that has sufficient tools that can be applied to check for errors in the design.
We wanted a language that allowed us to express things like replication algorithms or distributed algorithms in hundreds of lines of code. We wanted the tool to have existing ecosystems that allowed us to test various failure conditions at design level quickly. We found what we were looking for in TLA+, a formal specification language invented by ACM Turing award winner, Leslie Lamport. TLA+ is based on simple discrete math, basic set theory and predicates with which all engineers are quite familiar. A TLA+ specification simply describes the set of all possible legal behaviors (execution traces) of a system. While TLA+ syntax was unfamiliar to our engineers, TLA+ is accompanied by PlusCal, a pseudo code language that is closer to a C-style programming language. Several engineers at Amazon have found they are more productive in PlusCal than TLA+. However, in other cases, the additional flexibility of plain TLA+ has been very useful.
PlusCal and TLA+ have proven very effective at establishing and maintaining the correctness through change of the fundamental components on which DynamoDB is based. We believe having these core components correct from day one has allowed the DynamoDB system to evolve more quickly and scale fast while avoiding the difficult times often experienced by engineers and customers early in a distributed systems life.
I've always been somewhat skeptical of formal methods in that some bring too much complexity to actually be applied to commercial systems while others tend to abstract much of the complexity but, in abstracting away complexity, give up precision. TLA+ and PlusCal appear to skirt these limitations and we believe that having the core and most fundamental algorithms on which DynamoDB is based provably correct helps speed innovation, ease the inherent complexity of scaling and, overall, improves both the customer experience and the experience of engineers working on the DynamoDB system at AWS. While this is an important part of our system, there are hundreds of innovations we do in building and operating robust scalable distributed systems on how we design, build, test, deploy, monitor and operate these large scale services.
If you are interested in reading more about the usage of TLA+ within AWS, this is a pretty good source: Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services. And, if you are interested in joining the AWS database team and, especially if you have the experience, background, and interest to lead a team in our database group, drop me a note with your current resume (firstname.lastname@example.com). We're expanding into new database areas quickly and growing existing services even faster.
James Hamilton, firstname.lastname@example.com
The internet and the availability of content broadly and uniformly to all users has driven the largest wave of innovation ever e experienced in our industry. Small startups offering a service of value have the same access to customers as the largest and best funded incumbents. All customers have access to the same array of content regardless of their interests or content preferences. Some customers have access to faster access than others but, whatever the access speed, all customers have access to it all content uniformly. Some countries have done an amazing job of getting high speed access to an very broad swath of the population. South Korea has done a notably good job on this measure. The US is nowhere close to the top by this measure nor does the US have anything approaching the best price/performing access. But it's nowhere close to the worst either. And, up until the most recently Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal, it's always been the case that when a user buys internet connectivity they get access to the entire internet.
Given how many huge US companies have been built upon the availability of broad internet connectivity, it's at least a bit surprising that the US market isn't closer to the best connected. And given that the US still has the largest number of internet-based startups — almost certainly some of the next home run startups will come from this group — one would expect a very strong belief in the importance of maintaining broad access to all content and the importance of even the smallest startups having uniform access to customers. Surprisingly, this is not the case and the US Federal Communications Commission has proposed that networks providers should be able to choose what content their customers get access to at what speed.
Clearly large owners of eyeball networks like Comcast and Verizon would like to have a two-sided market. On this model, they would like to be able to charge customers to access the internet and at the same time charge content providers to have access to "their" customers. I abstractly understand why they would want to be allowed to charge both consumers and providers. There is no question that this will be highly profitable. In many ways, that's one of the wonderful things about the free market economy. Companies will be very motivated to do what is best for themselves and their shareholders and this has driven much innovation. As long as there is competition without collusion, it's mostly a good thing. But, there are potential downsides. There needs to be guardrails to prevent the free market from doing things that are bad for society. Society shouldn't let companies use child labor for example. Charging content providers for the privilege of being able to provide services to customers that want access to their services and have paid Comcast, Verizon, Time-Warner etc. for access is another example of corporate behavior not in the best interests of society as a whole. We want customers who paid to access the internet to get access to all of it and not just the slice of content from providers that paid the most. Comcast should not be the arbiter of who customer get to buy services from. Surprisingly, that is currently what the FCC is currently proposing
Allowing last-mile network providers to decide which services are available or usable by a large swatch of customers without access to competing services is a serious mistake. Losing network neutrality is not good for customers, it's not good for content providers, it's not good for innovation but its, oh so very good for Verizon and Comcast. Just as using child labor isn't something we allow companies to do even if it could help them to be more profitable, we should not allow these companies to be able to hold content providers hostage. Without network neutrality content providers must pay last mile network providers or lose access to customers connecting to the internet using those networks. This is why Netflix has been forced to grudging pay the "protection" fee money required by the major eye ball markets.
Netflix is perhaps the best example of a provider that customers would like to have access to but has been forced to pay last mile network owners like Verizon even though Verizon customers have already paid for access to Netflix. Some recent articles:
· Netflix blames Sluggish streaming on Verizon, other service providers
· Netflix Agrees to Pay Verizon for faster Internet, Too
· Netflix is Still Mad at Verizon and Has the Charts to Prove It
· Netflix got worse on Verizon even faster Netflix agreed to pay Verizon
Enter your comments against the ironically titled "14-28 Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet." My comments follow:
The open internet and network neutrality has helped to create a hotbed of innovation, has allowed new winners to emerge every day, and the proposal to give it up is hard to understand and is open to cynical interpretations revolving around the power of lobbyist and campaign contributions over what is best for the constituents.
Network neutrality is a serious topic but comedian John Oliver has done an excellent job of pointing out how ludicrous this proposed legislation really is. In fact, Oliver did such a good job of appealing to the broader population to actively comment during the FCC comment period on this proposed legislation that the FCC web site failed under the load. This video is a bit long at nearly just over 13 minutes but it really is worth watching John Oliver point out some of the harder to explain aspects of this legislation: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/03/john-oliver-fcc-website-net-neutrality?CMP=fb_us.
And, once you have seen the video, leave your feedback for the FCC on their proposal to give up network neutrality at http://fcc.gov/comments.
The internet and the availability of content broadly and uniformly to all users (network neutrality) has driven the largest wave of innovation ever experienced in the technology sector. Small startups offering a service have the same access to customers as the largest and best funded incumbents. All customers have access to the same array of content regardless of their interests or content preferences. Some customers have access to faster access than others but, whatever the access speed, all customers have access to it all content uniformly. Some of the most successful companies in the country have been built on this broad and uniform access to customers. The next wave of startups are coming and achieving incredible valuations in IPOs or acquisitions. Giving up network neutrality puts our technology industry by making it harder for new companies to get access to customers and places far too much power in the hands of access network providers where we have few competitive alternatives.
–James Hamilton, firstname.lastname@example.com, http://perspectives.mvdirona.com]]>
It's difficult to adequately test complex systems. But what's really difficult is keeping a system adequately tested. Creating systems that do what they are designed to do is hard but, even with the complexity of these systems, many life critical systems have the engineering and production testing investment behind them to be reasonably safe when deployed. Its keeping them adequately tested over time as conditions and the software system changes where we sometimes fail.
There are exceptions to the general observation that we can build systems that operate safely when inside reasonable expectations of expected operating conditions. One I've written about was the Fukushima Dai-1 nuclear catastrophe. Any reactor design that doesn't anticipate total power failure including backups, is ignoring considerable history. Those events, although rare, do happen and the life critical designs need to expect them and this fault condition needs to be tested in a live production environment. "Nearly expected" events shouldn't bring life critical systems. The more difficult to protect against are 1) the impact of black swan events and 2) the combination of vastly changing environmental conditions over time.
Another even more common cause of complex system failure is the impact of human operators. Most systems are exposed to human factors and human error will always be a leading cause of complex system failure. One I've written about and continue to follow is the Costa Concordia Grounding. It is well on its way to becoming a text book case on how human error can lead to loss of life and how poor decisions can cascade to provide opportunity for yet more poor decisions by the same people that got the first one wrong and are now operating under incredible stress. It's a super interesting situation that I will likely return to in the near future and summarize what has been learned over the last few years of investigation, salvage operation, and court cases.
Returning to the two other causes of complex system failure I mentioned earlier: 1) the impact of black swan events and 2) compounding changes in environmental conditions. Much time gets spent on how to mitigate the negative impact of rare and difficult to predict events. The former are, by definition, very difficult to adequately predict so most mitigations involve being able to reduce the blast radius (localize the negative impact as much as possible) and design the system to fail in a degraded but non-life threatening state (degraded operations mode). The more mundane of these two conditions is the second, compounding changes in the environmental conditions in which the complex system is operating. These are particularly difficult in that, quite often, none of the changes are large and none happen fast but scale changes, traffic conditions change, workload mix change, and the sum of all changes over a long period of time can put the system in a state far outside of those anticipated by the original designers and, consequently, were never tested.
I came across an example of these latter failure modes in my recent flight through Los Angeles Airport on April 30th. While waiting for my flight from Los Angeles north to Vancouver, we were told there had been a regional air traffic control system failure and the entire Los Angeles area was down. These regional air traffic control facilities are responsible for the air space between airports. In the US, there are currently 22 Area Control Centers referred to by the FAA as Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC). Each ARTCC is responsible for a portion of the US air space outside of the inverted pyramid controlled by each airport. This number of ARTCC has been increasing but, even with larger numbers, the negative impact of one going down is broad. In this instance all traffic for the LAX, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, and Orange County airports was all brought to a standstill.
As I waited to board my flight to Vancouver, more and more aircraft were accumulating at LAX. Over the next hour or so the air space in the region drained as flights landed or were diverted but none departed. 50 flights were canceled and 428 flights were delayed. The impact of the cancelations and delays rippled throughout North America and probably world-wide. As a consequence of this delay, I missed my flight from Vancouver to Victoria much later in the evening and many other passengers passing through Vancouver were impacted even though it's a long way away in a different country many hours later. An ARTCC going down for even a short time, can leads to delays in the system that take nearly a day to fully resolve.
Having seen the impact personally, I got interested in what happened. What took down the ARTCC system controlling the entire Los Angeles region? It has taken some time and, in the interim, the attention of many news outlets has wandered elsewhere but this BBC article summarizes the failure: Air Traffic Control Memory Shortage Behind Air Chaos and this article has more detail: Fabled U-2 Spy Plane Begins Farewell Tour by Shutting Down Airports in the L.A. Region.
The failing system at the ARTCC was the En-Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) that can track up to 1,900 concurrent flights simultaneously using data from many sensors including 64 RADAR deployment systems. The system was deployed in 2010 so it's fairly new but we all know that over time, all regions get more busy. The airports get better equipment allowing them to move planes safely at greater rates, take-off and landing frequency goes up, some add new runways, most add new gates. And the software system itself gets changes not all of which will improve scaling or maximum capability. Over time, the load keeps going up and the system moves further from the initial test conditions when it was designed, developed, and tested. This happens to many highly complex systems and some end up operating at an order of magnitude higher load or different load mix than originally anticipated – this is a common cause for complex system failure. We know that systems eventually go non-linear as the load increases so we need to constantly probe 10x beyond what possible today to ensure that there remains adequate headroom between possible operating modes and the system failure point.
The FAA ERAM system is a critical life safety system so presumably it operates with more engineering headroom and safety margin than some commercial systems but yet it still went down hard and all backups failed in this situation. What happened in this case appears to have been a combination of slowly ramping load combined with a rare event. In this case a U-2 spy plane was making an high altitude pass over the Western US as part of its farewell tour. The U-2 is a spy plane with an operational ceiling of 70,000' (13.2 miles above earth) and a range of 6,405 miles at a speed of 500 mph. It flies well above commercial air traffic. The U-2 is neither particularly fast nor long range but you have to remember its first flight was in 1955. It's an aging technology and it was incredibly advanced when it was first produced by the famous Lockheed Skunk Works group lead by Kelly Johnson. Satellite imagery and drones have largely replaced the U-2 and the booming $32,000 bill for each flight hour has led to the planned retirement of the series.
What brought the ERAM system down was the combination of the typically heavy air traffic in the LA region combined with an imprecise flight plan filed for the U-2 spy plane passing through the region on a farewell flight. It's not clear why a plane flying well above the commercial flight ceilings was viewed as a collision threat by ERAM but the data stream driven by the U-2 flights ended up consuming massive amounts of memory which brought down both the primary and secondary software systems leaving the region without air traffic control.
The lessons here are at least twofold. First, as complex systems age, the environmental conditions under which they operate change dramatically. Workload typically goes up, workload mix changes over time, and there will be software changes made over time some of which will change the bounds of what system can reliably handle. Knowing this, we must always be retesting production systems with current workload mixes and we must probe the bounds well beyond any reasonable production workload. As these operating and environmental conditions evolve, the testing program must be updated. I have seen complex system fail where, upon closer inspection, it's found that the system has been operating for years beyond its design objectives and its original test envelope. Systems have to be constantly probed to failure so we know where they will operate stably and where they will fail.
The second lesson is that rare events will happen. I doubt a U2 pass of the western US is all that rare but something about this one was unusual. We need to expect that complex systems will face unexpected environmental conditions and look hard for some form degraded operations mode. Failure fault containment zones should be made as small as possible, we want to look for ways to deliver the system such that some features may fail while others continue to operate. You don't want to lose all functionality for the entire system in a failure. For all complex systems, we are looking for ways to divide up the problem such that a fault has a small blast radius (less impact) and we want the system to gracefully degrade to less functionality rather than have the entire system hard fail. With backup systems its particularly important that they are designed to fail down to less functionality rather than also hard failing. In this case, having the backup come up and require more flight separation and do less real time collision calculations might be the right answer. Generally, all systems need to have some way to operate at less than full functionality or less than full scale without completely hard failing. These degraded operation modes are hard to find but I've never seen a situation where we couldn't find one.
It's not really relevant but still ironic that both the trigger for the fault, the U-2 spy plane, and the system brought down by the fault, ERAM, were both Lockheed produced products although released 55 years apart.
Unfortunately, it's not all about tuning the last bit of reliability out of complex systems. There is still a lot of low hanging fruit out there. As proof that even some relatively simple systems can be poorly engineered and produce remarkably poor results even when working well within their design parameters, on a 747-400 flying back to New Zealand from San Francisco, at least 3 passengers on that flight had lost bags. My loss appears to be permanent at this point. It's amazing that couriers can move 10s of millions of packages a year over far more complex routings and yet, in passenger air travel baggage handling, the results are several orders of magnitude worse. I suspect that if the operators were economically responsible for the full loss, the quality of air baggage tracking would come up to current technology levels fairly quickly.
James Hamilton, firstname.lastname@example.com
Most agree that cloud computing is inherently more efficient that on premise computing in each of several dimensions. Last November, I went after two of the easiest to argue gains: utilization and the ability to sell excess capacity (Datacenter Renewable Power Done Right):
Cloud computing is a fundamentally more efficiently way to operate compute infrastructure. The increases in efficiency driven by the cloud are many but a strong primary driver is increased utilization. All companies have to provision their compute infrastructure for peak usage. But, they only monetize the actual usage which goes up and down over time. What this leads to incredibly low average utilization levels with 30% being extraordinarily high and 10 to 20% the norm. Cloud computing gets an easy win on this dimension. When non-correlated workloads from a diverse set of customers are hosted in the cloud, the peak to average flattens dramatically. Immediately effective utilization sky rockets. Where 70 to 80% of the resources are usually wasted, this number climbs rapidly with scale in cloud computing services flattening the peak to average ratio.
To further increase the efficiency of the cloud, Amazon Web Services added an interesting innovation where they sell the remaining capacity not fully consumed by this natural flattening of the peak to average. These troughs are sold on a spot market and customers are often able to buy computing at less the amortized cost of the equipment they are using (Amazon EC2 Spot Instances). Customers get clear benefit. And, it turns out, it's profitable to sell unused capacity at any price over the marginal cost of power. This means the provider gets clear benefit as well. And, with higher utilization, the environment gets clear benefit as well.
Back in June, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs released a study that went after the same question quantitatively and across a much broader set of dimensions. I first came across the report via coverage in Network Computing: Cloud Data Centers: Power Savings or Power drain? The paper was funded by Google which admittedly has an interest in cloud computing and high scale computing in general. But, even understanding that possible bias or influence, the paper is of interest. From Google's summary of the findings (How Green is the Internet?):
Funded by Google, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory investigated the energy impact of cloud computing. Their research indicates that moving all office workers in the United States to the cloud could reduce the energy used by information technology by up to 87%.
These energy savings are mainly driven by increased data center efficiency when using cloud services (email, calendars, and more). The cloud supports many products at a time, so it can more efficiently distribute resources among many users. That means we can do more with less energy.
The paper attempts to quantify the gains achieved by moving workloads to the cloud by looking at all relevant dimensions of savings some fairly small and some quite substantial. From my perspective, there is room to debate any of the data one way or the other but the case is sufficiently clear that it's hard to argue that there aren't substantial environmental gains.
Now, what I would really love to see is an analysis of an inefficient, poorly utilized private datacenter who's operators wants to be green and needs to compare the installation of a fossil fuel consuming fuel cell power system with dropping the same workload down onto one of the major cloud computing platforms :-).
The paper is in full available at: The Energy Efficiency Potential of Cloud-Based Software: A US Case Study.
James Hamilton
e: email@example.com
w: http://www.mvdirona.com
b: http://blog.mvdirona.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com


text:
"'Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky? "
Roger WatersVote freedom, join the Libertarian Party.
There's no need to think too much about it. There are plenty of quality ice cream brands, I never will pay good money to eat commie ice cream.
i must admit i have in the past help b&j in their fight, but have you guys ever had chunky monkey-omg stuffs delicious. my favorite ice cream is caramel carribou, not sure who makes it though but when i get a half gallon of that stuff its gone in two days max. just somethin about caramel......mmmmmmmmmm caramel
Wars begin where u will
But they do not end where you please-Machiavelli
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man- Dr. Johnson
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
your my best friend but if the zombies start chasing us im tripping you
"I'm your brother, just make it count."
My favorite anti: American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities
I just bought levis... but never again!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Home and Garden briefs for April 3
Water consumption rebates offered: Poway is offering numerous rebates for residential customers who want to save money and reduce water consumption. Homeowners can get rebates of $135 for high-efficiency clothes washers and $100 for high-efficiency toilets. Those interested in improving landscaping can get rebates on rotating sprinkler nozzles of $4 per nozzle, rebates of $630 per acre for weather-based irrigation controllers, and rebates of up to $1 per square foot for artificial turf. Free residential landscape water use surveys are also available by calling (800) 986-4538. Visit poway.org/waterconservation .
Garden questions answered: San Diego's Water Conservation Garden has a telephone hotline where experts answer questions about water-smart landscaping. The Water Smart Pipeline phone number is (866) 962-7021. Garden author Nan Sterman will staff the hotline from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tuesdays and 1 to 4:30 p.m. Thursdays through 2009. Visit www.thegarden.org .
Free energy kits: San Diego Gas & Electric is offering a free home energy savings kit that includes items designed to save water and energy. Call SDG&E at (800) 644-6133 or visit sdge.com/energykit , call (760) 435-5828 or visit ci.oceanside.ca.us .
Society to hold special presentation: The San Diego Horticultural Society will host George Little and David Lewis, artists and gardeners, for a special evening at 7 p.m. June 8 at the Scottish Rite Center, 1895 Camino del Rio South, San Diego. The pair will discuss how to create a garden in your personal space. Event is $15 for society members and $20 for nonmembers. Call (760) 295-7089 or go to sdhortsoc.org .
Free smoke alarms for seniors: The Burn Institute, volunteers and fire service members are still installing smoke alarms for seniors in San Diego County in April and May. Call (858) 541-2277, Ext. 15, or e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com to make an appointment.
American Begonia Society: Meets at 10 a.m. April 18 at Ades Gish Nursery, 2222 Twin Oaks Valley Road in San Marcos, for a nursery tour. Call (619) 262-7535.
California Coastal Rose Society: At 9 a.m. April 4, Joel Ross will discuss integrated pest management in Magee Rose Garden, 200 Beech St., Carlsbad. And at 7 p.m. April 18, past club president Rosarian Sharon McColgan and other experts will discuss "Rose Show Preparation" at Heritage Hall, 2650 Garfield St., Carlsbad. The presentation is geared toward those who are considering showing roses at the Rose Show on May 2 and 3 at the Carlsbad Senior Center, 799 Pine Ave. Call (760) 804-0875.
Poway Valley Garden Club: Meets at 10:30 a.m. April 8 at Templars Hall in Old Poway Park, 14134 Midland Road, Poway. A panel demonstration on eco-friendly gardening techniques is scheduled. The May meeting at 10:30 a.m. May 13 will include a carpool field trip for a guided tour of Barona Casino Gardens. Call (858) 748-1025.
Ramona Garden Club: Meets at noon April 8 at the Ramona Woman's Club, 524 Main St., Ramona. Beekeeper Diane Busch will discuss bee basics, pollinating your garden and Colony Collapse Disorder, believed to be behind the recent decline in North American honey bee colonies. Call (760) 788-6709.


text:
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text:
The Top 10 In Action Sports
01Welcome to Qasr Al-Farid: The Rock With A Door That Will Rock Your World
0218 Things That Will Give Anyone Who Did Duke Of Edinburgh A Serious Flashback
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06Water Slides, Plane Wings and Danny MacAskill: This is Road Cycling Like Never Before...
0724 Reasons Why Snowboarding Was Better In The Early Noughties
08Could Scientists Be About to Build a Terminator? They're Closer Than You Think…
09Win a Holiday for 2 in Chamonix with Three #holidayspam
1017 Holiday Beer Photos That Every Skier Takes to Make Their Friends Jealous
Vail Mountain Snowmaking
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Snowmakers tell the tail of how it gets done, and why snowmaking is so important to the Vail Mountain product. Vail snow, vail colorado, lions head, ski vail colorado, ski vail, vail powder, vail mountain, Vail bowl, vail back bowls, vail bowls, most terrain, amazing view, vail village, vail square, vail tree skiing, blue sky basin, golden peak, golden peak park, lions head, mongolia bowl, sun up, sun down, tea cup, china bowl, inner mongolia bowl, siberia bowl, arrabelle, vail square, ski, skiing, snow, snowboarding, ski trip, ski vacation, vail resorts, deep snow, powder, powder skiing, great snow, amazing snow, fluffy snow, colorado mountains, best skiing, best snow, fun, snow storm, extreme weather, colorado skiing, vacation, storm, snow storm, blizzard, new snow, snow fall, new snow fall, ski resort, tree skiing, snowboard


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Gas Water Heater Venting
This evening I noticed an odor typical of natural gas products of combustion coming up from the cellar.
It appears that our exhaust fans that draw in cool night air are also creating negative pressure, and that's affecting the gas water heater draft. Down cellar, I felt a LOT of spillage from the draft hood.
That inspired me to go look at the installation manual that I got with this WH, which (urk) I sort of didn't bother to read at the time (ack), and what I found concerns me even more.
I can probably deal with the draft problem for the summer just by keeping the a cellar window or two open.
But the manual says that the WH shouldn't share a flue with a power vented gas furnace. And that's exactly how it's set up - it shares an old masonry chimney (I think it's lined, but not sure) with a mid-90s vintage 80% efficiency power-vented furnace. That's the way the old WH was installed, and when I installed this one a few years back, I just popped the old flue pipe right on top of the new WH.
What do the experts here recommend? Is this a serious situation? What can happen when you connect a draft-vented WH to the same flue as a power vented furnace?
Do I need to consider a different WH? I'm really not interested in a tankless WH, but I might go for a power vented WH, if I can vent it through the sill with PVC. Especially if it's a two-pipe or coaxial direct vent (drawing combustion air from the outside).
If I do go that route, what kind of pitfalls am I in for with a direct vented WH? Any recommendations as to brand and model? Where would a DIYer find a PVWH or DVWH?
"What can happen when you connect a draft-vented WH to the same flue as a power vented furnace?
Not much.
It will probably only kill you.
You're only option is to install a 2nd flue for the water heater or install the power vent.
Make sure you pull a building permit and have the work inspected this time.
So I take it the furnace can cause a backdraft into the WH flue, causing a buildup of CO in the cellar. Odd then that my CO detector in the cellar's never gone off. Maybe I should move it closer to the WH. Or test it; it's been a while.
But ... really? You're supposed to pull a permit to replace a WH with a functionally identical unit? Where the installation outline is essentially nothing but disconnect the pipe unions, screw the hot and cold nipples out of the old WH and into the new, rejoin the unions, and switch the flex gas line over to the new WH?
I never knew that such a simple and straightforward job, with no structural change, required a permit.
I learned several new things today. Thanks.
You likely don't have a power vented furnace.
Your mid-eff furnace will have an inducer motor that is there only to overcome the resistance when it is initailly creating draft. It induces draft, it doesn't create pressure in your venting, which will spill out your HWT. If you post your furnace make and model, we can confirm this. You can have a mid-eff furnacce and HWT share a common vent. It is perfectly legal and safe.
If you have a newer built home, or one that is sealed well, or your appliances are spilling, you should have combustion air brought into the area with the furnace and HWT. It is as simple as running an insulated pipe from outside to inside. The pipe must be sized properly.
Splillage could also be cause by a blocked vent, oversized chimney, undersized chimney, or a deteriated chimney. These are all easily diagnosed by a HVAC proffesional. You should call one ASAP. Your life may depend on it.


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September 17, 2013
Well made, good fit, excellent quality
October 13, 2013
Just what i wanted. warm and comfortable.
October 18, 2013
Have ordered a 2nd one
October 19, 2013
Wow....this gilet is so warm. just had a t-shirt under it and i was toasty warm inside, i had to unzip it several times to allow some cool air inside. bring on the winter. looks smart too.
October 24, 2013
Good quality and styling with a useful inside zip pocket.
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text:
Monday, March 02, 2015
1 comments
Its march!! closer to spring! I am so ready for it. Ready for walks up town with my little guy and taking the dog out for walks. But i hate my summer wardrobe :( But I am ready for my march challenge and perhaps I can loose a little and get so... Read more
Thursday, February 12, 2015
2 comments
So far my feb challenges have not gone exactly the way i wanted it to. I was wishing to do yoga every day,that has not happened. I have not totally blew it,but I have skipped a couple days. I love doing yoga! and I feel I am getting better and ... Read more
Thursday, February 05, 2015
1 comments
I decided to have a challenge for feb to keep me motivated. I chose to do Yoga this month. Since I am not very flexible i am doing yoga for dummies and complete beginners with Jen Hillman on you tube. I love her stuff! The yoga for dummies that ... Read more
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
3 comments
So there are a lot of people I know doing some type of fitness challenge for a months duration. I think I am gonna jump on that band wagon! I need to decide what challenge to go with for the month of feb. I need to choose from this list
1. 30 ... Read more
Friday, January 23, 2015
3 comments
I have decided to go in a diff direction for now. I am doing awesome with working out and doing yoga! I have not been tracking my food this week. My last blog I talked about how I have been gaining and it just gets me down a bit. Seems like if I... Read more
Monday, January 19, 2015
3 comments
Ok so before Christmas I got on the scale and discovered that i lost about 6lbs. I was excited,so I said to myself after christmas i will start back at sparkpeople and track my food and fitness again. well now this is what I dont understand?? Si... Read more
Thursday, January 15, 2015
1 comments
I am doing it!! I have worked out 3 days in a row now!! Woo Hoo!!! I gotta say it does feel good. I did 2 days of Leslie's one mile express. Today I wanted to see what I had in me, so I did level 1 of the 30 day shred. Wow!! It was rough,but I m... Read more
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
0 comments
Well I am still logging even if it is bad! I have been over just about every day,but not by a ton so I am thankful for that! We are low on groceries right now till pay day so I am not able to make as many healthy choices as I would like. I did ... Read more
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
2 comments
It's day 3 for me so far. I had a horrible start to my day! After my bad morning I pretty much set myself up for failure. I ate way to much today. And I am hungry at the moment, so I will have more food to log to the list. But I told myself I wa... Read more
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
1 comments
So it's January, time to eat better! My sisters and I and my best friend are all doing this together. We check in on voxer daily ( so far ) we started yesterday, and we labeled the chat DIET STARTS MONDAY since we started Monday, and it's a quot... Read more
Thursday, October 23, 2014
0 comments
ok so I have been thinking about shakeology and those kinds of drinks lately. What do you all think of them? First of all there is just no way i could afford shakeology,so if you have tried anything similar that is way more pocket friendly plea... Read more
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
2 comments
Its been a while! But I have decided( once again) its time to get back at it. I have not gained,but I have lost my motivation and a lot that goes with that. So for now I am gonna get back to tracking even if it is bad! I need to start trying to ... Read more
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
4 comments
I don't know what is going on with me,but I am just slipping up. My water intake has been horrible for a while now. So I need to get back to the basics! Tracking my water,and just focusing on water and logging my foods. So dissapointing when you... Read more
Monday, April 21, 2014
0 comments
I sorta fell off the wagon... again! I used up my ww tracker book,and then I got sick for a week. So I just sort of stopped tracking. I did not totally go overboard,but there was some damage done. I was feeling well enough to track friday,but t... Read more
Sunday, April 06, 2014
1 comments
I am so happy,I am now in level 1 vinyasa yoga!!!!! I have done the beginners for a few months now,and ... Read more


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text:
Re: Illiad is Free's holding company
"I hope that this will help our swiss neighbours as their telecom market has not always been a happy one..."
Here' s hoping. I'll be keeping an eye on them to see how it works out.
388 posts • joined 28 Jan 2011
"I hope that this will help our swiss neighbours as their telecom market has not always been a happy one..."
Here' s hoping. I'll be keeping an eye on them to see how it works out.
"Free upgrade for pirated (anybodies) install, then after 12 free, the monthly/annual sub kicks in. No pay, no windows 10, you'll have to find a nother hooky copy of win7."
I was using my Windows 7 box at the office and the first time I took it home to do some work over the weekend it saw my network and announced I was running a pirated copy.
Yes, it passed reactivation but left me with that nasty black desktop. Easy enough to rectify but why on earth should I have to do that?
"There's no way they are going to hold me hostage like that again" I thought,. and ever since have confined Windows to VMs.
Nope. I'm happily running LibreOffice without Java.
Yes, a few years ago the installer would bitch if you didn't have Java installed, but you could still go ahead and install it without.
I've just checked v4.4 and the database element wants Java. I can do without that bit thanksverymuch.
"browser.search.showOneOffButtons to false
Thanks very much. That works a treat.
I needed to restart FF for it to take effect.
Updated yesterday and so far no problems.
With my browser on the main article here, I clicked in the FF search box and it suggested "El Reg search", which I accepted, and now it's there as an easily clickable vulture icon.
"A half-timbered traveller, mayhap?"
But this time around one with a driver's door that doesn't sag when you open it, please :-)
Happy days. I could fix just about everything on those with a socket set, a few open ended spanners, plus screwdriver..
But not the rust which got it in the end.
DougS wrote: " every time I install an updated Fedora and install VMware I have to scan the vmware forums to find a patch some guy has cooked up because Linux's driver ABI changes with every point release."
I had the same problem with VirtualBox when I was using Fedora. It was nice using the bleeding edge stuff that Fedora had but it was simply taking too much of my time so I moved to something more stable.
VirtualBox itself has got much better in dealing with this and even tells you the command to run to do the necessary rebuild (you do need to have installed the kernel development stuff and headers yourself though).
That's some combination.
I remember using those but they weren't quite as large. My possibly faulty memory says just over 200MB usable space once formatted and with a file system in place
"At the 1975 NCC, CDC announced 150 and 300 MByte Storage Module Drives The increase in capacity was achieved by increasing the number of disks (and heads) without any technology change. The 300 MByte 9766 SMD drive was for many years the largest capacity removable disk drive on the market."
They had a remarkably long run compared with today. I last saw 9766 drives installed as brand new as late as 1985.
The OP said "Private Cloud" in case you missed it.
"Mine was the green and red version from the 60s."
I started out with the red and green version. One day my parents came and asked me if I sucked the parts. Sensing their apprehension I answered "No", but in fact I did suck them..
The red and green paints had lead in them apparently. Obviously not in lethal quantities or I wouldn't be writing this. My younger brother's Meccano came in yellow and silver, which made it easy to tell which bits belonged to whose set.
... a pulley or driveshaft and some fixing plates to attach it to Meccano bits and it could have provided many more hours of fun.
It gets tricky when so many sites use ajax.googleapis.com...
"it still looks rather glaring - but hey, I'll wear shades."
Is it a coincidence that this week my spam folder has been full of adverts for dodgy Raybans or has some tracking site decided that I now need them to read El Reg?
"With the email addresses of staff with access to root zone records having been compromised and the hack only noticed a week later,"
That's a bit worrying.
Possibly more than you want to know about Wombats:
Australian Wombat - Facts, Habits and Personality
and of course, The Famous Datatrieve Wombat
Enter your password to allow this.
Computer: "Invalid password"
Spaceman: "Who was using the computer last?"
"Oh the Russians. Anyone know how to change the keyboard layout?
"EVERYTHING is shut on a Sunday,"
That was true until a three or four years ago where I am but a limited number of shops are now open from 11 to 5 on Sundays.
The major difference came over a decade ago with later opening during the week. Extending opening hours to 7pm on weekdays made a huge difference, and Saturday shopping no longer involved huge queues. That's now 8pm for the major supermarkets so it's really quite relaxed. There are also places open until 11pm but they don't stock stuff at budget prices.
"Business language is usually English or American"
In the multinationals yes, but learning the local language makes your life outside work much easier and opens up opportunities for work in smaller places.
"A well-designed survey will attempt to control for this phenomenon. Or exploit it ruthlessly, depending on the objectives of the organisers ....."
These are known in the trade as "lie detectors".
"..that should never appear in this order. Ever."
My personal autopilot kicked in and skipped that video.
I'd rather not risk it straight after my tea,
Out of frustration I went looking for some means of contacting the admins but found no means of doing so.
All I found were some extremely heavy Terms and Conditions, which I preferred not to accept.
Ultimately their loss, not mine, I suppose.
'I get a lot of calls and have to keep saying "Does a Google search work? Yes? Then it's the website.".'
Advise them to try the following website. It might save you some calls:
I've seen the moniker "Cable Cowboy" in various places related to this deal so it's apparently not just an El Reg nickname.
I'm curious. Where does "Cable Cowboy Malone" come from?
For owners of more than one Mac, VMware Fusion currently beats Parallels on pricing because one licence covers multiple systems (for personal use anyway).
Parallels not only spams you to death while you are doing an evaluation but pops up a "Buy now" window every time you fire up a VM, which quickly gets tiresome.
"..they only printed formed characters that were on the type band/chain/drum spaced by the fixed print hammers."
Allow me to introduce you to the guy who sold us an uppercase-only printer.
P.S. I still occasionally wonder if he ended up in Nigeria.
"Why is Barbie's sister called Skipper? Does she wear a beard and a greasy sou'wester? Does she look like a tinned pilchard? A penguin?"
It was a misprint for Skippy.
Presumably a mix up at the printing presses.
""If you expect me to buy something where all I can sense is carelessness, actually I think that is personally offensive," he continued. "It's offensive culturally, because it shows a disregard for our fellow human."
Dear Jony.
Please give me a help system that doesn't flake out 90% of the time with the advice to "try later".
Once is unfortunate. Nine times out of ten is carelessness.
"They're quite right, it's a laptop without a screen or peripherals."
I can't remember where I read this but "think MacBook Air without the laptop bits".
For the base model, the mini processor specs look awfully like the MacBook Air processor specs.
P.S. for lurking pedants: If you look carefully, Apple refer to it as the "Mac mini" rather than "Mac Mini".
"With Microsoft you don't get situations like the BASH mess that took no less than 4 goes to release a secure fix! "
How many goes have they had at securing IE?
Am I the only one who does daily backups?
And keeps them hanging around for more than a week or two?
to go back a couple of weeks to 15th October.
"128GB won't affect everybody running ESXi, but it will hit those running very large clouds and virtual instances."
As I discovered recently, installing Docker allocates 100GB in one fell swoop for its container file.
This "buggette" could be affecting quite modest installations.
In fact once I realised I needed to expand my VM by so much I installed Docker on a real machine instead of a virtual one, so it's a case of "I could have been bitten by this".
"much like state lotteries are a tax for people who don't understand math very well..."
What that statement fails to take into account is that many people don't have the option of a better job just over the horizon. State lotteries provide a dream for such folks.
I first glanced at that without my specs and interpreted it as WifeSwap.
In that context the "Social Currency" bit on the card image seems highly appropriate.
Damage done. I will forever see that name as WifeSwap.
WifE SWAPPER
This week's winner for video tutorials can be seen at the Raspberry Pi Quick Start page
The cartoon character points out where the obvious things like USB, video and ethernet ports are but completely forgets to tell us one vital bit.
It's the same in the written instructions by the way. They tell you how to build the thing using Windows, Mac or Linux and then jump straight onto the thing booting up.
Spoiler: On the model B+ it goes underneath the board, at the opposite end to the USB ports.
And oh yes, the video requires Flash, so I had to fire up the only system permitted to run that bug ridden fest (company policy and one I agree with).
Or URL.
Spammer's delight.
"Microsoft wants to safeguard the data they are using, and so is adding containerisation technology for each file, ensuring it is sandboxed and encrypted."
Add cloud and your data isn't altogether yours any more.
Back in the days when our data was locked up on a mainframe at least we could get our management to do a bit of screaming on our behalf.
"My staff are the embodiment of British values, not a threat to them," the spy chief was due to conclude.
Whether one can interpret that as positive or not depends on his meaning of "British values".
Pass the port please Carruthers.
And I'm losing count of the newly upgraded apps, not just the Apple ones, which want access to Contacts.
"IE11 for Windows 8.1 is the most relevant result for 'weather' on a Mac? Apple must really hate Google."
No, that's Parallels in action. My brief test trial of Parallels showed that it sets things up to prefer Windows apps over native OS X ones.
Think about that one carefully and you might conclude that they really want you to remain dependent on Windows rather then transitioning to OS X so that you carry on using Parallels (not to mention seemingly without end future upgrades).
Show me your search history and within five minutes I'll find something embarrassing or incriminating. Guaranteed."
Embarrassing or incriminating for who?
> Anyway the reason is the video drivers are on the kernel too.
But it'll give excellent response times for your favourite games.
I'm sure all those corporate buyers will be pleased about that.
"Sorry, someone else's day job interferred with my post."
That's quite some day job isn't it?
I wonder how much that monologue costs HP.
Two and a half minutes long in its latest rendition.
"In a certain operating system that grew up with the knowledge of three mouse buttons, you will find the context menus hanging off the middle mouse button"
Shall we tell them that not all systems have a BIOS?
Oops just did.
" Either that or he just can't be bothered to sit through an interminable 6GB download for the sake of a teeny-tiny change to his phone."
It's a little over a gig if and only if you can free up the required amount of space on the iPhone or iPad for an in situ upgrade.
If freeing up that space is too much of a pain you are faced with the whopping download to go the iTunes route.
When will Apple, Microsoft et al realise that not all of us have super fast uncapped broadband?
It's the pain of the downloads, and for those with low bandwidth caps cost too.
It's easy to say "I don't want that job back" but if the pay was good enough it might be hard to get that amount elsewhere.
"ermmmmmm the biggest culprits for bundled crap is Firefox and Chrome they'll try and install all kinds of shite by defaut"
Are you getting Firefox from the Mozilla website or from some other source which adds crap into the standard installation package?
"a stultefying meaningless EULA."
When OS X Mavericks was released shortly after Windows 8.1 I got the chance to compare their presentation of the EULAs.
Apple won by a mile by allowing me to save them to disk for later perusal, and they weren't peppered with forgettable URLs which you had to write down to stand a chance of remembering.
"Oh, wait a minute, someone I've never heard of has just sent me a link to a new porn site. Must be genuine!"
Various ladies from the Ukraine want to fall in love with me.
They claim they are good looking too.
What could possibly go wrong?
A beer because it's that time of day,


text:
Radio Flyer
A Classic but. . . By Concerned Grandma
October 2, 2010
The wagon was beautiful and my grandsons loved it BUT the shipping carton and tires have a very strong unpleasant odor. Thankfully this is an outside toy and we are hoping the smell will disipate. I wonder if this was just our wagon if not Radio Flyer needs to investigate.
Little red wagon is a hit By Grandmom W.
November 8, 2010
Two-year old grandson is thrilled with his new wheels. My own kids had Radio Flyer wagons, so we have continued the tradition with the next generation. Wouldn't think of buying anyhing else.
The best wagon out there By Ohio mom of 2
October 16, 2010
We received this wagon as a gift for our 2nd daughter's birthday. Our girls are now 4&1/2 and 19 months. We have used this wagon so many times. We also had a Step2 and it is much easier to pull the Radio Flyer. The canopy is great for providing shade and is easily removable. The seats fold into the wagon to make an easy fit in the back of our van. The large storage container on the back holds our diaper bag, jackets, you name it. The cupholders on the front are really nice too. Another convenience for modern parents is the pocket in the padding that can hold your cell phone. I can't say enough about how much I like it. It works well on flat paved terrain as well as grass. Today we went to a farm and I was able to put my toddler in one seat, fold the other down and load that area with pumpkins and gourds and still had room!
excellent PathFinder Wagon By Yvonne Kucharski
December 14, 2009
We love the rugged wheels and the straps for the kids safety.Love the high back seats and the place to put the kids snacks.
Like it By RVH
July 21, 2009
It's perfect, as our can walk at her pace, and it doesn't scratch our wood floors.
NICE TRIKE By William Mayes
November 1, 2010
Love the pink! By Jane
October 27, 2010
I am so happy that this comes in pink! My daughter is 2 and a half and her favorite color is by far pink! Anything pink, she wants. She is such a girly girl, but I bought this for her and she adores it. I let her ride it in the hallways when its rainy outside but she loves to show it off outside. I havent had one problem yet with this Scooter, I am very happy with it!
Radio Flyer Wagon A Big Hit! By Scott Kelley
October 1, 2010
Wagon was received within a couple days of ordering. It took me 30 minutes to assemble while watching TV after dinner. Very easy assembly! Our 13 month old woke up to a stroll around the house and loved it. We can't wait to take her apple and pumpkin picking this fall. Great product!
good substitute for the old Big Wheel By Robert in Manassas
April 27, 2010
This product is much more solid and stable than mine was back in the 1970s. Not too difficult to assemble. Too big for my 2 year old, but she loves it
atv wagon By Jeff Findorff
January 1, 2010
Great wagon, great price. Fast shipping, would buy again. Highly recommend.


text:
Mushroom-Swiss Stuffed Potatoes
Mushroom-Swiss Stuffed Potatoes is a different potato variety you should try. This is quite a yummy deal and goes well for any occasion. Check out the recipe of Mushroom-Swiss Stuffed Potatoes.
|Baking potato
|48 Ounce
|Olive oil
|2 Teaspoon
|2 Cup (32 tbs), quartered
|Portobello mushrooms
|2 Cup (32 tbs), diced
|Sliced shiitake mushroom caps
|1 Cup (16 tbs)
|Finely chopped onion
|1⁄4 Cup (4 tbs)
|2 Clove (10 gm), minced
|All purpose flour
|2 Tablespoon
|1⁄2 Teaspoon
|Pepper white
|1⁄8 Teaspoon
|Skim milk
|1 Cup (16 tbs)
|Dry sherry
|1 Tablespoon
|Shredded swiss cheese
|4 Ounce
Preheat oven to 375°.
Wrap potatoes in foil; bake at 375° for 1 hour or until tender.
Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat.
Add mushrooms, onion, and garlic; saute 2 minutes.
Stir in flour, salt, and white pepper.
Gradually add milk and sherry, stirring with a whisk until blended.
Cook 2 minutes or until thick and bubbly.
Add cheese; cook 1 minute or until cheese melts, stirring constantly.
Unwrap potatoes.
Split open each potato; fluff pulp with a fork.
Spoon 1/3 cup mushroom sauce into center of each potato.
Place potatoes on a baking sheet; broil 4 minutes or until sauce begins to brown.


text:
Author has written 7 stories for Fantasy, Nature, Life, General, and Mystery.
"Sir Stafford Nye had been a disappointment in diplomatic circles. Marked out in early youth by his gift for great things, he had singularly failed to fulfill his early promise." (Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie)
That's me right now. Or, it would be, if I'd ever been singled out for my brilliance at a young age. Or happened to be a Sir with an awesome name like that. So, basically, the part about failing... that's me. But hey, no need to get bitter.
What you might (or might not) want to know about me...
I have this terrible habit of PMing people a list of errors I found in their stories... If you don't like it, just ignore it!
I speak English, German and some Japanese; I can kind of read French and have been struggling with Latin for a long time now. I just started out on Korean. I'm 26 yet terribly immature and love Tea and Sweets.
Right now, I'm a university student hardly attending classes. A part timer in a job where you essentially get paid to stand and walk around at a leisurely pace. This April, I participated in Camp NaNo.
In German we have this expression for one's own weaker self or the lazy/bad part of ourselves: we call it "innerer Schweinehund" which is like one's "inner swine". Now I have the theory that my inner swine is, in fact, a dragon; and each time one of it's heads is cut, two new ones grow in it's place. That's how lazy I am.
Books I've read recently
- The Secret of Chimneys . Gotta love Agatha Christie!!
- The Voyage Out Virginia Woo
About my stories
The Dragon Princess
A story I wrote in 2002. Basically a fairytale. People said it was to short, and I totally agree. However, inspiration hasn't quite struck.
A door to other worlds
Part of an English assignment I did back in 2002. A short story. Not very original but I enjoyed rereading it after these years... Please feel free to check out the first two handwritten pages! They have drawn frames which I took some time to make and they are probably the best part of the story, to be honest.
I was asked to continue this story, but won't be able to do it any time soon...
Elster und Perle
Ich hatte die größten Schwierigkeiten, das Genre für diese Geschichte auszuwählen... Wenn jemand bessere Vorschläge hat, her damit!! Bitte :)
Eerie Iry
A story I originally wanted to write for a friend to give it to her on her birthday; However, this has been dragging for many months now! But it's one of the two projects I'm really working on these days...
My poems
They are quite short and mostly written just for the fun of it. I guess the one I like best at the moment is "Something worth saying". Maybe because it captures one of the conflicts I come across again and again. I keep stopping, keep hesitating... Keep doubting if what I'm doing is of any real worth. If it's legitimate to be spending my time on something that is purely superficial. Something I realize I'm mostly doing to please my ego. I keep wondering if there isn't actually something else I should be doing right now, some crossing where I failed to turn... well, you get the idea.
Unsafe External Link


text:
The Holy Bible is both historically and scientifically correct.
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11-16-2012, 06:45
Peace Warrior
CLM Number 221
Am Yisrael Chai
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: With the other 7,999,999
Posts: 29,354
Blog Entries:
Originally Posted by
Animal Mother
To be fair, the Lucy's knee stuff predates the star formation stuff. On the other hand, PW seems eminently capable of avoiding answering two questions at the same time.
To be
and fair, you brought up lucy's knee in this thread.
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. -
William S. Burroughs
I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the Constitution. - Barry Soetoro
"Love 'Em All!!!
Let Jehovah sort 'em out." -
The Holy Bible
""Are there more things that you need, or more that you don't need?""
Peace Warrior
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Their result for The How sexually open are you? Test ...
Their Analysis (Vertical line = Average)
They scored 8% on open-ness, higher than 53% of your peers.
All possible test results
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You scored 14 sexual open-ness!
Bitch1975819 / m / Bisexual
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