Saturday, August 18, 2007
We interviewed Mik when he was moving to Vancouver. We had an accepted offer but at the last minute he took one from MAKE instead. I don’t hold it against him - Mik’s an intelligent guy, always interested in new horizons and I’d welcome the opportunity to work with him. It’s always fun to hear what he’s up to.
Mik Lernout
MAKE Technologies
-Why mainframes are cool
-virtualization things we’ve heard before about IBM porting linux onto their mainframes and running them virtualized
-lots of processors all in one unit - low, low latency
-wasn’t sure about # of spindles
-so how do the mainframes handle tons of IO, how do you add storage
-lots of scary looking code
-Mik seemed to be just having fun playing with things - not a bad life!
Saturday, August 18, 2007
This talk was quite close to some of the work we’ve been doing for the UN. It’s an example of something we could do by using google maps as the map server. To me the cool part comes when you can take arbitrary data sets and start to do drill down analyses/data exploration.
Darko Hrgovic
Agentic.ca
BC Electoral boundaries commission
http://www.bc-ebc-spike.dev/google_maps/
http://bc-ebc.ca/
-type in address, hit go, google returns a point and then they figure out which polygon you’re in and display it.
-this is b/c we’re switching from single member plurality to single transferable vote, and the regions change and become much larger.
-gpolygon method of the google map API
-view the JS source to get the boundary data
-do a mashup with historical voting and our software to show expected voting patterns.
-election BC
-boris - mybcgerimanding.com
-mashup with other data sources
-heat maps of crime
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Timely talk as we’re moving our dev and staging environment to be Xen-based. My major questions are scaling databases that weren’t setup for this infrastructure and production stability of the existing services. My raw notes:
Mark Mayo
Joyent.com
- Virtualization - gave a quick overview of the state of virtualization.
-linux OS guys pushing back that hypervisors just putting overhead between kernel and user. “We can do buy you 95% of what Xen gives you right in the kernel, and do alot of cooler stuff.” Reminds me of what MS used to say about embedding IE into their OS.
-discussion revolved around this
-package management - virtualization makes it easy for you to get into a bunch of VM, then you enter into the normal package management problem. Versus baking it into the OS, and you’re just updating the one OS.
-these are the same problems that anyone who has ever scaled before has to face. The problems should be well understood.
-traditionally hypervisor (HV) considered more stable. But getting more and more complex so bugs in the HV are more and more likely.
-writing off hardware 5 yrs to move it off your books in US, 3-5 yrs in Canada depending on industry. VM allows you to skip the entire capital outlay.
-Baking it into the OS vs Vendors again - have to wait for the Vendors to release drivers, eg VMware only X number of SCSI drives.
-EC2 - how often do their IP leases last? Downtime two blocks of 7 hours in the last two years.
