My laptop charger died today.
I now have a $2500 mousepad.
I guess I should really get it fixed 🙂
UPDATE: I contacted Apple last Friday and received my new charger in the mail today (Monday). Pretty fast!
Author: Barry
To be written by someone famous...
OS X not so fool proof
Yesterday my Mac Mini let me know there was an available security update. Should be easy enough I thought so I clicked the “Install” button. After about 2 minutes of installing I received the error that the updated failed to install and had been moved to the trash. If I wanted to attempt to reinstall the update I should remove the package from the trash and click on it. Again, seems easy enough, so I tried.
Nothing happened.
BBQ and free wifi
During my trip to Texas last week, I discovered that the Rudy’s BBQ in New Braunfels has free wifi! BBQ and free Internet access — doesn’t get much better than that. Needless to say, I made multiple trips to Rudy’s during my visit.
When I am not in Texas, I get my fill of BBQ and free wifi at Memphis Minnie’s. If you’re ever in San Francisco, you should check it out.
Photo by: Andrew Timm
When 100% is not 100%
Rackspace Managed Hosting is well known for their support and their 100% network uptime guarantee. One night last week, between approximately 23:31PDT and 23:51PDT there was an outage which affected Rackspace’s authoritative DNS servers and possibly other parts of their network. As a result, any site that uses Rackspace’s nameservers may or may not have worked during that time period. As my own personal domain uses Rackspace nameservers and was not working, I inquired about the outage and received the following reply from a Rackspace account manager:
“… Our SLA provides a 5% discount off your monthly fees for every 30 minutes of network downtime you incur. Your DNS connectivity problems lasted for a total of 20 minutes, therefore not constituted under the SLA as grounds for a discount.”
I guess that means that although they have a 100% network uptime guarantee, they don’t have to do anything about it as long as the outages occur in blocks of less than 30 minutes. Something about this doesn’t sound right to me…
Load balancer testing
Over the past week here at wordpress.com, we have been doing some experimentation with various software load balancers. In the latest test, we are using Pound with a weighted round-robin algorithm between all of the web servers in a given datacenter. The individual weight takes into account hardware differences and any other tasks that server may be doing. So, a dual processor server would receive more traffic than a single processor machine. The tests have been going really well so far. Once the testing is complete and we have decided on a solution, I will post about the various things we tried, pros and cons of each, etc. The graph below shows the load averages of the various web servers over a one week period. I’ll let you guess when the test began 🙂 Pretty dramatic difference, eh?
