We had more fun with a vendor today. We license a vendor’s services for corporate information, like annual revenue and office locations. Their name shall be kept confidential. I've written about them before. About two weeks ago, we noticed a slowdown in our API calls into their system. We asked them about it, and they replied … Continue reading How to hose a customer with your API
Tag: technology
Comparing two technologies on their configuration style
At IP Street, most of our technology stack is open-source. Something happened last week that threw our components' different design philosophies into stark relief. We use Solr (with Zookeeper) for many of our search and pivot tasks, and Redis as a Swiss Army Knife. They do different things and have different consistency requirements. You can easily critique any … Continue reading Comparing two technologies on their configuration style
Drobo data recovery: Conclusion
My dead Drobo saga's conclusion... tl;dr Grades: Drobo customer support: A+. DiskWarrior: F. Disk Rescue 3: A-. Don't consider your Drobo to be hot-swappable. Ever. Buy Disk Rescue 3 and have it on hand. Run Disk Utility and do a Verify Disk once a month. If that's too often for you, do it once a quarter. … Continue reading Drobo data recovery: Conclusion
A Drobo firmware update bricked my Drobo
I'm migrating my files and apps to my new MacBook Pro. A highly anticipated improvement was connecting my Drobo S to a USB 3.0 interface, instead of my previous laptop's USB 2.0 bus. During my migration, the Drobo Dashboard advised me that a Drobo firmware update was available. I did the update, which -boom- bricked … Continue reading A Drobo firmware update bricked my Drobo
How not to maintain an API
We license a vendor's services for corporate information, like annual revenue and office locations. Their name shall be kept confidential in this story. We access their API via http calls. They call it a REST API. But like 95% of the "REST" APIs in the world, it's not REST at all, and in fact nowhere … Continue reading How not to maintain an API
As the world turns…
Boy, what a roller coaster! Shortly after opening a position for a Senior Devops engineer, we had a funding "event" and now the opening's gone. What's worse, I had to lay off one of my developers, right before before the end-of-year holidays. It was stressful for all involved. We're doing some interesting things with name … Continue reading As the world turns…
I switched from Cacti to Munin
This week, I switched our systems-level monitoring from Cacti to Munin. I was dissatisfied with Cacti's interactive-only configuration and limited OOTB charts, and its reluctance to correctly display the processor %U of my multicore servers. I tried the oft-cited suggestion of cloning the existing %U graph into a new template and bumping the maximum to … Continue reading I switched from Cacti to Munin
Nook networking blues
My wife owns a NOOK Simple Touch with GlowLight. Our home router in an Apple Airport Extreme, the latest model. The NOOK worked flawlessly when she first got it. But starting three weeks ago, it forgets our home network credentials about once a week. Nothing's changed in our network configuration. The Airport's location hasn't changed. … Continue reading Nook networking blues
Unit test your obvious code
Sometimes you don't write unit tests. Your reason for not doing so always falls into one of two categories. Complexity The code you just wrote would be so much easier to test using system-level testing. For example... The setup and teardown would be 10x the test code. There's too much interaction with multiple data stores … Continue reading Unit test your obvious code
iPad diagramming II
I'm playing more with Noteshelf and thinking about how I use a whiteboard. And I'm noticing aspects of my sketching for the first time... My drawings mutate a lot as I create them: I'll start out leaving space for objects (e.g., server boxes, database symbols), and then decide the objects need more space. (For practical … Continue reading iPad diagramming II
Seek Nuance 