Posts

• Jul 3, 2012

  Amazon AWS EC2 2012 July Outage

  Summary of the AWS Service Event in the US East Region:

  We’d like to share more about the service disruption which occurred last Friday night, June 29th, in one of our Availability Zones in the US East-1 Region. The event was triggered during a large scale electrical storm which swept through the Northern Virginia area. We regret the problems experienced by customers affected by the disruption and, in addition to giving more detail, also wanted to provide information on actions we’ll be taking to mitigate these issues in the future.

  A 10 minute power outage in one of their datacentres led to a cascade of issues that took 9 hours to resolve and stablise.

  It’s an interesting but long read.

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• Jul 3, 2012

  The iPhone and Disruption: Five Years In

  John Gruber:

  The iPod’s success fooled almost everyone (including me) into thinking that Apple’s entry into the phone market would be similar. The iPod was the world’s best portable media player; the “iPhone”, thus, would likely be the world’s best cell phone.

  But that’s not what it was. It was the world’s best portable computer.

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• Jul 3, 2012

  The PHP Singularity

  Coding Horror:

  What’s depressing is not that PHP is horribly designed. Does anyone even dispute that PHP is the worst designed mainstream “language” to blight our craft in decades? What’s truly depressing is that so little has changed.

  …

  The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious.

  I think Ruby is almost there. Deploying a Ruby web-app is getting easier as we speak, with free hosts available (such as Heroku), and a easy to use Apache / Nginx module (Passenger). As for Python, slightly more work is needed to streamline deployment options.

  Java is a gone case. The closest usable thing is probably the Play Framework, available in both Java and Scala. It throws out most Java EE standards and takes after some conventions popularised by Ruby on Rails.

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• Jul 3, 2012

  Touched by greatness: The iPhone years

  Om Malik:

  It has been five years since Apple and the dearly departed Steve Jobs introduced us to arguably one of the more revolutionary devices ever, the iPhone. And as Tomi T. Ahonen put it, the history of mobile industry will always be divided into two eras — before the iPhone era and after the iPhone era.

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