All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 20, 2008
A question I get asked frequently is how working in industry is different from working in academia. My answer from the beginning has been that the main difference is teamwork. While in academia there are collaborations among faculty and there are student teams working together, the work is still rather individual, as is the reward structure.
The Agile Manager
JUNE 29, 2008
This content is derived from material presented in a ThoughtWorks-sponsored webcast in June 2008. A two minute video presentation of this material is available. A complete webinar re-broadcast, including audience Q&A, will be available soon. The popular press makes Agile sound like nirvana. Practitioners speak of it in nearly religious terms. Yet we often find that IT teams are underwhelmed after going “Agile,” even after having expended considerable effort on making the change.
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Tim Kadlec
DECEMBER 16, 2008
One of the new features that HTML5 offers web developers is a way to send information between documents on different sites via Javascript. Currently for security and privacy reasons, browsers prevent cross site scripting but with HTML5’s Cross Document Messaging, the intention is to allow documents to communicate with each other without sacrificing security.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 22, 2008
These are times where many companies are focusing on the basics of their IT operations and are asking themselves how they can operate more efficiently to make sure that every dollar is spent wisely. This is not the first time that we have gone through this cycle, but this time there are tools available to CIOs and CTOs that help them to manage their IT budgets very differently.
All Things Distributed
AUGUST 20, 2008
Today marks the launch of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store), the long awaited persistent storage service for EC2. Details can be found on the EC2 detail page, the press release and Jeff Barr's posting over on the AWS evangelists blog. Also the folks at Rightscale have two detailed postings: why Amazon EBS matters and Amazon EBS explained.
All Things Distributed
JULY 28, 2008
This page has some of the official material that can be used for conferences, interviews, etc. This is the official bio. Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.
All Things Distributed
APRIL 29, 2008
The laptop that appeared on the cover of business week as part of the story “Building the Perfect Laptop” is the Thinkpad X300. It arrived at my doorstep this afternoon. It is everything it promised to be and more; superlight, rugged, SSD, full ports, wifi, lan & cell networks, dvd, replaceable batteries and 13.
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All Things Distributed
APRIL 13, 2008
I would like to introduce to you the newest feature of Amazon EC2: Persistent local storage. This has been very high on the request list of EC2 customers and I believe that combined with the Availability Zones and Elastic IP Address features released earlier this month this makes EC2 the ideal environment for building highly scalable and reliable applications.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 26, 2008
Today Amazon Web Services launched two new features in Amazon EC2 that are essential tools in building highly resilient applications: Elastic IP addresses and Availability Zones. In summary: Elastic IP addresses are associated with a customer account and allow the customer to do its own dynamic mapping of IP address to instance.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 24, 2008
While the past months have been relatively quiet there is now a period coming up with public events that will take me across a few continents. The period already started two weeks with a Distinguished Lecture at the School of Computer Science of CMU. I had a wonderful day meeting many academics to discuss the relevance of particular research subjects for companies such as Amazon.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 18, 2008
A few days ago, on March 14, Amazon S3 quietly celebrated its 2nd birthday. I think congratulations are in order and I certainly wish the service "many happy returns of this day". That S3 is growing up fast is obvious from the number of objects the customers trust us with.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 16, 2008
Today I finished processing my first set of High Dynamic Range images. HDR is where you take 3 shots of an object using automatic exposure bracketing, in this case at [-2, 0, +2]. Each of the images will have details of areas (highlight, shadows) that the others do not have.
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 22, 2008
I wrote a first version of this posting on consistency models about a year ago, but I was never happy with it as it was written in haste and the topic is important enough to receive a more thorough treatment. ACM Queue asked me to revise it for use in their magazine and I took the opportunity to improve the article.
All Things Distributed
NOVEMBER 17, 2008
Today marks the launch of Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 28, 2008
The last week for submitting the applications for the AWS Startup Challenge has started. Looking at the proposals that are being submitted it looks like this will be another very inspiring challenge. These proposals are reviewed by a panel and five finalists will be selected. The finalists will come to Seattle to compete for $50K in cash, $50K in AWS credits, 2 years of Premium Support and more.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 22, 2008
Congratulations to the Amazon EC2 team for the hard work to get to the point where the beta tag is removed from the service and it is now in full production. Not only that, but there now is an SLA, and Microsoft Windows and SQL Server are available as of today.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 30, 2008
The backend servers that power the world of Internet Services have become increasingly diverse. With today's announcement that Microsoft Windows Server is available on Amazon EC2 we can now run the majority of popular software systems in the cloud. Windows Server ranked very high on the list of requests by customers so we are happy that we will be able to provide this.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 17, 2008
For many the "Cloud" in Cloud Computing signifies the notion of location independence; that somewhere in the internet services are provided and that to access them you do not need any specific knowledge of where they are located. Many applications have already been built using cloud services and they indeed achieve this location transparency; their customers do not have to worry about where and how the application is being served.
All Things Distributed
JULY 25, 2008
For those of you interested in the details of last Sunday's Amazon S3 Availability issue you should read the detailed explanation posted at the AWS Status Dashboard. Root cause was single bit corruption of internal state messages that are distributed via Gossip techniques.
All Things Distributed
JULY 17, 2008
What better way to pick up posting again than with following a meme. Nick Carr in Albums Going Steady describes the challenge to list "a favorite album for every year of your life." I actually do not have the problem described by Nick and others to really start with my birth year.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 18, 2008
On Thursday I'll be on stage at the Under the Radar conference for a fireside chat with Robert Scoble. The Under the Radar folks have asked for input into what questions Robert should ask me. The chat will be focused on cloud computing and related topics, so if you have questions, post them on their blog.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 12, 2008
I was going to pick up posting again and what better way to do that than to point to today's announcement by Usenix to open up the access to all of their conference proceedings. Compared to the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM, who still hide the published material behind the walls of their digital libraries, Usenix already had a very liberal one-year-members-only policy.
All Things Distributed
JANUARY 12, 2008
For those of you who always wanted an Amazon robot you can now buy this special Amazon version of the Danboard character from the Yotsuba & ! series.
The Agile Manager
DECEMBER 17, 2008
In the last installment we took a look at the gap between what the PMO reports out, and what's actually happening in a project team. To begin to understand the nature of this gap, we’ll first take a look at what we use for project gatekeepers. We need to make a clear distinction in an IT project between the means and the ends. We often confuse this, because what we see day in and day out is that we’re paying for the means of production, when in the end we’re really acquiring an asset.
Tim Kadlec
DECEMBER 2, 2008
I’ve been very interested in finding better ways to create CSS stylesheets that are easy to navigate, understand and maintain. After leaving a stylesheet alone for awhile, if you didn’t take the time to organize the stylesheet originally, it’s really easy to forget why certain rules are being used, or where you defined styles for an area.
The Agile Manager
NOVEMBER 26, 2008
This content is derived from a webinar I presented earlier this month titled The Agile PMO: Real-Time Metrics and Visibility. This is the first of a multi-part series. We’ve all seen it: the project that reports “green” status on its stop-and- go light report for months suddenly goes red in the late stages of development. This is nothing new to IT, as projects suddenly crater all the time.
Tim Kadlec
OCTOBER 27, 2008
Historically, it hasn’t been very often that I’ve been able to tip my hat to Microsoft for open web innovation. Today though is one of those times that I get to do so. John Allsopp, one of Microformats’s biggest supporters, mentioned today that Microsoft’s designer/developer community, Mix Online , has developed a IE toolbar called Oomph.
Tim Kadlec
OCTOBER 19, 2008
One of the areas that web design is lacking in, is a way to reliably provide beautiful fonts for our designs. There’s a very limited amount of fonts that are actually safe to use on the web, because not everyone is a designer with lots of nice fonts installed on their machine. Sure, with font stacking we can help ease the pain a bit, but it’s still a small amount of people that will see the fonts we intend, with everyone else getting boring alternates.
Tim Kadlec
OCTOBER 15, 2008
Who Wrote It? Mobile Web Development is written by Nirav Mehta, the head of Magnet Technologies a software development firm in India. He blogs about a variety of business and tech topics at www.mehtanirav.com. What’s Covered? Mobile Web Development covers a wide variety of topics related to…guess what… mobile web development. Nirav does a fantastic job of introducing a wide variety of technologies needed to begin mobile web development including sending and receiving SMS and
The Agile Manager
OCTOBER 13, 2008
There’s a lot riding on IT in the current economic climate. In tight times, businesses rely on efficiency, and IT investments will be expected to create a lot of that efficiency. But while IT assets may help the business tighten up, IT execution must also tighten up to match the times. That doesn’t mean IT projects have to execute flawlessly. They never will, as there will always be situations and events that challenge even the most experienced of teams.
Tim Kadlec
SEPTEMBER 18, 2008
Last time around , we took a general look at the canvas element and how it is supported (or not) in various browsers. This time, we’ll start to go into the element in a bit more detail and start to look at some the things we can do with it. A Quick Look at Attributes. We’ve already seen how to set up the canvas element in HTML: You’ve probably noticed that we’ve included an id attribute on our canvas element to make it easier for us to access the element in our Javascript
The Agile Manager
SEPTEMBER 12, 2008
Please join me on Friday, 19 September for An Agile Readiness Assessment , a ThoughtWorks sponsored webinar. Taking on Agile can appear to be an overwhelming commitment with no obvious place to start. For one thing, Agile is often a significant departure from how a team is operating, requiring organisational changes, new practices, and stricter discipline.
Tim Kadlec
SEPTEMBER 10, 2008
There’s a lot of really exciting and interesting features arriving just around the corner in the world of web development. One of the new features that is receiving a lot of attention, and for good reason, is the new canvas element. The canvas element offers a lot of power to web developers, but can take a bit for some people to get comfortable with.
Tim Kadlec
AUGUST 20, 2008
The big news in the Javascript community for the last week has been the announcement of ECMAScript Harmony. A lot of news is really just overblown, but this is a big development, and one that any Javascript developer should be following. Some Background. There’s been a lot of talk in the Javascript community over the past 9 years or so about the development of ECMAScript 4, what was to be the foundation for what was being called Javascript 2.
Tim Kadlec
AUGUST 12, 2008
It’s no secret that the web design industry is often not given the respect it deserves. People treat it as if it’s a much simpler task than it really is. Forgive me if I come off sounding a bit arrogant, but it seems like people seriously underestimate the work involved in creating a quality web site. One issue, for example, is people expecting to see comps of work without payment.
Tim Kadlec
AUGUST 11, 2008
There’s a lot of interesting new features being suggested for HTML5 and XHTML2. Some of them are extremely useful, some of them seem to be more questionable additions. One feature being implemented in HTML5 that I do like is the addition of custom data attributes to HTML elements. Manage Your Data. A custom data attribute is simply any attribute starting with the string “data-” They can be used to store data that you want kept private to the page (not viewable by the user) in c
Tim Kadlec
AUGUST 3, 2008
I did what I said I told myself I would never do…I only posted one item the entire month. I always told myself that if I was going to have a blog going, I was going to commit to it and ensure that the blog never went stale…there would always be fresh content on my site. I think I may have underestimated the wonderful curves that life throws out there!
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