Back-up Power System installation takes out AlaskaAir fleet central computer system

I got up at 5:15a this morning to get my mom on a 6:50a flight from SEA to SJC.  Checking with my sister she said the flight was a bit late.  Luckily she was only late 20 minutes arriving in SJC as opposed to the next 4 + hours of cancelled flights when AlaskaAir's computer system was brought down during installation of a back-up power system blew a transformer.

This is why  I couldn't check flight status this morning.

Systemwide Central Computer Outage

A systemwide central computer outage has caused delays to flights throughout the Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air network. We apologize for inconvenience this is causing our customers.

I wonder what the cost impact is of cancelling 95 + flights.

DALLAS (AP) - Alaska Airlines and its Horizon Air affiliate canceled 95 flights Saturday because a computer system used for flight planning failed.

How many of the AlaskaAir IT operations guys have learned some new things about facility operations.  You'd think they could run the power system change  during the window of time when AlaskaAir isn't running fleet operations. (update)  The transformer failure happened at 3a this morning, so the maintenance was performed after hours, but a major transformer failure is not a quick repair.

And, thanks to the good folks at Lunarpages, BestGreenWebHostingDeal is shut down

I’ve been blogging about the BestGreenWebHostingDeal that has been copying my content, and now thanks to folks at LunarPages the url now says.

Visitors, we are sorry, however, this site is experiencing difficulties at this time. Please return later.

Webmaster, please contact us by email at support@lunarpages.com or via Lunarpages Helpdesk athttp://support.lunarpages.com. Thank you for choosing Lunarpages (http://www.lunarpages.com).

2006 © Lunarpages Web Hosting

It was pretty convenient that the bot used to copy my content copied this post 100%.

Next step in stopping a Content Farm from stealing content, contacting web hoster

TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 2011 AT 1:56PM

I posted about BestGreenWebHostingDeal stealing my content.   I have tried to contact the owner of the site, but no response.

Next step I contacted the web hosting company and they asked for the following information.  As part of what they ask for below I plan on using this post as example of how BestGreenWebHostingDeal copies my content as it will be only a matter of minutes before their content bot scrapes my site and posts this up.  And here is the copy of my site http://www.bestgreenwebhostingdeal.com/2070/next-step-in-stopping-a-content-farm-from-stealing-content-contacting-web-hoster/

Hello Dave

Thank you for contacting Lunarpages regarding your recent copyright concerns. Please be advised that Lunarpages takes copyright issues very seriously and has implemented policies and procedures specifically to deal with claims such as yours pursuant to applicable law so as to protect the rights of all parties involved.

Top Mistake in Social Networking, not investing in Command and Control Technology like Telligent

I was able to meet with an ex-Microsoft employee Rob Howard who is founder and CTO of Telligent.

ABOUT US

Telligent is dedicated to being the most trusted and innovative enterprise collaboration and community software company. We were founded in 2004 by technology visionary Rob Howard around his fundamental beliefs that information should be independent of tools, and communities – social and business – contain vast amounts of untapped, unshared knowledge.

After I watched Rob's presentation on World Class Communities.   I was thinking about this graphic.  You can get a PDF of the presentation here.

And then it hit me.  Almost everybody focuses on throwing resources at the participation on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc., but few think about the ownership of the community.  How can you own your community when you use Facebook and Twitter?

If you think about Facebook and Twitter as your distribution channel, then you need to have something at the core of your social networking strategy.  You need command and control (C2) technology.

Command and control, or C2, in a military organization can be defined as the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commanding officer over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission.^[1][2]

The DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines it as "[t]he exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. Command and control functions are performed through an arrangement of personnel, equipment, communications, facilities, and procedures employed by a commander in planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling forces and operations in the accomplishment of the mission. Also called C2." ^[3]

Rob has the idea of Command and Control is his paper.

To truly become world class, leaders will invest not only in the technology to run the community, but the people and resources to support the community. The community must be an integral part of the entire experience and culture of the organization.

It's so clear now.  The top mistake people make in social networking is they don't have command and control technology as part of their social networking strategy.

I am looking forward to more conversations with Rob on this topic and the use of Telligent SW in social networking solutions.

If you really want to go further you think about Command and Control Intelligence and Telligent does that as well with Analytics.

• Monitor key decisions and community buzz.Evaluate brand awareness, sentiment and customer loyalty to enhance your interactive marketing strategy.
• Get a handle on service performance. Monitor trends and identify the most valuable people and information to deliver on your support commitments.
• Understand your community network. Track what your customers and employees are thinking, how they’re connected and what they contribute to your community.
• Build a sustainable community. Mine community data and assess the impact of your community via community health indicators.

One group with a smile on their face during Japan's Nuclear disaster, coal industry

There is tons of anti-nuclear press and discussions given the situation in Japan.

Consider this point from Seth Godin's blog on The Triumph of Coal Marketing.

The triumph of coal marketing

Do you have an opinion about nuclear power? About the relative safety of one form of power over another? How did you come to this opinion?

Here are the stats, and here's the image. A non-exaggerated but simple version of his data:

For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced... You might very well have excellent reasons to argue for one form over another. Not the point of this post. The question is: did you know about this chart? How does it resonate with you?

The coal industry like the fact that people don't think this way.  In their minds it is the opposite.

But, you go to some areas of the US and Nuclear is still a priority reports Reuters.

By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA | Fri Mar 18, 2011 5:12pm EDT

(Reuters) - For much of the world, Japan's nuclear crisis has heightened concerns about nuclear power. But in the U.S. Southeast, where the next set of reactors are planned, the concerns are not so great.

Even environmental activists -- those with deep-seated reservations about nuclear safety who say events in Japan provide an opening to change opinions [ID:nL3E7EI251] -- do not anticipate a radical shift.

No reactors have been commissioned in the United States since the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in which a reactor suffered a partial meltdown.

The next four are due to come online in Georgia and South Carolina between 2016 and 2019, pending regulatory approval, in a region that is one of the country's most conservative.

When will Netflix move to another cloud besides AWS?

I don’t own any Netflix stock, but if I did I would ask “Do you really think hosting Netflix in  streaming media competitor Amazon.com’s data centers is the best decision?  What other cloud providers have you evaluated besides AWS?”

Being in the cloud makes sense, but couldn’t Netflix be in a facility like SoftLayer or Rackspace?

With Netflix’s outage in AWS, should these questions get asked?

Netflix Confirms Outage; Showtime Shows to Be Pulled

By Mark Hachman

Netflix reported problems with its Web site and streaming service on Tuesday night, which the company has yet to explain.

While the Web site was functional at 8 PM PT, newer interfaces such as those used by the Logitech Revue were unable to connect. Other users reported that Netflix streaming was still down via the Roku box and the PlayStation 3.

"We are aware that the website may not work for everyone at this time. We're working to get it fixed as quickly as we can," the NetflixHelps account tweeted about 4 PM Pacific time.

Netflix proudly discuss the 5 reasons why they went to AWS.  I wonder what Netflix thinks about their #3 point.

3. The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly.

We’ve sometimes referred to the Netflix software architecture in AWS as our Rambo Architecture. Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.

If our recommendations system is down, we degrade the quality of our responses to our customers, but we still respond. We’ll show popular titles instead of personalized picks. If our search system is intolerably slow, streaming should still work perfectly fine.

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.