Oh I get it the NSA Data Center is a Cloud and Clouds have Lighting (Arc Flashes) - Humor

ABC reports on the NSA data center and has a quote.

"The failures that occurred during testing have been mitigated," Vines said in a statement. "A project of this magnitude requires stringent management, oversight, and testing before the government accepts any building."

I was thinking maybe somewhere buried deep in the huge stack of requirement documents are that the NSA data center is a Cloud environment.  And, someone could interpret the Cloud as we need lightning.  :-)

Here is an Arc Flash Demonstration with sound.

With all this PR on the electrical problems that are a whole of people at the NSA trying to figure out what went wrong with the electrical design, equipment, and installation.  

Heading to 7x24 Exchange San Antonio, are you?

A bunch of us our coordinating our schedules to get together at 7x24 Exchange San Antonio.

Here is the site for registration.

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I'll be there and looking forward to report on the presentations.

More and more of my data center friends are attending 7x24 Exchange and I am making more friends at 7x24 Exchange.  If your goal is to network in the industry and you haven't gone to 7x24, you should give it a try.

3 Forces for the Magic of Insight

I posted about a book on Seeing What Others Don't.  The book focuses on developing insights.

The last paragraph in the book is

The magic of insights stems from the force for noticing connections, coincidences, and curiosities; the force for detecting contradictions; and the force of creativity unleashed by desperation.  That magic lives inside us, stirring restlessly.

There are too many words in this.  I like to think of this as.  

The three secrets for achieving the magic of insight are seeing patterns, recognizing anomalies, and tapping the source of trying what others haven't.

Slate.com dives into the details on Healthcare.gov issues, discusses back-end server issues

Healthcare.gov's availability and usability is in the new since Oct 1 launch.

Slate.com has a post on what is behind the problems.

They are finding Oracle DB errors.

“Error from: https%3A//www.healthcare.gov/oberr.cgi%3Fstatus%253D500%2520errmsg%253DErrEngineDown%23signUpStepOne.”

To translate, that’s an Oracle database complaining that it can’t do a signup because its “engine” server is down. So you can see Web pages with text and pictures, but the actual meat-and-potatoes account signup “engine” of the site was offline.

And who the contractors are for the client web front end and the back-end.

This failure points to the fundamental cause of the larger failure, which is the end-to-end process. That is, the front-end static website and the back-end servers (and possibly some dynamic components of the Web pages) were developed by two different contractors. Coordination between them appears to have been nonexistent, or else front-end architect Development Seed never would have given this interviewto the Atlantic a few months back, in which they embrace open-source and envision a new world of government agencies sharing code with one another. (It didn’t work out, apparently.) Development Seed now seems to be struggling to distance themselves from the site’s problems, having realized that however good their work was, the site will be judged in its totality, not piecemeal. Back-end developers CGI Federal, who were awarded a much larger contract in 2010 for federal health care tech, have made themselves rather scarce, providing no spokespeople at all to reporters. Their source code isn’t available anywhere, though I would dearly love to take a gander (and so would Reddit). I fear the worst, given that CGI is also being accused of screwing up Vermont’s health care website.

Part of the reason why this post makes sense and is researched well is it written by a SW developer.

 

About

davidheadshot-300x221I am a writer and software engineer. I’ve worked for Google and Microsoft. I live in New York with several thousand books. I have contributed to Slate, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, n+1, Bookforum, Triple Canopy, The Quarterly Conversation, and elsewhere.

The closing remarks are proof the author knows what he is talking about.

Bugs can be fixed. Systems can even be rearchitected remarkably quickly. So nothing currently the matter with healthcare.gov is fatal. But the ability to fix it will be affected by organizational and communication structures. People are no doubt scrambling to get healthcare.gov into some semblance of working condition; the fastest way would be to appoint a person with impeccable engineering and site delivery credentials to a government position. Give this person wide authority to assign work and reshuffle people across the entire project and all contractors, and keep his schedule clean. If you found the right person—often called the “schedule asshole” on large software projects—things will come together quickly. Sufficient public pressure will result in things getting fixed, but the underlying problems will most likely remain, due to the ossified corporatist structure of governmental contracts.

Have you noticed you don't need to restart your smartphone as much as you used to?

Have you noticed you don't need to restart your smartphone as much as you used to?  Isn't it sad that the most often device you restart at home is your internet connection and/or router?

When you first got a cell phone you didn't think about restarting your phone.  Then with the iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android you got used to.  At least I got in the habit of regularly restarting my phone.

The one time I know I need to restart my phone is during an update, and those are usually only once every 3 months.

Hopefully this is a trend and the smartphone will just work all the time.  Huh, wonder what the availability % of a phone is?  99.7%  99.8  99.9