Cheerful Curmudgeon

I woke up in a good mood this morning and then…

Sometimes one piece of technology makes another, seemingly unrelated, piece of technology misbehave. It happened this morning at 12:15am CDT when an automated program that I run in Amazon EC2 failed to do its thing. The EC2 instances (that’s geek speak for “virtual machines” which is geek speak for “computers which aren’t really there but act like they are”) started up but never got around to doing any useful work. Six hours later, all of the instances were still running; they should have finished their work and died off in about two hours. I killed all of the instances, grumbling because I had paid for six hours of time and gotten nothing for it and did not even know why.

The underlying problem, it turned out, was a new SSL certificate that we had installed on our e-commerce store yesterday. One of the first things that each EC2 instance does is to fetch the latest version of the software from a Subversion server, which, coincidentally, is on the same machine as our e-commerce store. With a new SSL certificate on the server, each instance was waiting for a human being to say that the new certificate was OK. Inconveniently, the human being was sound asleep.

Who would have thought that renewing the SSL certificate for our on-line store would break an unrelated Amazon EC2-based application? Hidden dependencies suck.

Now I am in a bad mood, grumbling because I did not get my relaxed waking-up time after my shower, sitting next to my wife, drinking coffee, cruising blogs. Instead I dove directly from the shower into debugging and it left me feeling edgy.

We have a mechanism at Hen’s Teeth Network which works pretty well to keep emotional baggage like this from blindsiding our coworkers: we check-in every morning. It is a chance for me to say, “I’m in a bad mood. Better watch out; I may bite.” Better forewarned than not.

I am finishing this post a couple of hours later, after checking in with my coworkers. The check-in worked beautifully, giving me a chance to blow off some of the steam. I am more relaxed and I got some support from sympathetic ears. We even laughed a bit about the situation.

We missed the hidden dependency between the e-commerce store’s SSL certificate and the EC2 application and were caught unawares. Fortunately, we did not miss the hidden dependency between my early morning upset and my interactions with my co-workers. Knowing about the dependency and having tools at hand and in daily use for handling the dependency, proved a good thing for all of us.

I am fed up with wasting clients’ dollars “fixing” web sites so that they look good in Internet Explorer 6. IE7 has been out for 2 1/2 years. IE8 is available as a free beta. There are lots of other browsers available for free. All of these browsers work better than IE6. If you still use IE6, it’s time to get over it and move on. Upgrade for free to something better.

This web site, and the others for which I am responsible, now display a warning similar to this when visited with IE6:

Sample IE6 warning message

For more information, see Moving Past Internet Explorer 6.

Here is a short, informative video which explains the credit crisis in terms which ordinary mortals (i.e., I) can understand.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The Guardian write, Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline pledges cheap medicine for world’s poor

The world’s second biggest pharmaceutical company is to radically shift its attitude to providing cheap drugs to millions of people in the developing world.

In a major change of strategy, the new head of GlaxoSmithKline, Andrew Witty, has told the Guardian he will slash prices on all medicines in the poorest countries, give back profits to be spent on hospitals and clinics and – most ground-breaking of all – share knowledge about potential drugs that are currently protected by patents.

My hat’s off to you, Mr. Witty. This is a great step and I thank you. One more thing, though: what about the poor people right here in the US and the UK and the other “developed” countries? Will we soon live in a world where high quality medical care is more affordable in Africa than in America?

Surprise! Surprise! I received my movie today from Netflix, just as Netflix claimed I would. I do not know how they did it but they seem to have mailed via US Postal Service on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday. Cool.

I am intrigued. I just received a “movie shipped” notice from Netflix, telling me that I will receive my disk tomorrow, the day after a federal holiday during which the US Postal Service does not work (or so I thought). I will be pretty impressed if the disk really does arrive as promised. Stay tuned….

Do you remember when I predicted that Google Chrome would take over the world replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux? Here is the next step, to be released for CES which begins January 8, 2009.

If all you want from your computer is to read your email (Gmail) and surf the web and use the other applications that Google provides, it is just seven seconds away. No, that is not a typo. In less time than you have spent reading this article, you will be able to boot your computer and be doing useful stuff.

Of course, you could use this system for web-based applications other than Google’s, but how many people will bother. I wonder how long it will be until you can get a free, ad-supported computer with this operating system pre-installed.

You might have noticed a bit of “uncertainty” in the economy these days. I was fascinated to see these two articles show up within 24 hours of each other:

We do not know who is right, of course, but I am an optimist and strongly biased toward Updegrove’s view.

I believe that we live in a plentiful universe, that there is more than enough of everything to go around and our challenges are in distribution and not in production. We have, for instance, more than enough food to feed everybody; we just need to get the food from where it sits to the mouths of the hungry people. I believe that we are bright enough to solve this problem.

I also believe in the basic generosity of human beings. Innumerable projects have been accomplished through the donated time of unemployed and under-employed people. People with full-time jobs and plenty of money also donate their time, of course, but history proves that unemployment does not transform normally generous people into the selfish animals which Keen predicts.

Open source software is good for everyone. The programmers get to do stuff which they enjoy, learn new technologies, and bask in the warm fuzzies of seeing the works of their hands thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated. The companies which use open source software see lower costs and (hopefully) higher profits. And last but certainly not least, the people who use open source software get to enjoy a much wider choice of solutions to their problems than would exist if only commercial software were available. With all of this goodness in a naturally abundant universe, we are certainly going to see new bounties in the open source software cornucopia.

I hate paying money to be abused. Here is this morning’s tale of woe regarding customer “service” at the Anthem insurance company.

A few weeks ago, I received a letter telling me that the co-pay on my Zetia would increase dramatically and that I should switch to a statin instead. That is patently ridiculous advice, though, because I am also taking a statin (Lipitor). Were my cholesterol controllable with only a statin, I would not be taking both a statin and Zetia. So I just called the member service phone number and had this conversation:

Me: What is the process for appealing this increase in my co-payment?

Anthem: There is no appeals process.

Me: To whom would I send a letter appealing this increase?

Anthem: To our Grievance and Appeals department.

pregnant pause while I wait for more useful information to be offered — none was

Me: And what is the mailing address of the Grievance and Appeals department?

Anthem: You can send your letter to: Anthem, Grievance and Appeals Department – MO, PO Box 33200, Louisville, KY 40233.

I bit back my sarcastic questions about why she had told me that there was no appeals process. For what I pay for health insurance, why do I expect that I should get an honest answer to a simple and straightforward question?

Internet TV—broadcasting live television over the internet instead of using radio broadcasts or the cable television infrastruction. Almost everybody has heard of it. Some people talk about it as the Next Big Thing in television. Many people figure that it will not happen for a long time for a wide range of business and technical reasons. Did you notice that a new player quietly entered the internet TV market this week?

Netflix posted New content to watch instantly on Wednesday,

Today we announced an agreement with Starz Play that adds around 1,000 choices that you can watch instantly today, and will add another 1,500 by the end of the year. Movies include “No Country for Old Men”, “Ratatouille,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Superbad,” and more. You can see all the newly available choices here.

If you click the “here” link, and look near the top, right corner, you will find “Live Starz TV Channel” quietly nestled in there. (Click on the images to see full-sized versions.)

Click the “Live Starz TV Channel” link and, without any fanfare, you are watching a live Starz movie channel.

How long until Netflix offers more of the Starz, Encore and MoviePlex channels? How quickly will HBO, Showtime and the rest want pieces of the action? We have always known that Netflix was positioning itself to deliver movies over the internet. Now we can see that its goal is to deliver all TV content, not just movies. Netflix already has a solid subscriber base and delivery infrastructure. It looks like we consumers will soon have a third alternative to cable and satellite providers.