Landed

Asides, Travel

Paris has the most confusing airport, although I suppose any airport is confusing if you don’t speak the language. Franck was right. I ended up chickening out and taking a taxi, and I’m not checked in and settled. First order of business: find an adapter for these weird plugs. The weather seems to have cleared up so I’m going to venture out and explore a bit.

Gnome 2.8

Asides

Some screenshots of Gnome 2.8. Looks nice. Like any true geek, I’m more interested in the nice shadows on everything than the actual improvements. Are the shadows stock? 😉 I keep going back and forth on my Linux desktop. I’ll use Gnome for a while because it seems cleaner and then I’ll switch to KDE because I seem to get more done and I like things like being able to press Win + M to minimize all the windows. Hat tip: Wes.

Sometimes You Just Can’t Win

Personal

The last name “Mullenweg” has elicited various schoolyard permutations over the years, but by far the most enduring has been “Mulletwig,” presumably because mullets are so entertaining. Therefore it is with great trepidation that I point to Mulletwigs.com, “Business in the front, party in the back!” 🙂

It’s worth outlining how I came across this: Email → Politech posting → “It’s the Economics, stupid” post on spam whitelist → scroll down to Hairy Situation → Original Mullet Wig.

Economical Grids?

Uncategorized, ,

My friend Jason is blogging about Joyents grids and linked to one of their new whitepapers. The cost structures in the whitepaper were interesting to me, to give the executive summary for $2425 a month they got in aggregate 12 GB of RAM, 130GB of storage, and 750GB of public transfer. Some of the storage was block, and some was “distributed NFS mounted.” In systems terms, this came down to 800/mo for Big-IP load balancing, 1000/mo for 8 web servers, and 500/mo for 2 DBs.

Since a lot of startups ask me for hardware advice, I was curious this setup would compare to one of the better dedicated providers, LayeredTech. As disclosure, Automattic currently has 8 servers with Joyent that we got when WP.com first started (and they were called Textdrive) and we have 50+ with Layered Tech. Both are active, we serve blog traffic from Dallas (LT) and the main site/tags traffic from San Diego (Joyent).

However this raises an interesting question: If we had $2425/mo to burn and were just starting out, which would be a better choice?

We have the Joyent costs laid out there in a typographically-correct whitepaper, so I decided to dig into LayeredTech’s slightly-1999 website to see what would be comprable. First I started with the web nodes, their best deal currently seem to be the AMD 275 dual core with 2GB RAM, 250gb HD for 175/mo. Let’s get 10 of those. Let’s get two more but with dual 73gb SCSI mirrored drives for the DBs, at 190/mo. We need a file server, something CPU light, I went for this one and put two mirrored 500gb drives in it for 159/mo. Finally we need some load balancers. Two million hits a day is only 23 requests a second, which my laptop couuld probably do, but let’s get two 3800s at 109/mo each and we can put Pound + Wackamole on them for high availability. Those can easily balance probably about 30-40mbps of traffic each.

Continue reading Economical Grids? →

I’m somewhere in the middle of the Arctic Sea right now, approximately 78°05’N, 28°45’E, but even through the thin pipe of an intermittent satellite connection the ripples were felt of the announcement that Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. Jobs, or the idea of him, has had a profound impact on innumerable founders and CEOs. My own tribute to him (and Apple as an organization) is in the essay 1.0 is the Loneliest Number, where reviews of the original iPod punctuate a story of the messy act of creation. Moments like this give us an opportunity to take a step back and contemplate the bigger picture, so take a moment to read the post and think about what you’re launching next.

Preople Blogging

Asides

So according to Preople I should use Matthew instead of Matt, though I have no idea what that number is based on. I found this service via Om and it seems like the whole rank thing is a clever way to get you to register and start blogging. Here’s my Preople blog and profile page. Capitalizing on people’s ego is always a sure bet, so I predict this service might do pretty well, though it obviously has some very rough edges right now.

Millions of Blondes

Asides, Humor

I’m not going to particpate in it, but the “best blonde joke” (example) thing is driving thousands and thousands of hits every day to WordPress.com. It’s traffic on par with a front-page Digg, just constant and steady. Where did this thing come from??? (Continuing my tradition of being a month late to internet trends.)