Mormon Radio iPhone App
June 20th, 2009 | By Joel Dehlin | 8 Comments »
Mormon Radio now has an iPhone app available on the iPhone app store.
This is the first fruits of our community development effort.
Congrats all!!
Data Extortion
May 24th, 2009 | By Joel Dehlin | 2 Comments »
Recently somebody hacked into a web site operated by the State of Virginia, deleted the records of over 8 million people and left a note on the homepage, demanding $10M to restore the data.
We’re talking about 0’s and 1’s here.
It’s not the first time hackers have used data for extortion. Typically they threaten to release potentially damaging data, whereas this time it’s closer to kidnapping where they’re offering to return the data for a price.
This event underscores the importance of regular backups and disaster recovery. Granted, the brutes should never have had the opportunity to get into the web site in the first place, but a secure perimeter won’t solve the problem if it’s an inside job. Appropriate seperation of duties and regular testing of data (and system) restoration is critical for peace of mind when it comes to making sure your data is safely guarded.
Luckily, the state of Virginia apparently had appropriate backup and restoration precedures in place.
Do you?
Open Source Developers Wanted for Mormon Community Development Efforts
May 20th, 2009 | By Joel Dehlin | 17 Comments »
If you’re a developer or a tester or a designer, and you’re Mormon, or even if you’re not, come play!
The Church has been working to figure out a way to allow folks who want to contribute to its missions to do so. We’re ready for help!
We now have applications you can work on, a sandbox with web services, source control, bug tracking and even a requirements for participation. 
The most immediate need is the re-write of the stake and ward web site. We are working on an International web site (10 languages to start with) which will allow members to log in, and view or print their stake/ward directory, see a list of ward leaders, read the ward/stake blog, edit & view the ward/stake/Church calendar, and so forth.
Interested?
Read more here.
The first component you can start on immediately is the calendar portion. It’s built on our Java stack, which you can read about here. You can also read up on our “community development best practices.”
Tom Welch is our “community development” manager. His contact information is on the web sites.
Come join us! We’re ready for your help!!
WolframAlpha=CrazySearch
May 20th, 2009 | By Joel Dehlin | 4 Comments »
If you haven’t tried WolframAlpha, check it out.
Here is a screencast that explains.
It’s a search engine which returns organized data from queries based on normal language. You can ask it math questions, statistics questions, questions about nutritional content, popularity of baby names and so forth.
Notice how often it doesn’t understand your question–unlike Google where you almost always get a result, even if it’s not what you want. In this case, humans are doing more work behind the magic, trying to predict what people will ask. Though you don’t always get a result, when you do get a result it’s more satisfying.
A wonderful tribute to the Savior for Easter
April 12th, 2009 | By Joel Dehlin | 2 Comments »
A wonderful tribute to the Savior for Easter.
Get Patched
January 23rd, 2009 | By Joel Dehlin | 6 Comments »
If your Windows machines aren’t fully patched, you’d better get there.
Desiderata
December 31st, 2008 | By Joel Dehlin | 5 Comments »
Recently I came across a great bit of prose, written by Max Ehrmann. Just to be safe on copyright issues (thank you, David), I’ve linked to a site that has the piece in its entirety.
Hope you enjoy.
Server Sprawl
December 17th, 2008 | By Joel Dehlin | 10 Comments »
Because we are a Church, we are considerably more cost conscious than a typical enterprise would be. In an effort to save power, cooling & hardware costs in our data center, we’ve begun implementing virtualization. We’ve been using virtualization for quite some time with our AIX servers, but we’ve now begun to virtualize Windows and Linux boxes.
Most of you know what virtualization is, but for those who don’t, I’ll try to explain.
<virtualization_explanation>
In the past, when a team needed a server in the data center, we would purchase them their own server. Their application might use, on average, 10% of the capabilities of that server. Or less. It was a waste, not just for our shop, but for the entire industry. A potential, but not always viable, solution was to load multiple solutions onto one box, but those solutions shared the application server and operating system and consequently could interfere with each other by crashing the operating system or the application server and/or just utilizing too much of the computer’s brain (CPU).
Virtualization allows us to load multiple instances of an operating system on a single box. So on one machine, we could load several solutions, each with its own instance of the application server (Websphere) and the operating system (typically Linux). So if one solution crashes its instance of the OS, the other solution is just fine because it’s running on top of its own instance of the OS.
And because each solution was previously only using around 10% of the total resources of the server, you can run, say, 5 solutions on one server and still only use around 50% of the server’s resources. You just cut your power, cooling and hardware costs by roughly 80% (minus a little overhead for the virtualization technology itself).
Pretty amazing.
</virtualization_explanation>
We have seen significant, and maybe even extraordinary, savings on our “per server” costs as a result of virtualization.
The unintended consequence has been “server sprawl.” The ease, speed and extremely low cost of creating a new server (because it is virtual) has increased the demand for servers. Without great governance and management tools, this is becoming a problem for most enterprises.
How are you dealing with “server sprawl” in your shops?
