root# gem install refinerycms Building native extensions. This could take a while… ERROR: Error installing refinerycms: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb mkmf.rb can’t find header files for ruby at /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/ruby.h

Gem files will remain installed in /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/json-1.7.7 for inspection. Results logged to /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/json-1.7.7/ext/json/ext/generator/gem_make.out

The solution ended up being that I need to install Xcode and go to Xcode Preferences and add in the Command Line Tools. After that, it’s all good.

scottkahler$ gem install vmc
scottkahler$ gem install sinatra

scottkahler$ mkdir bigdatamidwest
scottkahler$ cd bigdatamidwest/
scottkahler$ vim bdmw.rb

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘sinatra’
get ‘/’ do
“Hello from BigDataMidwest”
end

scottkahler$ vmc target api.cloudfoundry.com
Setting target to https://api.cloudfoundry.com... OK
scottkahler$ vmc push
Please log in first to proceed.

target: https://api.cloudfoundry.com

Email> my.email@address.com

Password> **********

Authenticating... OK
Name> bigdatamidwest

Instances> 1

1: sinatra
2: other
Framework> 1

1: ruby18
2: ruby19
3: other
Runtime> 2

1: 64M
2: 128M
3: 256M
4: 512M
5: 1G
6: 2G
Memory Limit> 1

Creating bigdatamidwest... OK

1: bigdatamidwest.cloudfoundry.com
2: none
Domain> bigdatamidwest.cloudfoundry.com

Updating bigdatamidwest... OK

Create services for application?> n

Bind other services to application?> n

Save configuration?> yes

Saving to manifest.yml... OK
Uploading bigdatamidwest... OK
Starting bigdatamidwest... OK
Checking bigdatamidwest...
 0/1 instances: 1 starting
 1/1 instances: 1 running
OK

And BAM! I’ve got a running app.

Another timely XKCD comic, just yesterday I was talking with a bunch of my coworkers about how much of a change there could be to Google Maps if they start pulling in Glass images. For a large corporation with a couple dozen people walking around you could probably map out the entire campus outdoors and even inside structures within a week. At that point you are looking at Google Maps not only telling you how to drive to the next meeting, but where you can park, how to get in the building and where the conference room is. You can go through all that on your phone the day before the meeting to familiarize yourself. Maybe similar to the avoid toll roads function you’ll also be able to customize your path to avoid passing through the department of people waiting on your report that has not yet been delivered.

Over the last six months I’ve had the privilege of working off of a Dell XPS13. I signed up for the Sputnik program thinking there was no way I would get one and was accepted early on. We received a test unit at Adknowledge and things just seemed to fall into place. Over the past decade of carrying a machine home with me daily, this has by far been my favorite. Various beasts have passed through my hands, most of them Latitudes or varying sizes, a couple ThinkPads and a pairs of MacBook Pros. None of them I’ve enjoyed as much as this little number. I had for many years thought I needed a big monster of a laptop decked out with a huge screen and massive drives. Recently I’d come to the realization that I spend 90% of my day in console session or in a browser where apps have gotten so much better over the last couple years. I don’t need a 16GB of RAM and 1TB of disk, the times I need more horsepower I am looking at something much bigger and will probably need to be running the app in a cluster or off of a VM server. What I need day to day is something that’s light and portable that I can fire up quickly. Something with a big enough keyboard for my hands (I’m 6’2″) and I don’t feel like I’m missing screen real estate. A machine that is not akin to setting up a Dungeon Master screen in front of me when I take it to a meeting. It gets bonus points when it looks sexy enough for the C-level people in the office to request one too. The XPS13 has been all of that and more. From the get go running Ubuntu on it has been a dream, it’s going to be a sad day on Friday when I turn it back in.  The new job I’m taking with Pivotal has a standardized order of a MBP for everyone. I’ll be required to run VMs much more often, so I don’t think the little guy would hold up (though I’d love to give it a try) even were I able to hold onto it. Thus I’ll have to set what has been my favorite laptop aside and move on to something else. The poor thing did get pretty hot on a minecraft server with a lot of action going on, so maybe his next life will find him some lighter usage and he can make someone else just as happy.

What the heck is bisectional bandwidth? If you draw a line somewhere in a network bisectional bandwidth is the rate of communication at which servers on one side of the line can communicate with servers on the other side. With enough bisectional bandwidth any server can communicate with any other server at full network speeds.

Wait, don’t we have high bisectional bandwidth in datacenters now? Why no, no we don’t. We typically have had networks optimized for sending traffic North-South rather than East-West. North-South means your server is talking to a client somewhere out in the Internet. East-West means you are talking to another server within the datacenter. Pre cloud software architectures communicated mostly North-South, to clients located outside in the Internet. Post cloud most software functionality is implemented by large clusters that talk mostly to each other, that is East-West, with only a few tendrils of communication shooting North-South. Recall how Google has pioneered large fanout architectures where creating a single web page can take a 1000 requests. Large fanout architectures are the new normal.

Datacenter networks have not kept up with the change in software architectures. But it’s even worse than that. To support mostly North-South traffic with a little East-West traffic, datacenters used a tree topology with core, aggregation, and access layers. The idea being that the top routing part of the network has enough bandwidth to handle all the traffic from all the machines lower down in the tree. Economics made it highly attractive to highly oversubscribe, like 240-1, the top layer of the network. So if you want to talk to a machine in some other part of the datacenter you are in for a bad experience. Traffic has to traverse highly oversubscribed links. Packets go drop drop fizz fizz.

New Data Center Networks Will Set Your Code and Data Free

One of the key things that happened to me at the conference was running into Phil Simon. At the Data Scientist Summit he was involved in pretty good talk at the table and it wasn’t until I got back later and did a little googling that I came across the book he wrote, The Age of the Platform. The book interested me because the previous company I worked at (Universal Press Syndicate/uclick) had built it’s success upon a platform, in my opinion. Additionally at Adknowledge I believe a large part of the success they have is built upon a couple of key platforms.  I burned through about half the book on my wait at the airport and my plane ride home. Work, kids, work, workouts, work and home improvement activities have kept me busy enough that I haven’t had a chance to get through the rest of it. I like the manner in which he writes, the litany of examples cited in order to back up his points and plain speak are refreshing. I’m just getting to the point where he delves into the platforms of the different companies he goes over (Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google) and I’m interested to see if they fit into my concept of the platforms I believe I have seen.

At uclick what I believe their power platform is predated my attachment to the company by many years. In fact I think the core platform they have dates back to the founders of the company. What they created in the 70s melded excellent authors, superb artists, talented content creators, an intelligent editorial staff and an ability to get that collaboration to clients on time. In any company how you move the output of smart people to be used by consumers is a key to victory, and they were doing it well. During my tenure there from 2000 to almost 2010 I witnessed a massive change, in that the manner in which they monetized on this platform collapsed, the degree and rapidity at which the tried and true business model eroded surprised many. One of the largest attributing factors I believe was the advent of massive amounts of free content and the scrambles that followed to find new ways to make money. The internet is still figuring out how to make real money off of real people instead of screaming into the void . Once they figure that one out it will be realized that real people read real content and I imagine the value proposition will come back for this conent. If they’ve kept that core platform in good repair and manage to keep with it they’ll be sitting pretty to reap the rewards.

At Adknowledge there are a variety of platforms employed. One which I think is interesting, and one of the key reasons I joined, was the way they target advertisement. It’s not based on context, for example: a pet supply ad on site about cats. It is instead based on what we can derive the consumer wants are based upon the information we have. At the time I joined in the tail end of 2009 you didn’t see other companies doing this. Only recently has it started to permeate the mainstream places such as Amazon and Google, where they figure out you have interest in a product and throw ads at you based on that product. This type of advertising I believe in the end services the consumer and the advertiser in a much better manner than the contextual advertising that is the norm.

As I’m able to read more of Phil’s book it will be interesting to see how he breaks down the platforms of those internet giants and see if they match in part to what I see as the platform of the companies that I worked at.

DNS when I connect to the VPN has been all kinds of funky. I believe I fixed this today by turning off dnsmasq

I really don’t want a local resolver, how can I turn it off?

To turn off dnsmasq in Network Manager, you need to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and comment the “dns=dnsmasq” line (put a # in front of it) then do a “sudo restart network-manager”.

My other issue has been going back and forth between the office and going from two monitors to my single laptop monitor. I haven’t have a change to figure out exactly what the problem is but if I delete my mointors.xml it gets me up and running for the time being.

Edit (2012-05-30): Deleting monitor XML did fix it up. It’s probably some cruft from running through the upgrade process that last two or three updates instead of doing a fresh install.

Old one, but still good - http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25