James Galvin

Apologies to anyone who’s comment hasn’t made it onto this site in recent months. I’ve spotted a few false positives in my Akismet spam list lately, which makes me wonder how many I’ve missed in the past (because I usually just ‘delete all’). The inability to sort by “spamminess”, as Techcrunch puts it, is a glaring omission in Akismet’s functionality. It would be OK if I had 10 spam comments a day, but with hundreds of messages in the queue, I could never have time to check them all.

I used to filter e-mail with SpamAssassin. Any mail with a “spam score” of between 5 and 8 (higher probability of being spam) was held for moderation, and anything above 8 was just automatically deleted. A score of 5.01 means there’s a (relatively) good chance that the email is legit, while a score of 7.9 is almost certainly spam. Sorting by spam score meant I could quickly and easily identify false positives, and 90% of them would have a score of 5.x.

Matt et al are very secretive about the way Akismet operates behind the scenes, but if there is some fundamental reason why future releases won’t have this functionality, then I would see that as a fatal flaw. I might try out Defensio this week. If their spam filtering can get anywhere close to Akismet’s accuracy, then the ability to easily find false positives will make all the difference.

I was pretty surprised when I saw the lights go off on my Rackspace servers in the DFW data center, in Dallas.

The outage was covered by Laughing Squid, and made it onto a lot of big tech news sites such as TechCrunch, GigaOm, Valleywag, and O’Reilly Radar. 37 Signals and other well known web companies got wiped off the face of the earth.

It was embarrassing for me, since I just handed over a new web app to the customer for testing, which relied on a web service running on one of my DFW servers.

I signed up with Rackspace a couple of months ago, and was impressed by the confidence with which they spoke of their 100% guaranteed uptime. “Not 99.99999999999?” I asked. 100%, they assured me.

Down for three hours? That puts my uptime to date at roughly at 99.791%. Sorry Rackspace, but my Nintendo Wii has a better uptime than that. If you want to continue touting your “fanatical support”, you will have to do better.

And as for the apology:

We cannot promise that hardware won’t break, that software won’t fail or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong we will rise to the occasion, take action, resolve the issue and accept responsibility. If you are a Rackspace customer and don’t think we’ve lived up to this promise at anytime during the outage, please let your Account Manager know.

You forfeit the right to this excuse when you promised 100% uptime. Why do you think everyone else offers a bunch of 9′s? If it hadn’t been a lorry crashing into some transformer, it would have been a giant meteorite. This is God’s way of telling you to listen to your sys admin, and not your marketing guy.

p.s., I will accept a free iPod touch as a gesture of good will.

Update: Got the phone call from Rackspace ~1 hour after writing this. That is fanatical support, since whoever read this post had to find out who I was and get in contact with my account manager in that time. I’ll just clarify that, having been there myself in the past as a sys admin, and also working for a broadband provider, I know full well that these things happen. I am aware that the real test is the response when something like this does happen, and it looks like Rackspace did well to get everything sorted quickly. My issue is with the (now mathematically impossible) 100% uptime claim, which no right-minded service provider should give, and Rackspace now no longer have the right to maintain.

p.p.s., the iPod touch was just a joke

No matter how hard I try to describe Berlin, only one word comes to mind – it is very very “German”. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what I love about the place. Just like Weisswurst and pretzels, the city is numbingly bland on first impressions, until you discover the sachet of honey mustard. The wide streets layered with crunchy leaves reminded me of Boston. The ample public transport and complete lack of rush-hour traffic reminded me of Dublin… in a parallel universe… at 3am on a Wednesday… post apocalypse.

I spent five hours on Sunday walking around, seeing the sights. I got a good feel for the city… on a superficial level at least. Smart Cars proudly parked beside luxurious Bentleys. Stumpy dachshunds and puffy pomeranians waddling alongside hefty rottweilers and dobermans (should that be dobermen?) Berliners seem to have a particular fondness towards the more ungainly German breeds of dogs.

The conference itself was worthwhile. Purely by coincidence, I bumped into two lads from Enterprise Ireland, Brian and Jonathan, and before long there was a sturdy Irish contingent in place. Kevin from Electric Mill, Ben Mosse from Associated Press, Alan O’Rourke from Spoiltchild, and his Polish colleague Bartek “the noob” Czerwinski (or so the t-shirt says). Congrats to Alan and Bartek on the launch of Toddle – haven’t had a chance to test it out yet, but it looks good.

For a short time on Tuesday, Cork had the upper hand, as Tom Raftery and Mark from EMC joined the fray. Tom gave an informative and entertaining keynote talk about “reducing your carbon footprint”, inspired by his experiences in setting up the CIX datacentre in Cork. Widgets and social networks the world over breathed a sigh of relief, as Tom’s talk marked a hiatus in the concerted attempt to beat them to death.

Highlights of the event:

• Photosynth demo – truly incredible. I can’t wait to see this program in 18 months time when it has been developed a bit more. Kudos to Microsoft.
• Simon Willison, the co-creator of Django. I saw this guy at Future of Web Apps, introducing speakers and taking questions (I believe it’s called “the chair”, jut to confuse foreigners). I didn’t realise who he was at the time, but was impressed by his ability to understand some utterly garbled questions from the crowd, even when the speaker and the rest of the audience were baffled. His workshop on Monday was phenomenal. What seemed like a run-of-the-mill “so six months ago” topic (What AJAX can do for you / comparisons between the different JavaScript frameworks / Unobtrusive JavaScript, etc.) was a brilliantly articulated information overload and crash course in everything I wanted to know about this stuff. Not since the Godfather Part II has my attention been held so completely for a 3 hour session.
• Cal Henderson from Yahoo/Flickr about building scalable websites, while everyone else crammed in next door to see the illustrated guide to things things that suck and things that kick ass. At FOWA, I went to a bunch of talks about scaling web apps, so I didn’t expect much from this session, but it was outstanding. Just like Simon, Cal somehow managed to keep going for three hours without so much as a stammer. Disappointed that I missed the start, but I’ll buy his book, and the more detailed book he recommended too, if I can remember the name of it…
• David Recordon‘s OpenID pitch. Why did I go to a talk about OpenID? I have no idea. My interest in the subject has always hovered somewhere between moderate, and approaching zero. What is it about this presentation that appealed to me? Not quite sure there either. I took some notes for the Web 2.0 Ireland blog and gave my reaction there. I also took about 90 seconds while David was talking to turn http://www.jamesgalvin.com/ into my own identity (provided by Verisign). Wish I had gone to David’s other talk – slideshare really does no justice.

I suppose this shows that I’m more interested in the hacker guys who build the technology than the pointy haired bosses who rave about how widgets and wikis can make your turnips grow. As much as I want to be inspired by the marketing and business speakers, I am usually disappointed, leaving with the feeling that I learned nothing new. The guy either spoke basic common sense (“the internet is the future!”) or rehashed old ideas (“I call this: the Ophiuroidea and the Arachnid!”). The exception to this rule was Tim O’Reilly. Even though what he says is hit and miss (lets not mention that code of conduct thing), Tim’s talk at this event was about the only one that made me realise “I never thought of it like that before…”

Disappointments?

I’m such a positive person that I won’t dwell on the downers. I’m not going to diss the venue, because it sounds like they’ve heard it all already (just remember folks: some multi-coloured beanbags and a cappuccino maker can go a long way!)

Honestly, my biggest disappointment was having to miss the Thursday; Stefan Weiss on privacy, Cory Doctorow on copyright wars, and Mark Birbeck‘s talk on “Progressive Browsing” (I’m blown away by Sidewinder). Most of all, I was disappointed to leave behind the array of delicious Middle Eastern restaurant/take-aways. I can tell you, I’ll definitely be trying to vote Turkey into the EU if it means being able to get one of these on Patrick Street.