Cloud Computing, Life

We have a retired racing Greyhound. His dog name is "Stormy", his racing name was "Village Luigi". Even though many Greyhounds are now being adopted, many people still haven't seen them up close. When I have Stormy with me, I get a lot of questions about what it is like to have a Greyhound living in your house. I will attempt to answer some of those questions. Of course there will always be exceptions depending on the individual animal, but these are my experiences. First Contact: Almost all Greyhounds that people have in their private homes came from a racing program. Racing is an industry, and the dogs literally drove it. You don't see ads in the local newspaper saying "Greyhound puppies for sale". Greyhounds are pure breed animals and the breeding process is tightly controlled . The ones that people adopt are animals that have left the active racing program. You might get a dog that raced dozens of times, or you might get a dog that only raced ...

Most of us probably have the same "mental image" of what it means to do mobile testing. We envision a person sitting at their workstation holding a mobile phone in their hands and pecking out the sequence of steps needed to exercise some function of a mobile application or service. On their desk we see a whole bunch of different handsets laid out in a row. When you finish all the test cases on one handset, you set it down, pick up the next handset and repeat. A more advanced variation of this approach is where you "rent time" to access a particular handset in a hosted service model. It is still testing using a real handset, you are just accessing it remotely. Testing with real handsets allows you to verify that what is shown on the LCD of the device "looks cosmetically correct" for each step of the test case. The downside of this approach is that you have limited access to any type of diagnostic information other than what is shown on the LCD of the real h...

All of us have probably heard of the saying "Five Nines" which means 99.999% system availability and is the mythical reliability target often quoted as a goal to achieve when running a computer system or service. There is a larger debate on what the number means, if it is only the "network" or if it should include applications, servers, etc. I'm not going down that debate path today other than to state the obvious that the "more nines" the better. Instead I would like to use the standard availability table to describe one of the hidden realities that currently exists with mobile services. So first let's start with the table: 99.999% is 5 minutes of downtime per year, and 90% is 36.5 days of downtime per year. So now the question is: Would it be acceptable for a production mobile service to only be available 90% of the time? My company has seen examples of this low level of service from even the most well known of companies. One of the most problema...

When you send "HELP" to a sms short code, you are supposed to get back a message telling you what keyword options are available to use. The "HELP" keyword should work on all short codes. The other night while watching "Dancing With The Stars", I tried to send "HELP" to the short code for one of the couples and was expecting to get some generic message back. Instead I got back this: "Thank you for your vote.....normal text charges will apply...." Wait, "HELP" was not a vote, it was a request for information. Zillions of dollars are generated by the promotions, yet it doesn't look like any of that is invested in testing the quality and features of the service. One thing interesting about the current crop of top SMS aggregators is that there isn't any information that a subscriber of their service can use to compare one aggregator to another. Which one is the fastest? Which is the most reliable? There is no benchmark to c...

Mid December I was fortunate enough to get a Seesmic invitation. After logging in, at first I didn't understand what was happening, but after watching what was going on for a while it finally clicked. Seesmic in simplest terms is a way to post video clips like a video blog. Everyone posts their clips one at a time, and they are all listed in a sequential time line. It is "Alpha" so there aren't advanced features like threaded conversations, but that will come. Right now it is one continuous time line of posts and many conversations take place in that time line, in many ways similar to Twitter. In order to sort out the chaos, as a general rule almost everyone participates in whatever is the current set of "topics". When the discussion of the current topic trickles off, the next topic pops up and everyone starts posting on the new topic. There is overlap of several discussions going on at once, and in general there are about 6 different topics that are "c...

The Apple philosophy of showing screen fonts in a way consistent with printing is opposite of the Windows way of displaying screen fonts for readability. This issue has been discussed at length in the past, but because of the recent surge in popularity of Apple laptops and desktops, I wonder if this issue will resurface as more ex-Windows users switch to the Mac and find out that the fonts might look very different to them. I am a "dual mode" user. I have a XP machine I have to use at work, and at home I have a Mac. Since I was a Windows users for a long time before I started using the Mac, my brain is "wired" to think that the Windows way of showing the fonts looks best. My XP machine is a Thinkpad X60. The Thinkpads have always had really great laptop displays that are really clear and easy to read. Because of this, I run Windows with no font smoothing. To me it looks "pixel perfect" and I can stare at the screen all day with absolutely no eye strain. W...