Cloud Computing, Life

Stormy passed away Tuesday morning. Over the last month he was slowly deteriorating, and we finally learned he had a form of cancer that couldn't be treated. He was still "functioning", but he was no longer eating, and he didn't have much strength left. So we decided it was best to do the right thing before he experienced a lot of pain, or could no longer stand or walk. This is one of the recent pictures I took of him with my mobile phone a few weeks ago. He was sick, but his natural easy-going self still did shine through. This is how I want to remember him. I could write a book about him and Greyhound behavior, but for now, I just want to recount two days in the time he was with us. The first day we brought Stormy home, the realization of what it meant to have a Greyhound became apparent. Stormy went from the race track, to the Greyhound shelter kennel, to our home. He had never been in a house before! He didn't even understand what it meant to walk up a small s...

This picture about sums it all up. Taken from the top of Cape Kiwanda in Pacific City, Oregon. Nothing more needs to be said.

"Stormy" (retired Greyhound) is middle aged in dog years, but I can see that he is slowing down at little. As a retired Greyhound, he still likes to run and play, but the little things are what I notice. Our main vehicle for carrying the whole family is a SUV, so he has to "jump up" to get in. That part is no problem, but jumping down to get out is several feet. He is a big Greyhound at 85+ pounds, not fat, just tall, but a couple of times recently he seems gimpy after making the jump down from our truck. I think it is too much stress on his front legs and back. Recently, I've been carrying him out of the truck instead of making him jump. He doesn't seem to mind if I put my arms around his chest and lift him out, but I'm a big guy. What I really need is like a short "ramp" that can go from the floor of the truck down to the ground. Then he would just have to hop from the top of the seat to the top of the ramp to get out. I've never seen any...

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...