June 16, 2007
When I was still at TechEd in Orlando last Friday I had the opportunity to see the Space Shuttle lift off. Some of the guys from my office skipped a few sessions on the last day of the conference to head out to the cost for a good view. I didn’t, but I still got to see the show from about 45 miles away.
IT WAS AMAZING. Definitely something burned into my memory for the ages. We saw the craft from shortly after liftoff, through booster separation, and until the then-tiny spec of light disappeared. It was so awesome to actually see the rope of fire coming from the engines.
Here are a couple of pictures courtesy of folks who posted pictures to Flickr that are pretty close to what we saw. Click on each picture to link to the original up at Flickr.
I was probably standing about 50 feet from where this photo was taken, so this is the best example of what we saw during liftoff. This picture was taken after the solid rocket boosters burnt out as the contrail just dies out.
Later in the evening the contrail morphed into an amazing display.
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Atlantis, Space Shuttle, TechEd, travel | 
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Posted by Nathan Novak
June 16, 2007
It looks like Microsoft’s main website (www.microsoft.com) has an availability YTD 2007 of 99.83%. So they’ve been offline for about 9 hours so far in this year, or about 90 minutes a month. I wonder when the outages were and what caused them?
Anyway, Anna Liu has a couple posts (here and here) with some stats what it takes to run www.microsoft.com and how much load is put on the infrastructure. Right now they’re running Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 on 80 servers in two datacenters.
I find this kind of stuff really cool. And yes, I am a geek.
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Microsoft, technology | 
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Posted by Nathan Novak
June 16, 2007
I tend to write long and relatively complicated sentences.
I just violated Scott Adams’ first rule - that wasn’t an interesting opening sentence.
Check out the rest of Scott’s tips, and this could be the day you became a better writer.
Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)
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Scott Adams, writing | 
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Posted by Nathan Novak
June 16, 2007
Omar Shahine wrote a great article entitled Designing for Services Dependencies. If you’re involved in IT at all this is a must read, no matter whether you’re a developer or on the operations side.
If only more developers would understand the dependencies they add into their systems!
Here’s a quick chart that talks about “The Nines”. You’ll hear people talking about wanting to have “five nines” of availability. Good luck with that! 
| Reliability |
Downtime / year |
| 99.999% |
5 min |
| 99.99% |
53 min |
| 99.9% |
9 hours |
| 99.8% |
18 hours |
No Comments » | IT, technology | Permalink
Posted by Nathan Novak
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