Disqus - Latest Comments for joshuamckenty

Re: Introducing Spruce - A More Intuitive Spiff

joshuamckenty — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 13:37:44 -0000

The control-masonry project at 18F is working on pipelining of a number of large YAML files together for compliance efforts. See https://github.com/18F/cont...

I would love a python wrapper to spruce, btw. ;)

Re: Introducing Spruce - A More Intuitive Spiff

joshuamckenty — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 12:45:33 -0000

Can I suggest that this is more than just a BOSH tool, but possibly represents the *best* way to manage large-scale YAML-based configuration?

I'd love to see this adopted in other communities as well.

Re: Cloud Foundry Firehose and Friends

joshuamckenty — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 15:06:41 -0000

Ed, are you still planning on writing a follow-up on ELK integration?

Re: Kiss Your Bash Prompt Goodbye

joshuamckenty — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 15:55:55 -0000

Just that we can only support running in the TOR for Arista to date; many of our customers choose Juniper or Brocade or Cisco switches, and run a separate boot node.

Re: Kiss Your Bash Prompt Goodbye

joshuamckenty — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 01:13:08 -0000

Exactly correct - the Iocane image is hosted off a TFTP server that runs either in the TOR switch, or an external "boot node", and then PXE booted into a ramdisk.

Re: Introducing the OpenStack Activity Board

joshuamckenty — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 14:01:37 -0000

Where is the source code for the activity board?

Re: AWS Outage Proves It’s Better to Own Than Rent

joshuamckenty — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:20:46 -0000

Patrick,

The TCO calculator that we developed at Piston Cloud is based on the Full-Cost-Accounting (FCA) calculator that we developed at NASA. We had to price the cost of the NASA Nebula offering when we hosted applications for the Whitehouse - those prices are a matter of public record.

The calculator takes into account, and is adjusted for:
- Regional power costs
- Regional staffing costs (fully loaded)
- DC footprint expenses (whether owned or co-lo)
- CapEx (with or without depreciation)
- Software licensing

When comparing to other offerings, such as AWS or a VMWare-based private cloud, we typically make ROI calculations based on the most favourable list pricing (although in reality, many of VMWare and Amazon's largest customers don't pay anything close to list price.) We also calculate CapEx based on list pricing - again, this is not necessarily what our customers will pay in volume.

Bandwidth costs are usually estimated based on likely workload - for many prospects, these are already sunk costs in their LAN environments.

As others have pointed out in the past, the biggest factor for the "simple" economics case is load variability - but putting that another way, most large enterprises have enough workload DIVERSITY to achieve the cost efficiencies of being "multi-tenant".

Outside of headcount (which is typically the dominant factor in TCO), there are the per-incident costs, the ability to provision workload-appropriate cloud infrastructure (including SSDs, low-latency networking, or alternate ratios of RAM to CPU), and the bizarre but very-real tax advantages of carrying depreciating assets on your own balance sheet (instead of 'donating' such depreciation to your vendors).

As a final point, I don't believe Gretchen was referring to physical assets in the concept of "home equity" - but rather, the "system inertia" of a large corpus of data. Big Data is the new lock-in.

Re: http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/07/openstack-conference-program-committee-announced/

joshuamckenty — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:24:38 -0000

Where does Ken Pepple and John Treadway work? I believe John is at Unisys, what about Ken?

Re: Exclusive: Rackspace to Acquire Anso Labs

joshuamckenty — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 20:37:19 -0000

Anso Labs has two leaders: Jesse Andrews, and Soo Choi.

Re: The Second OpenStack Design Conference

joshuamckenty — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 09:27:43 -0000

You should update this page with the registration link (from the launchpad site.)

Re: Viral Grid Computing

joshuamckenty — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:55:23 -0000

I've experimented with using the browser as part of a grid computer - see BuyLatr.com for the app, and http://www.cognition.ca/200... for the details. I'm interested (casually) in how this can be expanded beyond extensions, but I still feel that you need something more sticky than a simple web page to capture much value. Maybe a greasemonkey script is the happy medium?

Re: Firefox New Tab + Addons

joshuamckenty — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:51:55 -0000

Jesse,

Our own experiments in "first-run/upgrade" tabs have proven how valuable that opportunity is - for many plugins, it may be the only way they monetize. I would be cautious (from AMO's perspective) about limiting or curtailing that opportunity.

However, I agree that the user experience of a 'multi-extension' event is poor, at best. Maybe we need a separate run-time context for this - which would go along with extensions having some way to detect install, other than the evil preferences hack that we all use.

Re: How to Make $1 on Teh Intertubes

joshuamckenty — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:17:18 -0000

Actually Jon, when I had reached out to you (originally thinking exactly what Jesse suggests, that we had independently worked on the same idea) - you ignored me entirely. Which is what fed my suspicions.

http://blog.archive.jpsykes...

No offense intended - my point was less "who had what idea, when", and more "marketing wins". And you definitely had better marketing.

(In point of fact, ajaxname/whoissocial wasn't MY idea either - it was Jessy Cowan-Sharp's. We worked on it together, along with the rest of the TinyApps crew. )

Re: When to Pause, When to Push

joshuamckenty — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:32:04 -0000

The Pre-pre-meeting was good, the pre-meeting was passable but they wanted everything in a different format, so we pushed off the meeting and we'll have another pre-meeting this week.

I can't believe I wrote that with a straight face... er... key.

Re: Platform Specific CSS for Firefox Extensions

joshuamckenty — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:13:16 -0000

I used to do something similar for window type (not do things on windows without toolbars, etc). You should be setting attribute on the window element itself, then your CSS rules can look like:

window[OS=linux] .mypanel #warning {
display: none;
}

Maybe this ought to be a native property of the window DOM element anyway?

Re: ClikBall: A Slick New Way to Share Links, From the Creator of Userscripts.org

joshuamckenty — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:29:59 -0000

I saw this article linked in my ClikBall stream and almost laughed out loud - way too self-referential. Have you seen articles about digg, on digg?

Re: Shipping with Rails

joshuamckenty — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:55:52 -0000

While I share your passion for commit-hook-triggered deployment, sadly I work at NASA where adoption of git looks to be several years off. And, of course, there's my hate for rails. (Which is sort of like Cal's hate for Django - www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6F....

So I've been using Fabric (www.nongnu.org/fab/), triggered from svn post-commit, to deploy to a staging server. My plan calls for triggering of the automated test suite within the staging environment - but no automatic deployment to production. Instead, the latest test results will control a web-based deployment panel - if the tests pass, you can click the "publish" button. (This button, of course, uses Fabric as well).

Of course, I'm just the architect (and prototypist) for this grand vision - I'm sure Jeff (http://www.blogrium.com) will build something entirely different. And possibly better.

Re: Jesse 3.0

joshuamckenty — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:58:47 -0000

Jesse,

Glad that you finally got me back for the video blogging thing, and shanghi'd me into the blogging Blood Pact (http://egometry.com/bloodpa....

Re: Four-Oh

joshuamckenty — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:36:13 -0000

This is the most sexiest extension EVER. But the jokes are not always SFW, it seems.

Re: 2009 Tips for Big Web Companies

joshuamckenty — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:11:10 -0000

When you talk about Yahoo opening up their search as a web service, I assume you mean BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). And yes, like most other geeks, I too was excited by this when it first came out - excited enough that I actually tried building something on it.

Sadly, they have once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory - it's not the Yahoo search index underneath there. It's Inktomi.

Anyone remember Inktomi?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Re: Tapulous+Cofounder+Mike+Lee+Ejected+From%26nbsp%3BCompany

joshuamckenty — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:05:49 -0000

I worked with Bart at Flock, and with both Bart and Mike at Tapulous (albeit for a very brief time). I left Tapulous early in anticipation of this conflict - which, for the record, I believe has nothing to do with the integrity or ability of any of the parties involved. Clearly, in any fast-moving new market, business models remain as fluid as anything else.

The irony, for me, lies in folks' focus on FriendBook. I worked with Mike on that app (building the backend service), and I believe the reason it was pulled from the AppStore was due to accuracy problems in how we used accelerometer data to match up pairs of phones. This bug is as easily my fault as Mikes, and doesn't really have much to do with the course of Tapulous' history. There ARE, however, a half-dozen OTHER apps in development within Tapulous that more closely align with their stated business goals (Fun over Function), that have yet to see the light of day.

Building a company on top of iPhone development, especially in the "Fun and Games" sector, is a project management challenge; for most of those apps, it becomes counter-productive to assign more than one or two developers to an app. This makes them particularly vulnerable to personnel turnover - perhaps you should ask Bart about the app Phil Crosby was working on when he left.

Oh, you've never heard of Phil? You probably never heard of me, either.

Re: BuyLater: Get Price or Status Change Alerts for Amazon Items

joshuamckenty — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:04:00 -0000

Thanks for featuring my app! A couple of quick notes:

1. I added support for Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk last week, I'm working on BestBuy.com right now - what would folks like to see after that?

2. I've been thinking about writing a plugin for IE - is it worth it? (I've done them before, they're a bit of a pain.)

3. I bought buylatr.com last week, going to move the site over there soon, but I'll have to redo the logo and take out the 'e'.

4. Upfront disclosure - the outbound links have my affiliate code in them, so amazon might (someday) pay me a referral fee. It doesn't cost the users anything, but I like to be upfront about that.

Thanks again,

Joshua McKenty
--
If you have questions, comments, feature requests or bug reports, feel free to email me directly: jmckenty at "gee" mail dot com.

Re: Amazon Wii Twitter Bot

joshuamckenty — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:34:00 -0000

Peter,

I've built a cheap knock-off of WiiMe (jesse knows, already) that you can use for ANY Amazon item - you can find it at http://buylater.cognition.ca.