It’s now 11pm on Wednesday night. Tomorrow morning, at 10am, I will be presenting my Project Plan to execute $6M worth of custom software development over the next 36 months.

That Project Plan doesn’t really exist yet.

It’s been a busy week. LAST night, at 11pm (roughly), I filed a Notice Of Intent, to bid on a DIFFERENT multi-million dollar, multi-year contract. Oh, yesterday was also my oldest daughter’s 6-year-old birthday.

There’s a point, in here, somewhere. We’ll wind our way towards it.

Technically, these days I’m an “Information Worker”. What I think that means, is that I get paid for thinking about things. At least, that’s how I choose to interpret it. My clients probably prefer to think I get paid for the OUTPUT of my thinking – but I’m all too keenly aware of how directly the quality of my output, is related to the quality of my thinking.

I drink a lot of coffee most days. It brings a certain crisp, painful clarity to my thoughts – great for coding, decent for hacking up a schedule, horrible for writing proposals.

Some days I drink beer, partly to fuzz those crisp, certain edges – partly to counteract the effects of the coffee. When I write strategy or policy, I usually combine the two. It produces documents with a certain bizarre, compelling lucidity – and leaves me useless afterwards.

Information workers, such as we are, can be noted for their ability to force their thoughts to follow a linear progression – to march through the gates of logic, as it were. This is, after all, what software is about – making rigidly explicit the implicit desires of the user.

And yet athletes often talk about being “In the Zone” – where every motion seems effortless, and the outcome so certain as to be written in time. Is there a place for such sentiments in the realm of informatica?

I like to think so.

And this belief is what leads me to my daily routine:

1. I never start (or finish) at the same time.
2. I rarely work in the same place. Anywhere with coffee and Wifi is a candidate – on writing days, the WiFi is optional.
3. My roles, while sweeping, are ill-defined – and I prefer it that way. When I’m in the mood to write, I write. When I’m in the mood to code, I code. If the phone calls, I dial it.

Such freedom comes at a price, however – the day I fail to meet a deadline, is the day my freedom ends. (NASA, after all, can only overlook my eccentricities while I’m impeccable). So occasionally, I push. But I don’t push the doing – I push the feeling. If I need to write, I’ll push at feeling a writing mood. If I need to code, I’ll push at feeling the thrill of execution and interpretation.

What about you? Do you believe in multitasking? Do you drink the Kool-Aid, that the A.D.D. we suffered with as children, was actually the early manifestations of a better, more intuitive and transcendent way of thinking?

Or really, are we truly the over-indulged, lazy and self-centered Generation-Me that “Suits” would have us think?

As a self-taught engineer, I tend to notice the glaringly-obvious – perhaps more than many of my well-educated peers. And there’s one obvious lesson in this – if solid state electronics are getting HOT, they’re wasting using a fair amount of power.

In a nuclear reactor somewhere out there, an atom died for the pixels on my screen. Another few drops of precious oil, or a few tons more gasified coal, were spilt for those extra minutes of Microsoft Word (or perhaps “Grand Theft Auto 4″).

Moore’s Law has shown us how the steady change of computing SPEED (doubling), and COST (halving), has reliably powered our advancing Information Age. Yet nothing in Moore’s Law has halted the seemingly inexorable increase in ENERGY requirements, of these most devious of machines.

This is not a problem that we’ve address head on – in our subsidized energy economy, there has been no real motivation to do so. In fact, as our dependency on computing infrastructure has deepened, we’ve made it WORSE. Here’s how it works:

“Hey Jim, did you realize that these hard drives fail as they get older? And really reliable hard drives are WAY more expensive.”

“Wow! That SUCKS! Why don’t we just put TWO hard drives in every computer, and copy all the data to BOTH of them?”

No joke. We’ve also done the same thing with (redundant) power supplies, and since all these extra disks and transformers are putting out more HEAT – we’ve had to install more AIR CONDITIONING, too. Oh, and in the REALLY high-end data centers, we’ve got at least one (sometimes two or more) Diesel Generators running at all times – just in CASE the power goes out.

As is typical of the world’s larger problems, the smartest folks haven’t done better – they’ve just done WORSE… in a more complicated way. Let’s take a look at programmers.

Writing software has changed a lot since we started this business. We’ve drifted from the “low-level” languages, up through the “high-level” languages, to things now rightly called “frameworks” that are too abstracted to be considered a language at all.

But along the way (with all this gratuitous computing power sitting around), we’ve gotten UNBELIEVABLY lazy. Here’s an example – it is, by no means, the only one:

Ruby on Rails. A very popular framework, with some fairly typical problems.

Ruby is not, to start with, an efficient language. This means it doesn’t do a very good job of translating “high-level” code, into “low-level” machine code.

Rails, as a framework, is intended to be really easy to use. Which means it does a LOT of stuff for you – much of which you don’t actually need done, in any given case.

Rails uses a database access pattern called “Active Record”. It’s pretty cool, actually – it encapsulates about 10 layers of abstraction, into a few easy-to-use commands.

Unfortunately, that encapsulation ignores most performance impacts. Also unfortunately, the implementation of that pattern – is not thread-safe.

Here’s where the laziness kicks in – rather than fixing the ActiveRecord implementation, or making ruby more efficient in general, someone wrote Mongrel.

What’s Mongrel? An extra web-serving layer, it simply manages a bunch of ruby instances, and hands http requests back and forth. It’s a workaround for the thread-safety problems we were mentioning above.

In software development, it’s called a “Kludge”. In human society, it’s called a “Rat Race”. (We all drive SUVs, even when we object to them environmentally, because we need to be safe – safe in case someone ELSE driving an SUV crashes INTO us. Are you starting to appreciate the irony?)

“So what,” I can hear you saying, “Buying more hardware is cheaper than fixing a whole language, right?”

Yes, it is. And that’s the problem.

Because there are other, more insidious, global impacts of this wasteful computing philosophy. If you need a wickedly fast CPU and a few gigs of Ram to run a Ruby on Rails server, might as well turf out the old servers, right? Those old servers end up as e-waste in developing nations. (HEADLINE: “Lazy coding kills children in the third world”)…

Now, I’m not espousing a return to the good-ol-days of hand-coded assembler, or even web apps written in pure C. But I’ve managed 10,000 http requests per second on a single server (yes, including DB) – simply by taking the extra day or so to tune the database, install some byte-code cacheing – oh, and not running RoR.

Even if you don’t care about the 12 year old kids dying in Thailand while they bake your discarded motherboard over a camel-dung campfire – at least think about the abuse you’re putting your electrons through.

(Editor’s note: Many thousands of electrons were tortured in the writing of this blog post. And yes, this is deliberately provocative link-bait for my overly-zealous RoR-fanatic friends. Which doesn’t make it any less true.)

Moving on from the success of BuyLatr, I’ve been playing around with other ways to make bargain hunting and online shopping easier. Today I’m launching the beta of “GoogAzon” – an extension for the Flock and Firefox browsers that adds related Amazon search results to the same Google results page.

It starts with an unobtrusive orange bar (yes, I love orange):

And expands into a listing of the top 10 items (complete with Image Preview tooltips):

Planned enhancements include price comparison (showing the lowest prices from Amazon and other sites), support for Yahoo/MSN search results… and whatever else the users ask for. We’re using UserVoice again for feedback, after our great experience on the BuyLatr.com website.

Some of you may note that I’ve stolen the “SpandexFox” brand from myself (previously the name of an expanded ElasticFox extension). I’ve been invited by Amazon to contribute patches to ElasticFox directly, and frankly the name seemed much cooler than a “Dashboard for managing EC2 instances”. This way, it can be all about making your browsing experience… tighter. Oh, and yes – pictures of “Megan Fox” in Spandex are definitely a possibility.

I hadn’t written my first WordPress plugin, so I decided this would be a perfect opportunity. You can see it working below this post (and every other post on the site) – where you will find social bookmarking links for only those sites that we’ve seen in your browser history.

I’m still waiting for my submission to be accepted at WordPress.org, but if you simply cannot wait to get a copy for yourself, leave me a comment and I’ll send you the tarball.

Oh, and a big thank-you to the makers of Sociable – I borrowed liberally from their plugin for this one.

If any of you are interested in collaborating to make this a little less ugly, let me know!

Everyone on the internet uses email.

I’ve played around with http://identitu.de, which takes your Facebook account, and turns it into an OpenID. Which is wickedly cool – if you have a Facebook account.

But what if all you have, is email? Could we take email accounts, and verify them (using IMAP or POP3), and present THAT as your digital identity?

I think we can. Watch this space for my attempt.

It never gets simpler.

I started out with a shared hosting account with ProWebSites.com (long defunct), for almost $30 per month. Traffic and storage were measured in megabytes, those days, and no one even talked much about “up-time”.

When I started working at Ramsbottoms Computers in Nelson, I took over their “web hosting” department – which involved a bunch of local businesses, hosted off of an overbuilt desktop machine sitting on the desk in the back room. The best thing I did for them was get that server rebuilt into a rack-mounted box, and tucked into colocation in the only data-center in town.

Sometime early in 2000 I put my own server together, in the basement of an office building in Iowa. (It’s still there, actually.) Since then it’s been a succession of colo boxes, self-managed hosting… I’ve even run a couple of data centers.

Last week, the hard-drive started failing in one of my ServerBeach servers.
This, really, was the last straw.

I’ve had billing issues. I’ve had trouble-ticket issues. They won’t return phone calls (although they do reply to email – excessively. Usually I get a blank copy of any email I send to them – 10 minutes before I get an actual reply.) Now I’m getting hardware failures – I’m done. I’m leaving.

I decided it was time for EC2 – until I realized that the hosting services built on it where $500 a month minimum, and the alternative seemed to be a weird set of windows command line tools.

I went whining to Jesse Andrews:

4:52:13 PM JustJosh: do you know the gandi people?
4:52:18 PM JustJosh: can I get an invite?
4:52:57 PM jesse: ahh, that is new
4:53:00 PM jesse: have no invites
4:53:03 PM JustJosh: fucl
4:53:15 PM jesse: ec2 might be better for you
4:53:20 PM jesse: since you need more than a $8 slice
4:53:31 PM JustJosh: yeah
4:54:01 PM JustJosh: but I don’t really have time to figure out ec2 instances
4:54:24 PM jesse: install elasticfox
4:54:31 PM jesse: you can have a new slice in minutes
4:54:41 PM JustJosh: looking into it now
5:16:18 PM JustJosh: help
5:16:24 PM JustJosh: what AMI should I start with?
5:16:27 PM JustJosh: there are a PILE of them

Etc, etc.

Let me start out by saying that ElasticFox ROCKS – James Greenfield took an entirely broken experience, and managed to make it only MOSTLY broken.

But there was one absolutely critical function that elasticfox DIDN’T do – save an AMI image of your running instance, back to S3.

So I added it.

There are a lot of caveats, of course – I’m still hacking wildly. No guarantees on anything but Mac. But seriously, it’s a lot better than the alternative.

Go download it, and try it out.

PS – SpandexFox.com is running on EC2.

PPS – EC2 got elastic storage today – SpandexFox will have support SOON, I promise.

(Guest Post by Todd Khozein:)

I am proud to say that I have written my first, yes my first, web app ever in the form of a tool to proliferate the growing and widespread impulsive want-it-NOW shopper’s need to be the first to know in the form of a Twitter Bot that will, indeed, tell you what the latest DVD releases are with a link to buy it NOW! Thanks to Joshua for holding my tender little virgin hacker’s hand through the intricacies of building something that actually works in a world where run-on sentences are acceptable, nay encouraged.

I think I have officially taken a significant step towards geekdom and feel that I should commemorate this occasion of the alpha release by inviting you, the reader, to make this app wildly successful and dedicating the remainder of your waking hours tonight and possibly tomorrow in telling all of your people how sexy this app really is.

By now you’ve all heard about BuyLater, my happy little firefox extension that (thanks to an unexpected LifeHacker.com article) is rapidly climbing towards 1000 users and world domination. Without getting TOO technical, I thought I would share with you how I saved BuyLater from becoming an infrastructure nightmare – one that would have either killed the value of the application (real-time updates), or sucked tons of money and hardware into a technology backwash.

This will be a little controversial, I think – simply because the technique I used, (grid computing), is most often used for less… legitimate… purposes. So much so, that it is almost synonymous with “Bot Nets”.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

When I approached Jesse about WiiMe, and suggested that he ought to generalize it beyond a single product (Wii), and a single interface (Twitter), he told me it would be too hard. The key problem, he pointed out, was keeping a large number of items up-to-date. “Don’t you realize Amazon has a limit on their API?”

Well, I did realize that. But I also had a few ideas.

Step 1 – Do more with Less

Amazon limits API requests to 1 request per second, a totally reasonable limit for most purposes. However, they enforce that limit based on IP address, NOT based on API key. So getting a bunch of extra API keys and round-robining through them was not going to work. (That was a trick I had used on Google’s Search API, some years ago.)

However, most people don’t realize that you can poll for more than one item, per API call. In fact, you can pack 10 items into a single request. Doing this gave me a theoretical maximum of 600 items per minute. When I broke the 300 user mark (somewhere in the first two days), and the total number of items exceeded 600, I had to drop the refresh interval back to 2 minutes. Uh-oh – I could see where this was going.

Sure enough, over the course of the next week, I gradually reduced the update interval to 6 minutes – which meant that BuyLater became essentially useless for tracking Wiis and other scarce items, where the time in-stock is typically 5 minutes or less.

I needed a BUNCH more IP addresses, and quick.

Step 2 – With a little help from my friends…

Rather than start buying additional servers (which I couldn’t afford), or additional IP addresses (which I couldn’t get), I did what any sensible child of the digital age would do – I made it someone else’s problem. I simply added a small service to the BuyLater extension – that fetches a given URL every 60 seconds, and returns the resulting XML data to the BuyLater server. In essence, I distributed the task of polling amazon to the end-users.

Why 60 seconds? Simple math, really. I’ve always wanted to maintain a 60-second refresh interval for the BuyLater service; most users are following 2 unique items, and as a basic assumption, I assume people have their browser open 20% of the time. (Having users in the UK and, hopefully soon, Asia, helps to spread out the polling). Remember, each query to Amazon fetches 10 items – which means, hopefully, that the cluster will be able to maintain my target refresh rate… indefinitely.

Now, obviously I’ll still need to add some more servers at some point, since all this data is still going back to one place. But at least I’ll be adding them for the right reasons.

Step 3 – ???????

There are two questions that people have asked me, so far:

• What do your users think about that?
• What does Amazon think about that?

To the first one, I have no idea. That’s really what this post is about – what DO you think about it? Is it alright for Larry to be fetching data from Amazon, that helps Sally get a deal? Should I have made the whole thing opt-in, or opt-out? From a technical standpoint, BuyLater users were already visiting both Amazon, and the BuyLater site (albeit not once every 60 seconds), and there’s no personal info in any of this data, so what’s the difference?

On to the second question – again, I have no idea. But since there were a couple of @amazon.com email addresses in yesterday’s batch of users, I imagine if they have a problem with it… I’ll hear about it pretty quick.

1. It doesn’t work in Amazon.ca, or Amazon.co.uk
2. Can I control what product condition (Used/New) or Vendor (Amazon/Others) it watches?

While the second one is proving a little difficult, I’m happy to announce that the new version of BuyLater has full support for Canada and the UK! If you haven’t tried it out yet, you should. And if you’re an extension developer yourself, feel free to grab the source code from github.com and have a look.

A big thank you to everyone who sent in a bug report – if you keep ‘em comin, I’ll keep fixin them. Other planned enhancements for the next version include:

1. Product condition and vendors (as mentioned above)
2. Fine-grained notification controls (including direct, non-twitter SMS and IM delivery)
3. Being able to delete your account (probably by providing notification when the plugin is uninstalled)
4. More countries
5. More shopping portals

On that last note, what would you like to see next? EBay? More book sellers? Alienware? What?

They decided to run a story on my happy little bot this morning. I didn’t know about it, came back from lunch – and I had 100 users. (For the last week, that number has been stubbornly stuck at 8).

I poked a little further, and realized that only 20 of those 100 users had twitter accounts. Hmm – I guess I better get email notifications working, eh?

In the five to six minutes that it took me to whip up an email solution, I added another 15 users. Wow. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know where this traffic was coming from – I hadn’t gotten around to adding google analytics code yet.

tail -f /var/log/httpd/buylater-access.log…

Ah. Lifehacker.

Here’s what happened to my user counts (new users per hour, and per day):

1      12      2008-03-28
20     13     2008-03-28
45     14     2008-03-28
57     15     2008-03-28
35     16     2008-03-28
20     17     2008-03-28
20     18     2008-03-28
22     19     2008-03-28
12     20     2008-03-28
12     21     2008-03-28
12     22     2008-03-28
15     23     2008-03-28
8       0     2008-03-29
7       1     2008-03-29
1       2     2008-03-29
2       3     2008-03-29
3       4     2008-03-29

I have to admit the 57-new-user peak was pretty exciting – nothing like a new user every minute to blow your socks off.

I quickly started having problems, of course – as the user count climbed, so too did the item count – which meant I was hammering Amazon’s API almost continuously. They didn’t like that, and started bouncing some of my replies. Luckily, I found this article that explained how to query up to 10 items per API request, which means I’ve been able to maintain an update interval of less than 3 minutes. (I’ll tune that for the most popular / rapidly changing items soon.)

For about an hour, a bug in my email function (the one I whipped up in the first 5 minutes) caused everyone to receive blank emails (sorry about that one). Oh, and I stopped echoing ALL the item updates to the twitter stream after the first 20 minutes or so.

I tried to jump into the comments on lifehacker, the consumerist.com, and a couple of other blog posts, but since I didn’t have a preapproved account, my comments don’t appear to have shown up. Ah well.

After the first bug report got filed by way of Jesse Andrews (who was kind enough to route it back to me), I threw a form up on the front page of the website to collect this priceless feedback. My favorite so far – apparently the beautiful web2.0 autogenerated logo I was using is “worse than nothing.” I wonder what they would think of my Web 2.0 Merit Badge (which I made for the Twitter Color Wars.)

So there isn’t really any summary statement just yet – tomorrow I’ll be able to start combing through the feedback, see how many of the users “stuck”, and go from there.