The name of this band is Talking Heads

I was poking around youtube for the Late Night with David Letterman show (the one back on NBC), the episode back around 1983-84, where the entire screen rotated clockwise over the course of the hour.

I've not found a clip yet. But I've been watching other clips, like this one...

Amazing. There was a time as an early 20-something when we *had* to watch Late Night and talk about it the next day. The current Letterman is more mild, but still bits like, "Is this anything" and "Will it float" provide glimpses back to the original show, which at the time seemed like "anything goes".

I wish I could find a clip of that episode with the screen rotating slowly over the hour.

Andy Kaufman and Elayne Boozler

Andy Kaufman and Elayne Boozler...

Boozler I think has gone under appreciated over the years. She keeps up with Kaufman here. Painfully hilarious improv.

"http is like air"

Quote of the day from an IBM exec on the importance they are placing on rest, http, atom being everywhere.

And Then There Were Three... Then Five Again

Mike? He gone.

He formed the band, a little over a year ago, chartered to launch an open source project within a large "vertical". That was four charters, a CIO, one viking, and Joanne ago.

Don't ask. That's the nature of large "verticals" and being a small team, unlike any other, weaving in and out of the established structures. We got pretty good at writing charters on the wiki.

But in between we've done some pretty good work across a couple tables of old Dells running the Ubuntu server. And we're still being asked to be creative, agile, and infectious, which is not often the nature of large "verticals".

This fourth charter could stick. We're back to a full complement of five. And a real budget. And simple tools for restful web services.

Good luck, Mike. You made a lot of good things happen and made them a lot of fun. And took more than one for the team. Now your original charter has come around... nice.

Bird of prey.

Learning Scalable Internet Services

Via Planet Trapexit, and this interesting post from RightScale on the network performance of Amazon EC2 and S3, there is this fascinating page from a UC Santa Barbara course...

"CS290F - Scalable Internet Services"

The project consisted of building a transactional dynamic web site in Ruby on Rails and running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Each site had to hold >100'000 database records that could be searched and explored, have user accounts, and include some form of transaction, such as a shopping cart check-out.

Each project then had to be deployed on multiple servers on EC2 and the groups had to use httperf to demonstrate that they could scale the performance of their site by running a front-end load balancer server, a database server, a memcached server, and up to 10 application servers. All this had to fit into a 10-week quarter, with none of the students knowing either Ruby or Rails at the outset!

More information from the instructor's RightScale blog. The wiki link there is broken, but at least pieces are still around, including the course material.