Screenwriter's Blues

Monday night:

Los Angeles beckons the teenagers to come to her on buses
Los Angeles loves love

It is 5am, and you are listening to Los Angeles.

"Screewriter's Blues", Soul Coughing

Monday I met up with Donny and Ludmilla for supper...and who's there but Tobi Oetiker! Another chance for geekish hero worship, hurrah!

After thanking him for MRTG and RRDTool, I asked him what had happened to the call centre he had spent all that time debugging. He said that it was kind of in limbo: the troublesome app had been replaced by a web-based app and was slowly being rolled out...but since it didn't do everything the old app did the old one was being kept around and people were reluctant to upgrade. But because the old app was on the way out, no one wanted to spend money tracking down the problems with it. I have to say, I expect more neatly wrapped-up story endings from the people I admire. :-)

Also along were Walter and Kyle, two sysadmins from Boston's TERC. This was handy, because Kyle had lived once in Baltimore and was able to take us to DuClaw's brewpub, which was not too far from the hotel. The sampler included about 10 different beers:

Despite being from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Tobi was not interested in drinking the beer, but appeared to be fascinated by the interest we took in it. Crazy Swiss, what are you gonna do?

Tobi also talked about coming to love JQuery and qooxdoo. Everyone kept asking him to repeat that name, and finally he wrote it down while we guessed how it was spelled. None of us were right, because we'd all been guessing crazy Dutch-German variations.

Kyle and Walter talked about their setup a bit. They're in kind of the same boat I am in that (being at an educational institute) funding is erratic yet the results (websites, curricula, etc) need to be around forever. Thus, they still have an NT4 web server which was only last month migrated to a VM. (Walter dulled the pain by asking the bartender to make him something sweet with rum. The procedure had to be repeated once, but then he was good to go.)

After that, we headed off to the James Joyce pub where OpenDNS was engaged in a COMPLETELY FUTILE attempt to gain my good will by buying the entire bar drinks all night. (Futile, do you hear?)

I didn't get to meet the OpenDNS folks, but that didn't stop Ludmilla from pasting OpenDNS stickers on everyone's shirt. And I did get to talk to another Norwegian sysadmin.

So he works for a Norwegian newspaper, whose website half of Norway starts their morning. (Apparently he went to a talk (previous LISA?) where Facebook was talking about their traffic levels; Facebook's traffic was less than their own and they used 1/5th the number of servers Facebook did.) They were using Squid in front of their webservers, but were looking for something to do better. Commercial/proprietary options didn't measure up. What to do?

Well, like any good Norwegian they decided to bring in a fellow Scandinavian. After determining that Linus Torvalds was not interested (not entirely sure how serious that part was), they asked Poul Henning-Kamp if he was interested; he wasn't. "I'm a kernel guy with 20 years of experience doing kernels," he said; "I'm just not interested in doing application work."

But then he comes back two weeks later and says, now that he's had some time to think about it, he is interested in the idea of a caching app that exploits the underlying OS to the hilt. N months later, Varnish was ready to go.

They roll it out at a big news conference, with The Register and others attending. Boss gives a speech while they watch the graph of request latency scroll across the screen; they throw the switch. The line go down from 300 ms to 30 ms and stays that way.

Also met Dan, who works for the U of Kansas Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets. "I keep wanting to go down to Antarctica, but they keep not sending me there."