Joyent

Mi casa es su casa...most of the time. Joyeur commenting 'policy'.

Joyeur has a diverse audience with different sensibilities and opinions, and we tend to give folks a very long rope when leaving comments here on Joyeur.

Just please remember this is our home and we ask that you play nicely once you walk through the door. Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly, and engaged. Bad blog commenters will be deleted, without notice, and possibly banned forever if you catch me in a foul mood. You can disagree with us, or any other commenters in this forum, but respect our space and keep your comments directed to the topic at hand.

To prevent your comment from being deleted:

• Please try to stay on topic as much as possible. We know sometimes you stray. That’s ok. Just try to keep it reeled in as much as possible.
• Relevant links in comments are okay, irrelevant links are not.
• Own your comment. We really don’t like ‘anonymous’ commenters and are more than likely to delete them. Be proud of what you have to say, and if you aren’t – then you should not be saying it. Linking back to your email address or website is even better as it shows me you are willing to stand behind your comment.
• No personal attacks, hate speech, excessive profanity, or other behavior that would be inappropriate in a civil conversation.
• No spam. We don’t like spam.

So don’t make us the bad guys. Just play nicely from the start and don’t track mud on the floor.

50 New Accelerators in One Go

I’m hanging out at the BuildingWebApps RailsQuickStart Seminar class in San Francisco.

Christopher Haupt just lead the class through the process of logging into their Joyent Accelerators for the first time.

This is the first time I have seen so many people log into new Accelerators simultaneously. Since we launched the Free Joyent Facebook Accelerators , there have been times when literally hundreds of new developers created new accounts in a day. But seeing it first hand is fun.

BTW, the next version of this class will be run on April 29-30. This class sold out, so make sure you register early for the next one.

Hello BingoDisk.

Just a quick note to confirm BingoDisk is online and good to go.

Dave will provide a summary post on what happened shortly.

The Systems team is focused on bringing Strongspace back online. Update coming.

Touch a Joyeur: Upcoming Events

CommunityNext (Sunnyvale, CA)
October 5-6, 2007
David Young will be on hand and leading a session on Friday (at 2pm) on ‘Building great businesses, not great datacenters’. It’s a barn burner folks – be there or be square. Register now.

Graphing Social Patterns (San Jose, CA)
October 7-9, 2007
Kristie Wells will be there on Sunday night and Monday, playing in the Open Faced event (Joyent is a sponsor) with David coming in on Tuesday afternoon to lead a panel on Hosting, Hustling, & Hog-tying Apps. Register now.

Boston Ruby Group (Cambridge, MA)
October 9, 2007
Luke Crawford will be giving a reprise of his packed RailsConf Europe presentation at the Boston Ruby Group meeting next Tuesday at the Harvard Law Library, Langdell South classroom. (Directions) The talk is entitled ‘Creating Hybrid Web and Desktop Applications with Rails and Slingshot’. Read more about it, and see you then!

OpenSolaris Summit (Santa Cruz, CA)
October 13-14, 2007
Catch Ben Rockwood and Jason Hoffman at the first ever Summit. It will be small (100 people). It will be informative. It will change your life (for the better). Register now as last time I checked, there were only 11 spaces left!

Web 2.0 Summit (San Francisco, CA)
October 17, 2007
Jason, Ben and Ian Murdock are joining forces to evangelize OpenSolaris and discuss ‘Why Operating Systems Matter’. The event is sold out, so if you have not purchased a ticket yet, we will try to podcast their session or will post their presentation online after the event.

Sun Startup Camp (New York, NY)
October 22-23, 2007
Sun puts on a great event for startups where you can learn from one another and get a chance to share your experiences while expanding your personal networks. It is free to attend, so if you are in the area – register now! David and Jason plan to be there and I expect will be leading a couple of sessions too.

Joyent New York Meetup (New York, NY)
October 23, 2007
David and Jason would like to educate you about the better bourbons in one of their favorite NYC bars. No tacos. But I would imagine a good time to be had anyway.

SNAP Summit (San Francisco, CA)
October 26, 2007
Mark Mayo will be on hand to lead a sessions around scaling Facebook applications where he will highlight the success of Are You Normal?. This Facebook application scaled to 100k users in 2 weeks using Joyent Accelerators.

Taco Tuesday (San Francisco, CA)
CANCELED
Sorry, Jason and Dave are traveling – Kristie is battling the flu bug. We need to cancel this gathering, but will be back on track on November 27th.

The benefits of IMAP and open: iPhone and Joyent Mail

Among the benefits of using open source (Joyent Mail) and open protocols (IMAP) is being able to use IMAP clients such as Outlook, Vista Mail, Thunderbird, Mail.app.

Why is IMAP great? Simply, it allows me to use email on different devices (a laptop, a desktop, a mobile device, a web client) while keeping all the devices in sync.

I’m very impressed by the IMAP client that ships with the Apple iPhone. Because it is a true IMAP client, unlike the behavior using a Blackberry, I’m able to read and respond to mail using the iPhone, file mail into folders, all the things that makes IMAP great. When I get back to using my laptop, IMAP ensures that everything is synched properly.

Now that Joyent Mail is open-sourced and free, we can work to make the workflow even better. For example, Joyent supports IMAP folders (some people think hierarchically), but also supports a rich tagging/keyword infrastructure (not yet supported in IMAP). I’d also like to see more work done to integrate IMAP with CalDAV (group calendaring, Joyent Calendar) with a view towards creating a true competitor to Exchange.

And the Joyent diet contest winner is...

...David Paul Young.

That boy lost 13% of his body weight, only narrowly beating out Pete who lost 12%.

It seems Jason, Shane and I never had a chance – though I would like to note, for the record, that I am down 6% which is not too shabby, especially as I have not seen the inside of a gym in almost two weeks.

We are also not exactly sure how Shane did since he didn’t show up for this morning’s weigh in so we went ahead and made the huge assumption he wasn’t even close, especially as he was just asking for ‘two more weeks’ a couple of days ago. :)

In total, the team lost a combined 77.5 pounds which is not a bad accomplishment. But then, considering we started off weighing a combined 1153.6 pounds, it seems maybe we could have done a little better with five weeks of healthier living.

So while it was hard to part with the $500 this morning, I must say it was money well spent as I got to sit back and watch Dave suck down cottage cheese and water in lieu of his preferred cheeseburgers and Manhattans. I am telling you. It was worth every single penny.

Round II anyone?

Speedo Tip Of The Week

Tip: If you want washboard abs and glutes you can bounce a quarter off of, you might consider working somewhere other than Joyent. :)

—————-

Of course, another route to bulging biceps and calves the size of baseballs is to simply put the Manhattan down and order a chef salad in lieu of the Mixed Grill which is what five of the Joyent staffers have decided to do, starting today.

Photo credit Michah

Dave, Jason, Kristie, Pete, and Shane have all kicked in cold hard cash ($500 each) for the bragging rights of who can lose the biggest percentage of weight in five weeks, with the winner taking the entire pot on June 28th.

And while it is no secret we have our fair share of ‘big boned’ people working at our little slice of heaven here, it was never more clear than at the weigh in yesterday. Once Shane took the bottled water and the roll of duct tape (cheater) out of his pants, we learned our combined weight totaled 1153.6 pounds. Wow. More than a 1/2 of a ton. Five (5) people. Not sure this is something to be proud of, but it surely is a conversation starter…

So, wish us luck – and please excuse us a bit if some of us get a little crabby over the next five weeks. Don’t take it personally, we are just carb deficient. And while some of the other (skinnier) staff are taking side bets to see who will wimp out first – I prefer to stay on the positive side of things. We need to do it. We have to do it. I mean, it would be nice if we could all get in an elevator together someday.

GoreRig(tm)

I got back from Railsconf yesterday and at some point picked up the latest Time magazine. It has Al Gore on the cover. There’s a picture of Mr. Gore working in his office. Did you notice the rig he’s working on? The GoreRig™. What struck me was the number of displays turned on. And the power they must consume. I like Mr. Gore. I was moved when I saw “An Inconvenient Truth”. I have biked more, taken the bus a few times, etc. because of the message of the film. But there’s something ironic about that picture.

Doing some back of the envelope calculations, I figure Mr. Gore is spending nearly $988 per year to power his three 30 inch HD Cinema displays, Power Mac, and the 32” inch (guess) LCD television (he’s not watching). I don’t have a television in my office. Just a 15 inch MacBook Pro, and a 20 inch Cinema Display. My rig costs $196 per year to power. Assuming each set up is on all the time, etc. etc. Like I said, back of the envelope. But that’s nearly an $800 per year difference. Seems significant. Especially if we all worked with the GoreRig™.

Here’s how I calculated:

I live in California where power is expensive. We pay roughly $0.15 per kW hour.

GoreRig™

1. Computer: Mac Pro 170W, ~5.9 hours (to consume a kW), $223 year. Source.
2. Displays (3): 30 inch HD Cinema Display 150W, ~6.6 hours, $598 year. Source.
3. TV: (guess) 32 inch Panasonic LCD 126W, ~7.9 hours, $167 year. Source.

Young Rig

1. Laptop: MacBook Pro 85W (when plugged in), ~11.8 hours, $111 year. Source.
2. Display: 20 inch Cinema Display 65W, ~15.4 hours, $85 year. Source.

Separated at birth?

I think so.

Photo credit Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

The Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network

Just as a technical aside (from all this “website” talk), the Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network (site) has launched and looks great. It’s our preferred way of getting things like ejabberd and tsung installed on our systems.

We contribute the “SunOS” (Solaris) packages to the project, so have fun.