Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California at a site that used belong to Sun Microsystems. A large sign with Facebook's distinctive "like" symbol—a hand making the thumbs-up gesture—marks the entrance. When I arrived at the campus recently, a small knot of teenagers had congregated, snapping cell phone photos of one another in front of the sign.

Thanks to the film The Social Network, millions of people know the crazy story of Facebook's rise from dorm room project to second largest website in the world. But few know the equally intriguing story about the engine humming beneath the social network's hood: the sophisticated technical infrastructure that delivers an interactive Web experience to hundreds of millions of users every day.







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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers.

MAAS supports installing an Ubuntu Server image on computers over the network. It relies on PXE for that purpose, much like similar open source provisioning tools such as Cobbler. A simple Web-based administrative interface is provided for managing nodes. MAAS is implemented with Python and Django and is distributed as open source under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

MAAS is intended to complement Juju, Canonical's service orchestration framework. Juju works a little bit like a package management system: administrators use Juju recipes (which are called Charms) to automatically deploy and configure various server software stacks. Juju integrates with MAAS, making it possible to centrally deploy software to the nodes in a MAAS cluster.

Using MAAS and Juju together can significantly reduce the difficulty of bringing up an Ubuntu-based private cloud. A system administrator can use MAAS to provision nodes and then use Juju to populate those nodes with complete software configurations for things like OpenStack or Hadoop.

Canonical is best known for its desktop Linux product, but the company has worked hard to convince potential adopters that Ubuntu is also a credible choice for servers. The availability of updates at no cost has helped to drive Ubuntu server growth over the past few years, but it still faces an uphill battle competing with Red Hat's highly successful Linux distribution. Canonical's strong focus on the cloud is one way that the company is working to differentiate Ubuntu as a Linux server platform.

For more details about MAAS, you can refer to Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post about the new project. The source code is available from Canonical's Launchpad project hosting service. MAAS is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 12.04, an upcoming long-term support release that will arrive at the end of the month.





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A decade ago, Linux developer Red Hat faced a decision that would make or break the company: whether to stop producing the very product that gave Red Hat its name. The company was built on Red Hat Linux, but when Paul Cormier—now the head of Red Hat's technologies and products group—joined the company as vice president of engineering in 2001, he knew Red Hat's devotion to open source alone couldn't create a business model capable of standing up to the Microsofts and Oracles of the world. He pushed for drastic action.

To move from small player to big-time enterprise software competitor, Cormier argued that Red Hat had to ditch the freely downloadable Red Hat Linux. Instead, it should replace Red Hat Linux with a more robust enterprise software package that maintained the principles of free (as in freedom) software without actually being free (as in price) to customers.







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Last week, the Iranian government apparently started a new censorship program that blocks encrypted Internet traffic. Even Iranians who had taken steps to evade government firewalls were being stymied—and the immediate impact can be seen in usage of the Tor network.

Tor anonymizes Internet activity with client software that routs traffic through the Tor network, a worldwide network of relays and bridges set up by volunteers. Iran is second only to the US in Tor usage, with roughly 50,000 Iranians anonymizing their Internet traffic each day by routing it through the Tor network. Yet between Feb. 8 and Feb. 9, connections dropped from about 50,000 to fewer than 20,000, and plummeted to nearly zero by Friday, Feb. 10.







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Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique to take advantage of the "fused architecture" emerging on multicore CPUs that puts central processing units and graphics processing units on the same chip. The technology, called CPU-assisted general purpose computation on graphics processor units (CPU-assisted GPGPU) uses software compiled to leverage the architecture to allow the CPU and GPU to collaborate on computing tasks, boosting processor performance on average by more than 20 percent in simulations.






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ActiveState has released a major new version of the Komodo integrated development environment (IDE). The update, which is called Komodo 7, introduces several useful new features and support for additional programming languages.

Komodo is a high-end commercial development tool for programmers who work with scripting languages such as Python and Ruby. It's especially well-suited for developing large-scale Web applications. It supports code completion and breakpoint debugging for a relatively broad number of programming languages.







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As part of Google's continuing quest to dole out Web pages ever more quickly, the search giant has proposed a number of changes to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the ubiquitous Internet protocol used to reliably deliver HTTP and HTTPS data (and much more besides) over the 'net.

Google's focus is on reducing latency between client machines and servers, and in particular, reducing the number of round trips (either client to server and back to client, or vice versa) required. When data is sent over a TCP connection, its receipt must be acknowledged by the receiving end. The sending end can only send a certain number of packets before it must wait for an acknowledgement. The time taken to receive an acknowledged is governed by the round-trip time (RTT). With high bandwidth, high latency connections, clients and servers can end up spending most of their time waiting for acknowledgements, rather than sending packets.







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JavaScript has come a long way since its inception in the 1990s. The odd language, which was once confined to simplistic tasks like form validation, has expanded beyond the browser and now powers all kinds of applications from mobile devices to server rooms.

The evolution of the language standard and the introduction of heavily optimized implementations have made JavaScript a respectable choice for building serious applications. Although the language is still burdened by some idiosyncrasies, its intrinsic flexibility is proving to be valuable.







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Experimental support for WebRTC has landed in the Chrome developer channel. The feature is available for testing when users launch the browser with the --enable-media-stream flag. We did some hands-on testing and used some of the new JavaScript APIs to make an HTML5 photo booth.

WebRTC is a proposed set of Web standards for real-time communication. It is intended to eventually enable native standards-based audio and video conferencing in Web applications. It is based on technology that Google obtained in its 2010 acquisition of Global IP Solutions and subsequently released under a permissive open source software license.






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From iOS and Android to BlackBerry and Windows Phone, the app store model has become the main way mobile device users find, download, and update their software. And with employees increasingly begging for access to corporate resources from smartphones and tablets, IT departments are starting to wonder whether they should jump into the app store business themselves.

"The public app store is kind of the wild, wild West," Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond tells Ars. Private app stores, hosted for the employees of a single business, are receiving “a lot of interest from the clients I talk to. Folks realize that self-provisioning is the long-term trend."







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First of all, I should announce my editorship (starting
today)
of another blog, the
Android Developers Blog.
But at Google there are stories behind the stories.

Android Dev Blog
It’s been around since November 2007, way before I’d ever heard of Android.
In recent times it’s been used
somewhat like a press-release channel; each of the pieces heavily group-edited
into just-the-facts mode. Perfectly OK (if a bit tedious) when that’s
the kind of channel you want.

It seemed obvious to me that there was scope for a real bloggy kind of
blog, since there are a ton of interesting stories inside Android crying to be
told. So I said that a few times and I suspect irritated a few people, and
the upshot was I got the whole thing dropped into my lap.

Let me drive a stake in the ground: If you want to
know the actual technical substance of what’s being built here, or to read
inside-Android stories,
that blog is the place
to come, or rather
subscribe
to if you really care.

Blogging at Google
It’s hard, way harder than I’d realized. There’s this thing in the company
culture where everyone is very free with information, internally, and
expected to be very close-mouthed, externally. Within a few days of arriving,
my brain was bulging with more Really Big Secrets than I’d picked up in years
at Sun.

In fact, I now know how much storage we’re dedicating to support... hold
on, even mentioning what it’s being used for would probably get my ass
appropriately fired. And so on. There are a million stories around here and
a person like me who can’t not write is dying to tell them; but it’s really
hard to keep track of which ones are fair game.

To make matters worse, Google is interesting. Since I’ve come to
work here, my blog readership and Twitter follower-count have both ballooned,
and I’ve noticed that more or less anything we say, whether or not I think it
matters, is news.

Twitter follower count; I started at Google on March
15th. Statistics courtesy of
twittercounter.com.

On top of which there are many out there who are kind of scared
and nervous about Google, for a variety of reasons some of which are
perfectly reasonable. And there are those, including some who write for
large audiences, looking to pounce with glee on any whiff of evil or
hypocrisy. Fair enough, I suppose, since Google presents what we in the trade
call a Large Attack Surface.

Which means that Google in general and the Android project in particular
are careful, verging on paranoid, about what gets said in public.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve argued repeatedly that there are a lot of people
who would like to like us, and that there are lot of stories here
that would be good to tell; that the rewards of open-ness greatly exceed the
risks. There are people here, including some very important ones, who
are unconvinced. But they’re still giving this a chance. Let’s hope I’m
right.

I liked this quote from Hugh MacLeod the other day:

Idea-Driven People come up with Ideas (and Results), more often than Results-Driven People come up with Results (and Ideas).

His quote brings up two related fallacies.

People who are good at one thing must be bad at something else.
People who specialize in something must be good at it.

Neither of these is necessarily true. It’s wrong to assume that because someone is good at coming up with ideas, they must be bad at implementing them. It’s also wrong to assume that someone produces results just because they call themselves results-driven.

The first fallacy comes up all the time in hiring. Job seekers may leave credentials off their résumé to keep employers from assuming that strength in one area implies weakness in another area. When I was looking for my first programming job, some companies assumed I must be a bad programmer because I had a PhD in math. One recruiter suggested I take my degree off my résumé. I didn’t do that, and fortunately I found a job with a company that needed a programmer who could do signal processing.

Andrew Gelman addressed the second fallacy in what he calls the Pinch-Hitter Syndrome:

People whose job it is to do just one thing are not always so good at that one thing.

As he explains here,

The pinch-hitter is the guy who sits on the bench and then comes up to bat, often in a key moment of a close game. When I was a kid, I always thought that pinch hitters must be the best sluggers in baseball, because all they do (well, almost all) is hit. But … pinch hitters are generally not the best hitters.

This makes sense in light of the economic principle of comparative advantage. You shouldn’t necessarily do something just because you’re good at it. You might be able to do something else more valuable. When people in some area don’t do their job particularly well, it may be because those who can to the job better have moved on to something else.

Related post:

Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty