ChisBlog

Change the Time Zone in the Cloud

We recently ran into an issue with one of our virtual servers running up in the Rackspace Cloud . Some legacy application code required the time zone on our server to be set to EST but we could not get the UTC offset to stick. We tried all the usual suspects on our Ubuntu 8.04 LTS instance:

• changed /etc/default/rcS
• ran /usr/bin/tzselect

….nothing seemed to worked. My sysadmin and I were at a loss, but we finally stumbled across a site with some good advice about setting a time zone in the cloud:

As a virtual server hosted using Xen virtualization technology, such as those offered by RackSpace Cloud Server offer, system time will get reset by Xen to match the physical machine’s clock whenever the virtual server is restarted.

This time-reset behavior can be modified if you can change the Xen configuration. However as a user of the cloud computing service, you most likely do not have such access.

You can however do the following to set your system to the time you want. Changing the time zone of your system will set your system time to the correct time of that time zone, given that your virtualization provider gives your server a correct UTC time.

Here’s how we finally made the offset stick on our configuration:

…bonus points…no reboot required

What the heck is NoSQL?? => my takeaways from NoSQL East 2009

This past week I was lucky enough to attend NoSQL East 2009 which was not only the east coast’s first major NoSQL conference but one of the first conferences for the movement as a whole.  Thanks for everyone that put NoSQL East together, in particular Brad Anderson and Chris Williams.  There are a lot of in-depth conference reports out there, written by people way smarter than me, so I’ve decided to do a high level overview of what the heck “NoSQL” even means.  Much of the credit/inspiration for this post goes to Emil Eifrem (creator of Neo4j) who gave a great talk about Neo4j and the NoSQL movement in general.

Most people assume NoSQL literally means “no more sql” or “replace all relational database with some shiny new non-relational toy”.  But the reality is the movement is less of an coup and more of a new-world colonization.  “Not Only SQL” (@emileeifrem), and “NoSQL is not !SQL” (@rklophaus) were two of my favorite movement clarifications batted around at the conference.  The basic gist here is a NoSQL approach/architecture should compliment, not replace, a traditional relational database architecture.

Emile Eifrem broke the NoSQL movement into the following emerging categories:

• Key/Value Stores
  • inspiration => based on the theories laid forth in Amazon’s Dynamo paper
  • data model => global collection of key/value pairs
  • projects => Riak, Dynomite, Voldemort, Tokyo Cabinet, Redis
• BigTable Clones
  • inspiration => based on Google’s BigTable whitepaper
  • data model => big table column families (think huge spreadsheets)
  • projects => HBase, Hypertable, Cassandra
• Document Databases
  • inspiration => chiefly inspired by Lotus Notes (and it’s kick ass replication engine)
  • data model => a collection of key/value collections
  • projects => CouchDB, MongoDB
• Graph Databases
  • inspiration => based on the theories from Euler’s Graph Theory
  • data model => nodes, relationships and key/values on both
  • projects => Neo4j

I’m sure I left out someone’s favorite NoSQL project…mostly because there are so damn many of them out there!  The running joke throughout the whole conference was 2009’s trend of rolling your own NoSQL product was like the last few years trend of rolling your own web framework.

The final thought I want to leave with everyone is this: a lot of the NoSQL data stores not only scale way UP…but many can also scale way DOWN.  Neo4j is a small 500k jar which runs mostly in memory…one of CouchDB’s use cases is running on mobile devices (bonus peer-to-peer replication).  To me this is f-ing awesome…the same software leveraged in large-scale internet companies like Digg, Twitter and Facebook has a home in a small interactive agency like MaxMedia.

New team…new challenges…Max excitement

I’m excited to announce I will be joining local interactive agency MaxMedia as a Principal Architect.  In addition to more traditional web, RIA and kiosk development MaxMedia is involved with some very cutting edge work surrounding multi-touch displays, Microsoft Surface and XAML/WPF.  I’ll be sharing my agile development love and helping MaxMedia build out their back-end team and processes.

MaxMedia’s ‘09 demo reel gives just a small glimpse into some of this agency’s amazing work:

I have enjoyed my time at the Fox Audience Network and will miss the amazing people I’ve met over the past year and a half.  It has been exciting to be part of the Fox Audience Network’s rise to a 6th place comScore ranking.  I have also learned a lot about what it takes to build a scalable system that can crunch huge amounts of data and serve billions of ads a day.

Goodbye IBM…hello FIM

I recently accepted a position at Fox Interactive Media (FIM) as a Senior Software Engineer in the newly formed FIM Audience Network business unit.  So what is the FIM Audience Network?…the recent press release describes things best :

The new unit will combine FIM’s advertising technology, ad operations and performance sales efforts into one unit. The team will be responsible for the sales of performance-based ads for both FIM and third-party sites.

Favorite upside…I’m getting a new MacBook Pro (thanks Boss).  Only downside…I have to temporarily turn my back on my Ruby brethren as I will be developing in Java again :)  Don’t worry though…it’s still Agile development 4 life baby!

It has been a privilege to work for IBM during the past eight years.  I will always be grateful for the valuable experience, mentoring and practical lessons that I have gained while working there.  I am definitely looking forward to this new challenge and to starting a new phase of my career.  Between my career change and the upcoming arrival of The Chislets my life has just gotten a whole lot more interesting!