top - 12:59:09 up 6 days, 15:51, 4 users, load average: 1050.04, 753.62, 356. Tasks: 150 total, 24 running, 126 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 12.2%us, 87.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2059260k total, 2049260k used, 10000k free, 2412k buffers Swap: 4208608k total, 523792k used, 3684816k free, 116432k cached
*shakes head in disbelief*
A few weeks ago we got a pointer to the LinkShare developer contest, open to any of their publishers who are using their web services in interesting ways. I wrote up an entry, mailed it in, and didn’t think too much about it for a while. Then a couple of weeks ago we got a message saying that we’re finalists for their Technology Genius Award, and that we should plan on having someone attend the festivities.
Fast forward to this week and I boarded the LimoLiner bus and headed off to New York. A few hours later I was checking into the Sheraton, and not long after that I was boarding another bus for the Plaza Hotel and the Golden Link Awards ceremony. After spending some time in a very dressy crowd, feeling like a fish out of water, I made my way to my seat at a table near the front of the room and after a nice lobster appetizer and steak dinner it was time for the show, hosted by Susie Essman (best known from Curb Your Enthusiasm).
Well into the program, it was time for the Technology Genius Award and the butterflies started going in my stomach. And the award goes to…. StyleFeeder! Went up, shook some hands, made a speech, and sat back down, all in a blur. After the show was over, got on another bus and returned to the hotel with trophy in tow. People kept asking if it was an Oscar, and I kept answering in the affirmative.
The next morning, up bright and early, I got on another bus to head down to Chelsea Piers down by the Hudson River, site of this year’s LinkShare Symposium. The morning was filled with speakers, headlined by James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. After lunch and more presentations, it was networking time, in which I was somewhat out of my element. During that time I ran into Adam Weiss of LinkShare, who had helped me with some technical issues back in the Spring, and he introduced me to Jessica Kingman who is our account manager over there. They both had good suggestions in terms of people who I should meet and talk to, and I made my way around to several of the advertisers booths exchanging cards and collecting conference swag. I even won another contest, taking away a nice 9 bottle wine cellar courtesy of our fellow Bostonians at SmartBargains.com. The conference finished around 6, and I headed back to the hotel with the guys from Buzzillions.com to drop off our bags.
After a long New York style evening of after, after-after, and after-after-after parties and some much needed rest, I boarded the LimoLiner back to Boston, with a shiny trophy nestled in my bag. It was worth the trip, and thanks to LinkShare and all their friendly people for making it a great trip.
We just did a little refresh of our Facebook profile box, and I learned a couple things along the way that would have been nice to know ahead of time:
I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel about cloud computing today in Boston. The panel was part of a conference on the subject hosted by Xconomy in Akamai’s wonderful facilities in Kendall Square. One of the things that jumped out was that there absolutely is no consensus of what cloud computing is, an observation made by Josh Coates, who pointed to the currently fluffy state of the Wikipedia page on the subject.
John Landry did a great job moderating the panel and keeping things lively - he had some particularly good observations in his opening remarks about some of the key forces behind cloud computing (no matter what your definition is), including open source software, cheap hardware and virtualization (plus two more that I can’t remember). However, I think the most important factor that will determine your ability to join any kind cloud computing program is your system architecture. It’s one thing to be able to spin up 100 virtualized Linux boxen on EC2, but it’s quite something else to be able to integrate those dynamically into a running system. If you can’t do that, then you’re at a disadvantage (I made the point that we at StyleFeeder have 100 databases in production and that we can very easily move those around to scale up our data tier). John also talked about the gradual move away from traditional relational databases to key/value stores, which prompted some good discussion.
The conference was full of people who were clearly interested in the subject matter, but it seemed like many of them haven’t yet taken the plunge. Contrast that with another talk that I gave this morning at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute: how many of these students had heard of EC2? Pretty much all of them who are doing software startups. Not surprising. I bet most of them are using virtualized systems of some flavor.
Cloud computing seems to be on everybody’s radar screens these days, even if nobody seems to have a clear idea of what it is.
(Elias and Yoav were also at the cloud computing event, but Elias left early because he’s lame.)
I’ve been absolutely loving JavaRebel, a java agent that reloads modified classes at runtime, thereby obviating the need to start or stop some long running piece of code (say, an app server or some other kind of daemon). It’s not, unfortunately, open source, but it is inexpensive and the time savings so far are considerable. I ran it for three weeks using their free trial version expecting to find some kind of showstopping bug… but that never materialized. Integrating it is really easy… just a simple change to the command line that runs your java code. I’ve only found one caveat that requires any thought at all, which usually has to do with the modification of static fields, but it’s really not a big deal. I reckon that this saves me 15 minutes per day, which… well, it’s quite a lot. And I don’t remember the last time that I found software that could do that for me.
I also had a little incident with a 1.5Gb heap dump yesterday. I wanted to analyze it after one of our app servers coughed it up (right before it crashed hard) to find out what the problem was. I tried jhat, which seemed to require more memory than could possibly fit into my laptop (with 4Gb). I tried Yourkit, which also stalled trying to read this large dump file (actually, Yourkit’s profiler looked pretty cool, so I shall probably revisit that). I even tried firing up jhat on an EC2 box with 15Gb of memory… but that also didn’t work. Finally, I ran across the Eclipse Memory Analyzer. Based on my previous two experiences, I didn’t expect this one to work…. but, holy cow, it did. Within just a few minutes, I had my culprit nailed (big memory leak in XStream 1.2.2) and I was much further along than I was previously. I actually downloaded the standalone version… I usually don’t need memory analyzers very often, so I didn’t want to saddle my regular Eclipse with something new. I highly recommend this tool - it worked like a charm with a very big file and was also very easy to use.
Last night, we had a bit of a (good) surprise by winning an award from MITX in the “Collaboration and social networking” category. Hey, it’s not every day that something like this happens, so we have to savor these moments!
Our friends at HubSpot also won also won (Hey, Dharmesh and Yoav!). I ran into Brian Halligan (CEO of HubSpot) and well-known troublemaker Ed Lyons after the event (Ed then proceeded to lecture Katie Rae of Microsoft about the pitfalls of SharePoint, but let’s just pretend that part didn’t happen).
One thing I’m particularly glad about is that we received our award before the fire alarms went off, which prompted a mass exodus out in front of the hotel over looking the river. Hey, if you have to evacuate your hotel due to a fire threat, that’s a nice place to do it (our previous experience with flames involved a bit more action).
Congrats to the other winners from all of us at StyleFeeder!