How to censor websites from yourself

Once and awhile I find myself stuck in a very bad habit. I’ll refresh the page of a website constantly, because I love the look, or I want to feel totally ‘up to speed’ on what’s happening in an industry. These are terrible habits, because they make you way less productive, and most sites are just huge distractions with lame out of date material (Slashdot being the best example).

What I do to get around my refreshaholicism is to add the site to my RSS reader (Google Reader) then if I still find myself visiting a news site more than once a day, I’ll add it to my /etc/hosts file so that the DNS doesn’t resolve properly. This lets you continue to view stories via RSS but removes the eye candy – and more importantly makes you stop wasting time. It breaks your habit.

To add a website to your /etc/hosts on a mac or on linux do the following


[509] trevoro 21:42:49 [ hyperion:~ ]
# sudo vi /etc/hosts
Password:


Add the website on the same line that has the 127.0.0.1 entry


##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost hyperion
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost hyperion
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
127.0.0.1 popurls.com www.popurls.com slashdot.org

Save and exit. Now when you try and access slashdot.org, you’ll try hitting your own computer instead. If you want to get complicated you can put up some negative reinforcement page that answers requests for all hosts.

Walmart Computing – Understanding Utility Computing and Economies of Scale

Walmart computing is the new term I’m inventing to describe what happens when the Utility Computing or one aspect of the Cloud computing movement makes it bigtime. The idea is simple enough. As more companies access virtual resources instead of real, physical servers then that will result in a reordering of the infrastructure. That reordering will also imply massive cost changes, like I’ve written about before over at LayerBoom.

Once the big companies that offer these virtual services realize how unimportant seeing the actual server is, they’ll just start buying containers of servers instead, similar to what Microsoft is doing with their new data center in Chicago, and that means that on a per-server basis, you’re going to get a way better price. When you’re buying 1000’s of servers, you just let them fail in place, and replace the whole container after a certain threshold (does anyone have any best-practices for this?)

Big companies have buying power, and when you buy things in such large quantities you can get big discounts. Not only that, but you can also justify customized chipsets when you order a million instead of 10. That’s why I call it Walmart Computing. When you’rea huge company with tons of buying power, you get to set your own price. (Perhaps there are even acquisition possibilities?)

There are a lot of interesting papers and blogs written about this subject. James Hamilton over at Microsoft has an amazing paper entitled ‘Emabarassingly Distributed Cloud Services“, and Rob Snevely of Sun published “Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology” which I have yet to read but have heard great things. What’s most interesting about these papers is that they prefer the modular distributed approach to designing data centers and services, rather than the large bulky approach we use right now. Personally, I’ve been totally converted to that school of thought. James Hamiltons paper has some great numbers but I can summarize it here. For certain services, it’ll cost you about half as much to build the infrastructure in a distributed fashion, rather than a centralized one. The nice thing is, most applications we use online can be “embarassingly distributed”, but that’s perhaps a blog post for another day.

Relax, Everyones Watching

I’m reluctant to write anything remotely soul-revealing and post it online. Everyone’s always supposed to be happy, all the time and nothing bad ever happens because we’re all just so strong, and the rest of the time there’s LiveJournal. I’m not unhappy, but I’m not happy. I’m just around right now. More importantly I just felt like it was time to write something that didn’t make me sound like a robot. What, with such cerebral titles as “SOHO Cloud Cache”, “Rogers DNS Hijacking”, “Supernerd Geek Moment”, and my personal favourite “Data Transparency and Queries” I’m surprised so many people pay attention.

Circumstances being what they are, I haven’t been comfortable for quite some time. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing. But sometimes I feel like a goddamned mini-wheats commercial (How’s that for bad analogies?). The kid in me loves the adventure of pushing the envelope, and trying new things, while the Adult in me just wants a steady paying job and a place I can call home for a few years. But just like any cereal not covered in sugar, the safe side is usually goddamned boring.

Previous experience has taught me well. Anything worth doing won’t be easy, and easy things are rarely worth doing. School, Travel, Adventure, Relationships. The tough things are the ones that resonate and define you and the easy things? Well they were just distractions. Sometimes things pile up and it’s a little overwhelming. When do you get to just chillthefuckout? What’s the line between foolishness and ambition, and when do you chase after something without question? Do you fight for Love or cherish Love lost? It’s important to know people that make you feel truly comfortable, at ease and happy in each others presence. Attempts to draw on previous experience are proving to be futile.

I’m losing someone important to me soon. The fact that it’s on a calendar doesn’t help I don’t think. Perhaps sudden departure would be better. There’s no bad blood, no fight, no real reason other than an unfortunate set of circumstances, which if they didn’t exist would mean a completely different reality. Part of the problem is probably because I ask too many questions, and postulate too many possibilities – ‘What ifs?’

What exercise or elixir shall ease this relentless emotional curiosity?

LayerBoom Survey – You can Help

Hi everyone!

I’m looking for some help answering some questions to help my company LayerBoom and some associated projects determine what companies and individuals really want in their own “Cloud Computing” environment.

I know the Term has been getting worn out, so to summarize, LayerBoom is providing software that helps companies build utility computing environments using existing hardware and network infrastructure. The idea is to provide software as a common platform, then provision resources across many distributed environments, and enable companies and academic environments to rent/share unused resources for extra revenue.

There’s a survey posted up at http://survey.layerboom.com

I’d appreciate your help and time!

-Trevor