It is slightly surreal for me to see somebody posting here with my name and such different perspectives to mine on the topics being discussed. I have to double-take each time I read one of your comments and see the poster name. Greetings from 'the other' mpyne :D
I just feel sorry for the many other M. Pynes in Australia with my name. I jumped on the right GMail address and all the other ones have had to go without (though it doesn't stop their friends/associates from occasionally sending me mail meant for them).
Since we manage our servers with Puppet, we use hiera-gpg to securely store sensitive information in encrypted form in git. Puppet then safely deploys these files to our servers and our application deployment process (Capistrano) symlinks/copies these config files in to the application as part of the deployment process. The sensitive config files themselves are excluded from our application's git repository and developers keep local copies of these files (containing local dev. credentials only) for development purposes.
This looks like a scaled up version of this experiment that has been on youtube for about 5 years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1TMZASCR-I
(only 5 metronomes in that one, but I remember being fascinated when I first saw the effect)
Congratulations to the 80/20 folks, and a great acquisition for Square. I had the pleasure of working with Andrew in the past on a couple of projects and he's both a very talented & productive designer, and a very nice guy.
I watched the Anthony Griffiths movie he referred to a while ago and it is heartbreaking. I'm normally a very reserved person who's partner is convinced my tear ducts dried up from lack of use years ago, but watching Anthony tell his story is like a punch in the guts. I didn't enjoy watching it, but I'm glad I did. It sure puts things in perspective.
Please consider yourself lucky you experienced this through a film. Last week I got to experience it in front of my eyes and afterwards again when telling my 6 y/old little girl her grandmother died. Your own grief is hard, your kid's grief is unbearable.
Heh, perhaps some Joyent staff may have something to contribute to this conversation. They offered a "lifetime" hosting deal with shell access a while ago for a one-off fee, and I have heard that this is becoming a bit of a millstone for them. Certainly my brothers 'lifetime' account with them is not getting a lot of love and feels a bit like it's being left to rot on decrepit hardware.
I wonder would they do it again with the benefit of hindsight, or did it serve their purpose?
Upgrading users is one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenarios. If you do: some users are unhappy about old hardware. If you don't: some users are unhappy about uptime and changing software.
Joyent's CEO was on HN a while back and mentioned that if users on the old FreeBSD boxes want to run on the new illumos boxes, they should send an email to support.
Is there any overlap between the work done in Gizzard and the other popular MySQL forks (Percona, MariaDB, Drizzle) or are each of these solving different (incompatible) problems?
Gizzard is sharding framework that sits on top of, as a separate layer from, MySQL (or any other storage backend, like Redis). It's open sourced right now at https://github.com/twitter/gizzard. Twitter's MySQL fork for now is just a way to get in bug fixes and extra features that are needed but not available upstream.
Yup! And our changes are quite complementary to Gizzard, since it's one of the larger use cases at Twitter for MySQL. More to come in the future to better support big Gizzard systems!
