Technorati colo move

I just posted an update regarding the status of Technorati.com and our colo move.

The short answer is, we've moved 2/3 of the old colo, search and tags are working, but slow, and blog claiming and blog lookups are not happy.

Our priorities are:

1. Stability and performance of the site.


2. Making sure blog claiming works.


3. Continued ping processing and indexing.

We will continue to move servers and network equipment over the next two weeks, but, at this point, we have enough capacity to run almost everything out of the new colo. Getting this far has been a ton of work for the ops team, late nights, long weekends, system pages at all hours of the day and night. I really appreciate their continued hard work and positive attitude. Ops and 7x24x365 duty is not for everyone. Throw a colo move of this magnitude into the mix and it is inspiring to hear them respond, "it's all part of the job".

Thanks guys, and thanks to the core engineering team and product team who continue to help out in any way they can.

Onward.

Technroati Tags: Technorati, TechnoratiNews, ColoMove

#1 on Google for search "dorion" - I win

For the 1st time I am the #1 result for the search "dorion" on Google. Can't tell you how cool this feels.

Google search for "dorion"



Technorati Tags: dorion, SEO

Richard Jalichandra launches a new blog

Richard Jalichandra, AKA the bossman, RJ, the Jali Green Giant (ok, I just made that last one up).

Follow him on Twitter at jalichandra.

Technorati Tags: Jalichandra, Richard Jalichandra.

What's the fastest way to turn an oil tanker?

A tidal wave.

Rather than focus on the laborious task of changing direction, it might very well be better to consider the absurd. If you can make a tidal wave, you can turn a lot of oil tankers. Of course, you need to figure out how not to sink them.

I was at a dinner party tonight with a bunch of people who, perhaps without knowing it, figured out how to make tidal waves. I suspect they did not focus on the specific problem of turning a single oil tanker. In fact, I think Niklas and Janus knew, once they had learned how to make tidal waves, they could do a lot more than turn ships. Thanks for a pleasant and illuminating evening.

Mass of a multi-dimensional cube

Recently I've been thinking a lot about multi-dimensional arrays. Don't ask me why, I can't tell you.

It's quite common to comment on the sparsity in a multi-dimensional array. In data warehousing this can be be quite helpful or the bane of your data management strategies. Keeping track of indexes and pointers can also be a royal pain.

Given a few dimensions, and knowing the expected size of any of the individual key spaces lends itself to the easy calculation of the volume of the multi-dimensional space.

You have two dimensions. Friends and Cities. You have 100 Friends. You are tracking 100 Cities. The possible combination of these keys is 100 x 100 or 10,000 cells in the space. But what if you wanted to estimate how many of your friends had visited each of the cities. This would certainly be much smaller.

So, you might estimate that most of your friends have probably visited 10 of the cities. Thus, there are only 10 x 100 cells filled in. But then, many of them may have visited the same cities, so you want to think about how many of the cities have been visited by any friends. Maybe most of the cities have been visited by 5 of your friends on average. Certainly there is a high likelihood that some of the cities haven't been visited by any of your friends.

Now, imagine that you have 6 or more dimensions. You are actually trying to model a much more complex set of keys and their combinations where not all combinations are likely to happen. Thus, you have lots of sparsity. But what about where you do have combinations?

Well, what's been racing through my mind is a visualization of the clusters, the density of the combinations and, that leads me to the notion of calculating the "mass of the multi-dimensional cube". Ok, it's really a multi-dimensional array as a cube has three dimensions, but data warehousing seems to use the cube concept.

There you have it, nothing conclusive but I thought I would coin my phrase.

Technorati indexes new White House Blog

My colleague Ian Kallen put up an excellent post about the change in Washington and, in particular, the new White House Blog. He was far too humble in stating his contribution to our new crawler architecture that is rolling out this month.

Excellent post, Ian, and incredible job on the new crawler. I know it has been a long time coming.

On a separate note, I just have to comment on the title of the White House Blog. All it says is:

Blog

Go figure.

Technorati Tags: White House Blog, Spidaman, Ian Kallen