Kenneth's Picnic

Man walks down the street. Takes him ten minutes every morning.

One day, his watch breaks and starts running fast. It takes twice as long, according to the watch. Completing the same distance took twenty minutes. He buys a new watch.

The following week, some wanker at the council moves his tube station 400 yards further away. According to his new watch, the journey again takes twice as long as usual: twenty minutes. The man blames cheap foreign imports, and buys a new watch.

I have a grid in three dimensions. It’s held together with wires, will balls at the joints. Each wire is 10cm long.

The next day, I measure my grid with a ruler. Each wire is now 20cms long. But none of the balls look any further apart. I buy a new ruler.

I throw away my grid and buy a new one. It’s bigger.

A lot bigger.

My grid has balls one light-year apart. Each ball is held in a rigid cubic system as before. My grid extends to infinity in all six directions: up, down, to the left, to the right, in front, and behind. Infinitely.

I know what you’re thinking: “You must have huge balls”. But I don’t like to brag.

I measure the distance along the wires between the balls, not with a ruler, but with light and a stopwatch. A ball sends out light, and I time exactly one year before the light reaches the next ball. That’s one light-year.

All over the grid, it always takes one year for light to reach the next ball.

The next day, a fine summer’s day in 1665, Newton invents gravity. This does not go unnoticed.

Each one of my balls has a large mass, and so a strong gravitational pull. Each ball attracts every other ball around it, not just the nearest, but all of them. It’s quite a shock to my grid, but my grid still hangs together. I rush out and measure my wires again. To my relief, each wire, measured by pulses of light, is exactly one light-year long.

All is well and good, and my grid holds steady. Of course, it does not collapse in on itself, because it extends infinitely in every direction. As each ball pulls those around it, they are equally pulled away by those more distant. Each ball has an equal pull on its left and its right.

For 250-odd years, my grid hangs together, perfectly happily. Occasionally I step outside to admire my balls (steady), by the light of the moon.

In 1915, some bloke called Einstein completes his General Theory of Relativity. In it, he invents several fundamental principles. Mass-energy equivalence, for example, as shown by the famous equation e=mc^2. Woo.
Something else he does is change gravitational theory. Newton is now proved wrong, for gravity is not a force, it is a distortion of space and time caused by masses.

I have to admit, this funny-looking bloke has me scared. I rush out to check on my beautiful, infinite, gleaming grid and see whether it has been affected. And I find some disturbing results.

Near each of my massive balls (by which I mean, my balls with mass), there are some weird effects happening. Close to the surface of each mass, I find that time is running more slowly.

I dig out my trusty stopwatch and wait for the light. A ball emits light, and the light travels more slowly than usual near the ball. Further from the ball it picks up speed as it moves along the wire away from the ball, but then slows again as it gets near the other ball. In total, my stopwatch shows that two years have passed.

Shit. The bastard’s only gone and ruined my grid. I go back inside to sit down and have a calming cup of tea.

Edwin Hubble catches my attention in 1929. He’s spent ten years looking closely at my grid, and he’s found something more peculiar still. He watches as many balls as he can, from the one ball he’s sat on. He’s been looking at the light beams all over my grid and he’s worked out that my grid is expanding.

I’m incredulous. “Where would it expand to?” I ask, “It’s infinite, FFS.” But the arrogant fool is insistent. Look at the evidence, he says.

The distances, as measured by light, between each ball, are getting further apart. Ipso facto, the grid is getting bigger. I have a quick check, and he’s right. A beam of light now takes 3 years to get from one ball to another.

But if I’m honest, those balls look a bit smaller. They’ve taken some of the mass that was hanging between the balls, and they’ve pulled it in. They’ve squeezed themslves together. Effectively, they’ve become bigger and denser masses, I wasn’t expecting that. With tighter, more compact masses, the light travel time is more affected by the gravity, and so it takes longer to get between the balls.

But my grid is still the same size. Or is it?

Did my watch break, or did someone move the tube station?

I was amused by a comment I overheard in the office last week, just after the announcement of the iPad. It went something like this:

People will buy the iPad instead of a MacBook because the iPad has Applications.

My initial reaction was “how daft”. A laptop running MacOSX, or Windows, has access to billions of application, built through the ages. It’s ridiculous to think that there could be more applications available to a souped-up mobile phone.

But it immediately struck me that he had a point. Shareware died in the land of sophisticated web browsers, and the proliferation of viruses and spamware. Thinking back, they were awful. “Proper” software, like Office or Photoshop is priced beyond the realm of individuals.

Really, I can’t believe that we missed it for so long. What people wanted was a safe, reliable, place where they could spend pocket money on little apps that were beautifully built. They found it in the App store. And you know what? I think Apple underestimated it too. Otherwise there would be an App Store for MacBooks.

• So there’s a review process, hated by developers. But equally, there’s no spamware.
• There’s no multi-tasking. But equally, there’s no battery intensive, memory-hogging, background-running daemons.
• Apps costs money. But Apple already has your card details from signing you up to iTunes. They had a micro-payments model, beating Facebook and Paypal (whose customers have been begging for one) by miles. £1.50? That’s only half a pint these days. No problem.

In the land of the laptop, the only competitor (excluding webapps and shareware), is the widgets. We have widgets for weather, clocks, telling the time, calendars, weather forecasts, clocks, and the weather. Handy.

It’s here that I’d like to see the App Store. Why can’t I drop an iPhone app onto my dashboard (or sidebar)?

The iWork for iPad apps are $10 each and will be available at the iTunes App Store.

1) I expect you to manage my files. Maintain a list of my purchased files and let me download them whenever I want. Why am I expected to keep backups? It’s just weird.

2) I expect you to allow me to deauthorize a computer remotely. For example, I’ve just lost my hard disc. How do I deauthorize it? You tell me I’ve got 5 out of my 5 computers authorized. Ok, which ones? Unlike 1975, five is not a big number of computers. How about automatically deauthorizing a computer after 12 months?

3) I expect you to tell me that I can’t play HD films on a non-approved TV BEFORE I buy it. Or, to be honest, never. I’ve never heard of such ridiculous bullshit. I’m not about to go and buy a new TV, just because it doesn’t have your DRM built in.
The discussion here has 8 pages, and the last one says “Apple Support has no idea this problem exists.”
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8472731

4) If I tell you I own an MP3 I expect you to trust me. Allow me to copy and transfer it like any other file.

We like our iPods, we love our iPhones, and when our wives aren’t looking, we might secretly give our MacBooks a cuddle. But no-one likes iTunes. And not because it’s a bad idea. It’s just clunky and unusable.

If I were the EU, I would consider Apple bundling iTunes in the same light as Windows bundling Internet Explorer. Let’s start the fine running at €1m/day and start talking openness.

I’ve been at Digitas for five years. Five years. As I’ve recently learned, that’s about thirty-five dog years. Which is about four years older than I am now.

Here, I’ve worked on websites for Hewlett Packard, the Cannes Film Festival, Persil, Nicquitin, General Motors, Opel, Vauxhall, Sega’s TotalWar, Nakheel and the Palm Jumeirah, Bayer’s Xarelto, MSD’s Propecia, Procter & Gamble, Eukanuba, Digitas of course, and a few sites so cool, I still can’t tell you about them.
That’s not a bad record.
Estimates suggest that on average*, I have been involved with more than seventeen percent of your household purchases , and although I have a three-percent chance of killing you with a car, there’s an extra four percent chance of saving your life after an operation.

Somehow I’ve been sent to Brussels, Warsaw, Geneva, Minsk, Basle, Kiev, Zurich, Paris and Bangalore.

Ninety-two of my facebook friends, I met through Digitas. That’s sixty-one percent.

Since I joined Digitas, I’ve started and finished a three-year degree in Physical Science, with a two:one. I’ve got married, and twenty-five percent of my guests were from Digitas. I’ve run twenty-six point one miles in the London marathon, and they helped me raise three-hundred pounds for the NSPCC.

I loved working here.
I wish them all a great 2010.

Kenneth

* some estimates may be approximate to the point of complete fiction.

Ok, so the headline of this article is probably a little OTT. But I’ve just had one of the most annoying, and expensive, experiences working with Amazon’s hosting.

Actually, it’s really only annoying because it was expensive.

What happened was this: I moved a sizeable set of sites over from my previous standard hosting to the Amazon EC2 set. It was LAMP based, but I’m not going to tell you which site, because it was built a long time ago and hasn’t had enough TLC recently.

The site was suffering from some pretty terrible response times. Using a top to find the slow process seemed to give me no clues at all, and yet the cloudwatch service was showing consistently high CPU usage.

The site is database driven, and that work is quite intensive. Each page on the site executes several queries, and there is a chatroom which drums the database on a regular basis. But the site doesn’t do much else. And so my culprit was obvious: the database.

I’d read about Amazon RDS and it seemed the perfect solution. There’s no denying that my database is relational, it’s almost the textbook relational example, and so RDS beat Simple DB any day of the week. It was cool to have my own EC2 instance running MySQL, but really, Amazon can be a bit complicated with backups and storage. The thought of carefree backups, and a consistent long-running database as I toggled between application servers definitely appealed. I have a new site to roll out? Easy. I run a new server in parallel, and switch the IP across when it’s tested. Dream scenario, right?

And so it seemed. The cost seemed a little high, but I had high hopes for the performance, and it was still less than our (3 year old) prior hosting. I followed the Amazon online setup guide together with someone’s step-by-step tutorial (since sadly the console did not support RDS yet).

Except that it wasn’t much faster. “Shit”, I thought. That was a waste of time. But that’s ok – I now can toggle between different instances of application server, and figure out the problem there without worrying about the database at all. The site was fast enough to leave it running for a week to “bed in”.

One week later, a spring in my step, time to get working on the application. This is working out well. Database still intact, Cloudwatch says CPU load still high, so the blame must be with the PHP not the MySQL. Ok, fair enough. And a quick check of the running costs, gives me $400, not bad for the …

No, wait, go back to that bit again.

Four hundred dollars? A WEEK?

WHAT. THE. DUCK.

That’s over twenty grand a year. Sucre.
My fingers have rarely moved as fast as they did to get that server switched back.

So what happened?
It turned out that I’d been charged for the bandwidth between the app server and the database. And in that week, I’d racked up a terabyte of data. That sounds like a lot, but like I say, this was a DB-heavy site. And actually, you never really look at the bandwidth to your DB do you? It’s not what I would consider “external bandwidth”, which is what Amazon charge for.

After a very stressful couple of hours, I had a medium size instance (high cpu) running, with a clean Ubuntu install and Apache PHP MySQL on top. Performance was back to proper levels (so the PHP just needed another processor), and the costs were back down.

I sent a message to Amazon asking what had happened, and whether I could have my money back. Answer: not on your nelly. You used the bandwidth, you pay the price.

I protest. “Come on”, I say, “I’m not sure what happened here”. I’m a loyal customer and they could at least be generous on this. A bit of faith in the newly-subscribed. Better than that, I paid up and reserved an instance to demostrate my commitment. Just drop the week’s charges, I asked.

My question was passed to management. Not on your nelly, they said. You used the bandwidth, you pay the price. Your bandwidth was cross continent, they say.

AHHHHHHHHH.

Now I get it. My servers were naturally in Europe. Obviously I’d omitted the step of putting my RDS instance in Europe too, and it had defaulted to the US. Bollocks. I moved 1TB of data across the ocean because of a silly oversight.

Of course, it would’ve been nice if the setup commands had mentioned this.
It would’ve been nice if they had added RDS to the console, so I could see this (seriously, they can develop a distributed database system, but haven’t got the time for a bit of HTML?)
It would’ve been much better if they’d alerted me as I switched from a $1,000 setup to a $20,000 setup.
Not much to ask.

And really, it’s not much to ask for my $400 back. Ok, so I got it wrong. But where’s the love?