The Daily Parker

Yesterday I wrote that I'd spend this morning setting up the Inner Drive Website as a continuous-delivery application running in Windows Azure cloud services. Well, that was a bit optimistic. Here's what I did instead:

• Shook my head sadly that the last time I published the site at all was last March. That's a little dis-continuous, I think.
• Upgraded the application to .NET 4.51, the Azure SDK 2.2, Azure Storage 3.0, and the latest Inner Drive Extensible Architecture build.
• Moved the master code repository to my real provider.
• Upgraded an administration feature to a new database schema.
• Created an entirely new copy of the site's database to accommodate this, because other applications are using the old database schema.
• Beat Web deploy into submission to avoid the 30-minute Azure publish time. (Why 30 minutes? Because I have a slow DSL and because the site has about 30 MB of SDK files (register!).
• Corrected an idiotic mistake that prevented people from resetting their forgotten passwords.

The total time for this mishigos: 5 hours, including 6 minutes for the last bullet point.

So I haven't actually converted the repository to Git, let alone set up a CI server or anything like that. And now, I will go walk the dog, and work on this no more.

This is just a note to myself, really. Last weekend I spent an hour setting up continuous deployment of an Azure website using Git.

At work, we're moving towards doing the same thing with Azure cloud services, which has a different set of problems to solve.

I'll have more to say about this once we've done it. Meanwhile, here are a few of the resources we're reading to get started:

• Martin Fowler's paper on continuous integration.
• Microsoft's own overview of continuous delivery on ASP.NET.
• Food Fight's podcast on continuous delivery.
• Jez Humble's and David Fairley's Continuous Delivery
• Stack Overflow posts on unit testing MVC 4 apps and continuous integration with MVC 4.
• Rob Moore on automated testing of Web API and MVC.

This weekend I may move Inner-Drive.com to CI/CD as well. It'll be my Sunday Morning project, possibly.

Andrew Sullivan tops my reading list every day. He and his staff post sometimes 100 items a day on The Daily Dish, and even if I only read a tenth or them, my day is better. He's infuriating, fascinating, informative, conservative, Catholic, gay, mercurial, level. I don't agree with him about a third of the time, but one of his best characteristics is his willingness to listen to arguments and change his mind.

So last February, when he jettisoned a paid gig with The Atlantic to become a professional blogger, I supported him. By "supported" I mean "gave him money." And now I'm up for renewal, about which he says:

What have we created together? Every now and again over the years, I've tried to figure it out. A blog? A magazine? A blogazine? A website? But every year, it changes again, as the new media shift, and as the world turns and as small experiments - like the Window Views or the Reader Threads - become ramparts of the whole thing. Do we, the staffers, write this blog? Sure, we do. But so do you, every day, with emails and testimonies and anecdotes that bring dry news stories to vivid personal life. Do we curate the web? Sure. Every day, we scour the vast Internet for the smart or the funny, the deep and the shallow, the insightful and the abhorrent. But you send us so many links and ideas every day that the creators of the Dish are better understood as a collective of all of us, you and us, correcting, enlightening, harshing and moving each other.

It's journalism, in its original meaning. It's a conversation. It's how I start to get information—but only how I start, because he always posts multiple viewpoints even while making it clear what he believes. And I'm proud to give him money to keep writing.

(By the way, if you want to give me money, just let me know.)

The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama Administration has dumped CGI Federal and hired...oh sweet baby dills, Accenture:

Federal health officials are preparing to sign a 12-month contract worth roughly $90 million, probably early next week, with a different company, Accenture, after concluding that CGI has not been effective enough in fixing the intricate computer system underpinning the federal Web site, HealthCare.gov, the individual said.

Accenture, which is one of the world’s largest consulting firms, has extensive experience with computer systems on the state level, and it built California’s new health insurance exchange. But it has not done substantial work on any federal health-care program.

This contract is worth billions to Accenture, who deserves it about as much as Bashar Assad deserves a Nobel peace prize.

Let me tell you a story about Accenture. A few years ago I worked for one of its subsidiaries. I was on a project I really enjoyed, traveling 100% outside of Chicago. Then I got a new job and gave 30 days' notice so that we would have sufficient time to staff someone else in my role and transfer what I knew to him.

That was Friday. On Monday, when I showed up at the job site, I couldn't log into my accounts on the client's systems. So I went to the client and said, "Hey, I'm having trouble logging in."

He said, "What the f@&! are you doing here?"

It turned out, the Accenture partner on the project had told this guy that I just up and quit, walked off the project, and didn't give any notice. Unfortunately, the Accenture partner did not communicate this fable to me, or to my boss at the subsidiary, so I flew to the project location Sunday night as planned.

I neither know nor care what the client said to the Accenture partner who lied to him and tried to destroy my reputation, but the client assured me it would not be a happy or polite conversation. I never met the Accenture partner personally, which is good, because I might have said something rude as well.

This wasn't the first or last time that Accenture did something Machiavellian at my expense, but it was one of the few that had so many impartial witnesses that I can relay it without fear of contradiction.

So: these are the folks that my President's government has decided to hire.

I'm also chuckling that the contract will begin on March First. Google that phrase and you'll see why it's funny to us in the industry.

Right before Christmas I removed the four dormant servers from the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center (IDTIDC), vowing to complete the job posthaste. Well, haste was Wednesday, so now, post that, I've finally finished.

There are no more servers in my apartment. The only computers running right now are my laptop and the new NAS. (The old switch, hidden under a chair, still has a whirring fan. I may replace it with a smaller, non-fanned switch at some point.)

Here's before:

And here's the after:

Notice that Parker doesn't seem too freaked out by the change, though he did seem uncomfortable while things were actually changing. He's resilient, though.

Fully 18 months ago I started moving all my stuff to Microsoft Azure. Today, the project is completely done. My apartment is oddly quiet, and seems oddly larger. I can get used to this.

Right before Christmas I removed all the long-dormant servers from the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center. Today I'd planned to shut off the last two live devices, my domain controller and my TeraStation network attached storage (NAS) appliance, replacing the first with nothing and the second with a new NAS.

(The NAS is the little black box on the floor to the right; the domain controller is the thin rack-mounted server at the top.)

It turns out, today was a good day to shut down the old NAS. When I logged into its UI, I discovered that one of its disks had failed, cutting its capacity by a third. Fortunately, I configured the device with 4 x 256 GB drives in RAID 5. This meant that when one of the drives failed, the other three kept the data alive just fine, but the array lost 128 GB of space and a whole lot of speed.

The new NAS cost $200 and has 4 TB of space—almost 6 times more than the old, ailing NAS. I'll have a photo of it when I put it in its permanent home next weekend. (Right now there's a server rack in the way, and right now it's busy getting completely loaded.)

For perspective: the TeraStation cost $900 in May 2006. It's run nearly continuously since then, which means three of the drives lasted about 67,000 hours, with an amortized cost of 32c per day.

I'll discuss how much damage to a network killing the domain causes once I'm done cleaning up the debris.

Well, I mean, it's already 2014 in time zones east of UTC+8 (Singapore, Tokyo, Australia), but here in Chicago it's 10:30 in the morning. Which means, here in Chicago, many creative works created before 1 January 1924 are still protected by copyright. Many, like the last 10 stories about Sherlock Holmes:

A US district court in Illinois found itself wading into the details of the fictional detective's imaginary life this week in a copyright ruling on a forthcoming collection of original short stories featuring Holmes characters.

Ten Holmes short stories, however, were published after 1923, the public domain threshold pinpointed by Melville Nimmer in his authoritative Nimmer on Copyright. Details from the last ten stories could still be subject to copyright claims by Conan Doyle's descendants, Judge Rubén Castillo ruled on Monday, in a decision that went unnoticed until Friday.

In protecting the last ten stories, however, Castillo reinforced access to the rest of the Holmes oeuvre. Castillo rejected an argument by the Conan Doyle estate that some aspects of pre-1923 Holmes were not plainly in the public domain because the stories and characters were "continually developed" through the final ten stories, which will not entirely enter the public domain until 2022.

Yes, 2022, thanks to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act that extended corporate ownership of copyrights to 90 or even 120 years in some circumstances. (The last Holmes story is from 1932.)

This is an interesting ruling to me. The court has drawn a clearer distinction between ideas and expression, which I think is the intent of copyright law in the first place.

It's not an earth-shaking ruling, though, and I don't think it changes much. Still, I'll be watching for an appellate ruling on this.

I had a reasonably productive morning cleaning up the Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, including removing all all the decommissioned hardware from the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center. Contrast the before with the during:

Both DSL modems are still there; so is the NAS, the PDC, and the switch. However, the dead UPS (thank you, TrippLite, for creating a UPS whose battery you can't replace), four decommissioned servers (including one in the back you can't really see), and a whole bunch of cables, are now out of my apartment.

I'm still debating whether to break my domain or move it to the cloud, so the domain controller gets a stay of execution for a week or so. Either way, it's gone next weekend.

All the rack servers, along with the rack itself, are free or nearly so. Let me know if you want one.

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The Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center (IDTWDC) will shortly be decommissioned. I first wrote about this in June 2012, when it looked like I could migrate all the apps running on my servers to Azure quickly. (It actually took until March.)

Now, however, I'm done. And now I have about 100 kg of equipment to remove from my apartment.

So: does anyone want some equipment? Here's the inventory:

• Two Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U servers with 1.6 GHz Xeon dual-core processors. One has 4GB of RAM, the other has 2GB. These were my Web and database servers.
• Another Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U server, but with a 1.8 GHz Xeon single-core processor and 4 GB of RAM. This was my Exchange server.
• A Dell PowerEdge 860 1U server with a 1.8 GHz Xeon single-core processor and 2 GB of RAM. This is my PDC.
• All four servers have SCSI PERC RAID controllers.
• A Netgear gigabit switch with 24 ports.
• A 42U steel rack, as pictured, with removable shelf.
• A 17" LCD screen, Dell keyboard, and 4-port KVM switch.
• Assorted network cables, power cables, and APC battery backup units, some of which may need new batteries.

Since I'm essentially giving these things away (except for the rack, for which I'm asking $50), they're conveyed as-is, no liability. And again, the servers will not have disk drives.

If you want these, or know anyone who might, let me know through Inner Drive feedback.