Recent content on Jonathan Oliver
Take a look at the last half-dozen or so publicized outages at Amazon. Every single time it was a failure in EBS—including the multi-day EBS outage in April 2011. I still love AWS. If you have an elastic (scaling) workload, it’s awesome. Normally I have a hard time taking a dependency of third-party behavior which facilitates vendor lock-in, but Amazon makes it so incredibly easy because…
There’s a lot of discussion about generics in Go. In fact, it’s one of the most-requested features in the language discussion groups. The language designers aren’t against generics, but they have not found or seen a good proposal that allows generics in the language without significantly complicating the language and implementation. That being said, Go has generics. Think about…
Hacker News is awesome. I browse the site every day because love the continual stream of relevant stories and articles for tech-savvy people. Stories there are sorted by using an algorithm based upon time and community up-votes, among other things. This means that the first page of results is an ever-changing set of compelling and intellectually revealing articles. My phone started going crazy…
Comcast’s Evil Twin We love our movies and our television. After a hard day at work, many Americans like to enjoy some downtime with a good TV show or movie. When technology advanced in the 1980s in the form of video cassette tapes, this gave us a new choice for how and when we consumed media. From this innovation came a natural outgrowth: the video store. Virtually every town in America had…
The .NET Framework was good. Really good. Until it wasn’t. Why did I leave .NET? In short, it constrained our ability to choose (which is a huge deal for me) and turned our focus inward toward the perceived safety of the nest instead of the helping us experience all of the possibilities out there in the big, wide world. [Buckle up: this is post has pratically become a book in length…]
As a development environment and a server environment Windows makes less and less sense. It’s not that I don’t like Windows. It’s actually really good operating system for a lot of people and is getting arguably more secure from attacks. My problem is that it continues to get in my way and limit me in ways that hamper and impede progress. NOTE: I’ve been using various…
Hello, World! I’m still here. It’s been a good, long while since I last posted. So where have I been? And what have I been up to? Well, a lot has changed since my last post, but one thing remains the same: messaging. In fact, messaging is now more ubiquitous in my architecture and designs than it has ever been. I’ll touch on that in a future post. For now, I’m back and…
I have been in the process of migrating off of Windows and the .NET Framework for a little while now. The process is still underway, but is going very smoothly. To understand the need for a platform migration, there are two things to understand: First, why change the development environments and application platform at all? And second, what platform/language should we choose? The first point is…
Since leveraging some of the capabilities of NuGet v1.6, such as “package restore”, our build server has been giving us random fits about various file locks. Sometimes it was just a matter of re-executing the build and sometimes we had to clear the temporary build workspace and then re-execute. In any case, it was very annoying. The error message that we’d get during our build…
Tonight at 6:00 PM at Neumont University(room 300) in Sandy, Utah–the same place where the Utah Code Camp is held. I’ll be giving a presentation on my EventStore project and going into a little bit of detail regarding the advantages of event sourcing–specifically idempotent messaging and rebuilding view models. If you’re in the area, you’re welcome to attend. If not,…
To use event sourcing or not is an interesting question and one that should not be taken lightly. The two main camps in the debate contend on several key points among which include business necessity, architectural gold plating, educational overhead, and tool support. For a moment, let’s consider the argument to use or not use event sourcing in a different light. Let’s take a…
Just in case you missed the announcement, I will be presenting today at 7:00 PM UTC on the EventStore project for the Europe Virtual ALT.NET conference. The event will be recorded and available for later viewing if you can’t make it.
Note to self (and to anyone else who cares): If IIS7 is giving back 404 pages and it’s pointing to the proper directory and configured with Integrated Mode, and the MVC routes appear to be correct, it might be that there are no controllers registered with the container. This one bit me a little bit today–I kept getting 404 pages from IIS and everything appeared to be configured…
I paid my “Windows tithing” recently and did a complete reinstall. Fortunately Windows is now a guest VM inside of a Linux host. A settings change I had made a long time ago but forgot to reapply during my reinstall was for IIS. Whenever I was developing–even locally–I would get “500” errors from IIS which would then display a generic and very unhelpful error…
There have been quite a few posts related to issues installing the VirtualBox Extension Pack for both Windows and Linux hosts.http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=11262&sid;=334fb962995ae00d32bb8988192f701chttp://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7899http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7972http://blogs.oracle.com/wim/2010/12/oracle_vm_virtualbox_40_extens.htmlThe error message given is very cryptic:…