The Left Side of Normal Airplanes, The Internet, and Everything Else

As anyone who works with ColdFusion knows, it's built on top of Java.  It also provides ways to easily leverage pretty much anything Java is capable of.  I saw a post from Todd Sharp about using the "faint" Java project to enable facial recognition in ColdFusion.  You would think that something like this would be fairly complex, but all of the hard work has been wrapped up in the faint engine.  With ColdFusion, a few lines of code loads the Java object, sets up a Java thumbnail object, then points the faint engine at an image an asks it to find the faces in the image.  Easy!  Java passes the results back to ColdFusion which then writes the images to disk.  This could be great for helping users to crop uploaded avatar images or create a facial thumbnail for dating sites.  Of course the amazing part about this isn't the facial recognition, but the ability for ColdFusion to simply pick up any Java class and use it without any fuss.

Back in April, we took on the responsibility for raising two awesome ducks that were only a week old.  They started out in a small plastic swimming pool with a bed of wood chips huddled under a heat lamp.  The wood chips quickly gave way to straw, and they began to grow very quickly.  Within a couple of weeks, we set up a portion of the back yard as their pen and built them a shelter to live in.  Within a month they were nearly fully grown and feathers were replacing their cute yellow fuzz.  After a couple of months, we took them out into the lake and let them swim around.  They've made several supervised trips into the lake, but they prefer to hang out in their pen instead.  They're always in a hurry to waddle back up the hill to get back to their safety zone.

Overall, the ducks have been awesome.  They're gorgeous, incredible animals, and raising them and having them with us has been an amazing experience.  Unfortunately, as they mature, the environment we can provide just isn't suitable for such incredible animals.  Ducks really need water to be happy.  We set up a kiddie pool for them, but that really just doesn't do them justice.  We considered leaving the fence open so they could commute to the lake, but there was too much danger of them wandering off and getting hit by a car or leaving the lake in someone else's yard and doing damage, not to mention the neighborhood cats, dogs, and other wildlife that could put them in danger.  It just wasn't fair to keep them penned up in such a small area without ready access to a pond or some other water to swim in.  The noise was also beginning to become a problem for us (and probably our neighbors as well) with fairly loud quacking from Peaches fairly early in the morning every day.

So, it was with a heavy heart that we decided that change was at hand.  Jeanette wanted to put them on a plate with a garnish, but I decided that we should try to find them a loving home before we resorted to taking their lives in the name of dinner.  I made a few calls to farms in the area with little success (one at least promised to call me back but as yet has not).  Craigslist has usually been a good way to find things or sell unwanted stuff, so I posted a note in the "farm and garden" category that we were seeking a loving, suitable home for two mature Pekin ducks.  As usual, craigslist did not disappoint.  I had a couple dozen e-mails from people who were interested, though mostly from people who had no experience with ducks.

Then, a message came in from a lady in Arcadia that looked promising.  I gave her a call and we spoke for a few minutes.  She lives on 40 acres of rural land and takes care of a wide variety of animals including horses, cows, llamas, goats, geese, and ducks.  She said they had six Pekin ducks, one of another breed, and two geese.  A small stream runs through their property and they've created a pond off of it with a large pen where the ducks live (right next to the pen where the goats and the llama reside).  It sounded perfect and we made arrangements to make a visit and drop them off if we were satisfied with the location.  We packed them and their remaining food and straw into the car and made the trek out to northern Arcadia, nearly an hour away.  When we arrived (in the middle of nowhere), I was happy with what I saw.  They did, indeed, have a very nice area sectioned off for the ducks and geese with an adjacent pond for them to swim in.  The ducks she had were similar in age and looked very well fed and cared for.  We let them out into the pen and they seemed disoriented for a few minutes.  The other ducks began checking them out and sizing them up.  Since they are new to the flock, there will of course be some jockying for position to see where they will fit in.  After a few days, they will be full members and have lots of new friends to huddle up with.

The new location isn't perfect, but it's far more ideal than we would be able to provide for them.  The pen is a lot larger and she said they have plans to make it even bigger.  The pond is adequate for all of them to swim in, and occasionally small fish come up the stream that they can chase after.  Overall, our experience with the ducks has been amazing and I wish we were in a better position to better provide for them ourselves, but it wouldn't be fair to them or our neighbors to keep them here.  I do not know if we will see them again, but she did say that if we're in the area we're welcome to drop by and visit if we like.  I'm very happy that we were able to find what I hope will be a much better life for them.  Quack quack!

One of the things that makes the Internet so amazing is how well it works.  Sure, it has its moments where things stop working, but these events are usually very isolated.  Mother nature might take out some critical fiber optic cable and cut off access to a particular country or region, or one provider might suffer a major outage that impacts tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of customers, but I can't think of a situation in which the entire Internet broke down.  It's world-wide, decentralized, and not under any one organization's control (you could make an argument for ICANN, but even their authority only goes so far).  The best thing about the way the Internet works is how it is designed.  A commonly quoted line says that it is designed to route around failure (or censorship, or atomic blasts, or whatever).  It's redundant.  It has multiple paths, and that is where the title of this post comes from.

Parts of the Internet, large and small, break all the time, and nobody ever knows.  They are unseen problems.  One of my responsibilities as a network and server administrator is to help ensure that problems on my little chunk of the Internet remain unseen.  We take extraordinary precautions to ensure that when someone needs to access a service we manage, be it a website or an e-mail inbox, it will be there for them all the time.  We try to eliminate single points of failure.  Many people think of a firewall and envision a single box that filters traffic.  We think two boxes which monitor one another, each connected to its own network switch which in turn has its own dedicated connection back to our provider.  People think of a hard disk for storage and we think in RAID arrays of disks which stripe data over multiple drives.  If one fails, the system notifies us and keeps right on working.  When the replacement arrives, we pull the bad drive and replace it without ever turning off the server.  Data centers need to be kept cool.  They are, after all, just converting electricity into heat 24/7, so air handling is a major part of data center operations.  When the A/C goes out, there is temperature monitoring to alert us and people available 24/7 to vent the server room and ensure it stays cool enough for the servers to keep running.  Our clients don't care if the air is hot, cold, clear or filled with a purple haze; just that the servers stay online.  They don't care if a hard drive failed, or if a firewall goes down.  The systems just have to keep working, no matter what.

So it is to all of the people (like me), that keep the systems running, that I raise my glass of mango iced tea and say "Thank You!"  Don't forget, System Administrator Appreciation Day is Friday, July 30, 2010 (the last Friday in July each year).  Give your favorite sysadmin a nod and know that even when everything appears to be working just fine, they may be in the trenches working on some obscure problem that nobody else will ever know about.