Ulduar!

I'll put up some WoW background sometime later... just wanted to put up a note that my guild has dived in to Ulduar this week, clearing Heroic: The Siege of Ulduar and 2/3rds of Heroic: The Antechamber of Ulduar in the last 4 days of raiding.

Tuesday was fairly slow between some late shows and server instability; we got Flame Leviathan down, cleared the trash to Ignis twice and each time had an instance server reset drop all our progress on that overtuned trash. So we headed over to Razorscale with 30 minutes left and couldn't really nail the fight, but got some practice in.

I was off on Wednesday, but others managed to kill Razorscale, getting Heroic: A Quick Shave; not sure what else they did, but they didn't make any further progress.

On Thursday, we ended up wiping on XT-002 Deconstructor a bunch of times -- we were going with a 3 tanks/6 healers/16 DPS setup, and we hit the enrage timer once or twice, plus lots of trouble on the trash. On the plus side, I got my cooking to 448 and about 6 points in fishing replacing all the Dragonfin Filet I ate.

Our normal raid schedule is Wed/Thurs/Sun/Mon, but some people wanted to get a second extra night in on Saturday. I had other plans, and it sounds like we didn't have enough DPSers interested to get a raid going. If you'd told me back when I started raiding Kara that I'd see raids cancelled on account of not enough DPS showing up, I don't think I'd have believed you...

Sunday night we absolutely took Ulduar apart -- XT-002 Deconstructor in 3-ish tries (with both Heroic: Nerf Engineering, and Heroic: Nerf Gravity Bombs). About 4-6 attempts later, we got Ignis along with Heroic: Shattered (I died for that one!). We then wiped and died on trash for 45 minutes or so and then battled Kologarn 6 or 8 times until we finally got the kiting and the healing and the DPSing and the taunting and the not getting hit by the stone guys down. We'd been raiding for almost 6 hours at that point, but decided to peek at Iron Council to be ready for Monday. Two pulls later, people got Heroic: I choose you, Stormcaller Brundir. (Iron Council seemed really easy on easy mode - our first "let's try this" attempt saw us get to about 65% on Stormcaller Brundir.)

Ulduar is a blast - it's nice to see the rust being shaken off some of the basic raiding skills like not killing everyone else in the raid. It was funny to see the raid leaders try to figure out how to pull the group of 4 iron dwarves and 2 iron constructs at the entrance to the Antechambers until someone suggested that we could try some crowd control.

Routing around outages

A fun little article about how Google deals with real-world hardware failures.  Yep, that's part of what I think about day-to-day -- not just "how do I make software do X", but "how can I build a system that will survive when a truck runs into the power substation?"
Unfortunately for my private work, I don't really have great answers for this except to build on other companies work... I don't have the resources to have multiple computers in different locations with independent redundant power, etc.  One of the cool things about my work is that there are a number of different levels you can design redundancy at, anything from hardware to to software to configuration.  For example, let's say you're designing a system to receive email and store it reliably (say, for auditing purposes).
You could buy one machine with redundant hard drives, CPUs, power supplies, etc.  You're still vulnerable to single-site disasters like an earthquake or maybe loss of ISP.  (You could have two independent links on independent fiber to the machine to mitigate this, for example.)  You'd need a machine that could deactivate some of its RAM/CPUs if it detected a fault if you were really concerned about downtime, but the nice thing about SMTP is that the sender will queue the mail until you're ready to receive it, so that's not too much of a worry.
You could buy a couple machines at different hosting locations, and store the data on a SAN or some other synchronized and replicated storage system.  Multiple sites for the frontend protects against some of the SPOFs in the previous design, and you're hoping that your SAN vendor has worked out the replication in the storage so you can rely on that for diversity at the backend.
You could write your own SMTP receiver which wouldn't commit on the SMTP transaction until the message has been written to all the destination stores. (which could be on separate machines in different locations)  This is a "software" solution to the above, and is probably fairly cheap if you end up buying virtual server space.  You still have to be wary that your VMs are actually on separate machines/locations, and you should probably verify data integrity on files between the machines, since bytes can degrade on disk.
You could configure an off-the-shelf SMTP system to do multiple deliveries, using NFS mounts over IPSec or something to ensure that it does all the deliveries before it returns a 200 or what-not after the MESG. This would be a "configuration" solution. Depending on the difficulties of configuring the disk-sharing, this might be easier or harder than the "software" solution.

Back from silence

Apparently I've decided that I want to comment on a lot of other blogs, so maybe I should start to keep this place up again.  If nothing else, I can use it to jot down notes on things I'm thinking about.

I'm back to cycling again after the winter.  I should start jogging again soon -- the group thing ended up petering out after a few weeks because jogging in the middle of the workday was a huge scheduling hassle.

Some stuff I've been up or will be up to soon:

• Vacation on Maui for a week.  Played with an underwater camera and enclosure.
  
• Almost 40k gold in WoW, even after buying up a bunch of expensive recipes.
  
• Sarth+3 in WoW (a few months back).
  
• Replaced the rear tire on my bike, and replaced it again...  one of the blocks to my cycling.
  
• Noodling out some visualization and presentation stuff for work.
• Trying to find a fun new coding project.
• Been cooking more, and talking about doing some remodeling.

Running tomorrow!

I've been running solo sporadically for the last 6-7 months, but I'm actually going to start running with some co-workers tomorrow.  One of them has run a few marathons in the past, including the Chicago Marathon, while the others are brand-new to running.  Having done really poorly this time around in the San Jose half-marathon, (2:30! two years ago I was a 2:05...) I'm hoping that having a regular group to push me will help out.

I'm a horribly slow runner in general, maybe some faster/shorter-distance runs will help.