tempest in a teacup

The snow stopped just around the time I returned, but instead now it’s raining all the time. This would not normally be an issue (this is Seattle after all) but this rain is accompanied by some pretty strong wind, making walking to and from work a bit of a chore.

Oh well, I suppose I need the exercise.

Somehow it slipped my mind throughout the entire return flight that I was to be on call this week. I literally realised this the day before I returned to work. No matter, though – I find my on call weeks to be a decent break between the usually hectic (and sometimes tedious) pace of everyday development work. Although I am looking forward to what I’ll get to work on next week.

My new laptop is plugged into a power socket right in front of the TV. I’m not sure what I want to use it for just yet, although a Media Center PC seems most likely since it runs Vista and has a convenient HDMI output for my TV. Said HDMI output also lets me play stuff like Outrun 2006 in 1360×768 on a nice big screen. Quite nice, I have to say…pity the graphics card seems to have some issues rendering the game at its proper speed.

Speaking of computer issues, this news has me interested a fair bit. I’m not usually one to install pre-release versions of operating systems, but I’ve heard almost nothing but positive impressions about Windows 7 (as opposed to Vista which was sending mixed signals even when it was in alpha). Kagura is about due for a format anyway, so I think I’ll delete my unused Linux partition and create one for trying out Windows 7.

This past week I was on call for my team. This past week was also Thanksgiving, and since I work for a company that is in the business of selling things to people, it was more than a little hectic for me.

In other words, being on call for a critical service at Amazon + Black Friday = PAIN.

I’ve been paged more times this week than any week I’ve worked at Amazon so far, and I spent most of the week working on an urgent fix requested by another team, one which necessitated that I load test our software to make sure that the fix didn’t affect performance adversely, and then spend hours on Saturday deploying the fix to our production boxes. On top of that I’ve had to attend early morning conference calls for high-velocity sales events (some of which you may have heard of). So yeah, I’m pretty worn out.

Still, while it does sound like I’m whining, I’m pretty happy that I was able to get through the week without any major problems on the site. The Amazon philosophy is to have all employees think like owners of the company, and given that we got through Black Friday without any major problems, as an owner, an employee and someone interested in customer experience I’m pretty happy.

I would be happier if we could ensure that sort of thing without driving the on call engineer nuts, though…

On a somewhat related note, I did manage to score 4GB of Corsair DDR800 RAM for the awesome price of $50 plus a $30 mail-in-rebate, and a copy of the PC version of Fallout 3 for $30 (both off Amazon, of course). I haven’t finished the first Fallout yet, but it’s already pretty clear that the third game is a vastly different beast from the first (and I’m not sure if it’s in a good way, either).

Amazon is going to be having PS3 deals all day today (August 27th), starting at 12am PST for the big daily deal and then lightning deals every four hours starting at 6am PST. Just a heads up in case there’s some PS3 game or accessory that you’ve been on the lookout for.

And no, I don’t know what the deals are going to be in advance, so don’t bother asking. You can usually make a pretty good guess from the clues on the Gold Box page anyway.

EDIT: The list of deals is up – the daily deal is Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. The lightning deals haven’t been revealed yet, but here are my educated guesses:

6AM: Resistance: Fall of Man
10AM: Ridge Racer 6
12PM: Ratchet & Clank Future
2PM: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
4PM: Devil May Cry 4
6PM: Warhawk

Looks like either games I have no interest in or that I already own. Urgh…

And now to pad out this post a little more, here’s what my desktop currently looks like (click to view full-sized version).

Why yes, I am rather obsessed with sandviches at the moment.

A year and twelve hours ago today, I stepped into the lobby of Pacific Medical Center in Beacon Hill, ready to begin my first real job at Amazon.com. I’ve really come a long way since my first time on call when I accidentally did software deployments in the middle of the day, I think…in particular there’s a lot of stuff that I’ve learned.

1. Your pager is most definitely not your friend.
2. Perl is actually quite readable if you squint at it really hard.
3. Eating lunch at your desk while a dog is in the vicinity is asking for trouble.
4. Do not bite the hand that provides the free beer and snacks every Friday.
5. Resist going out for Brazilian food as much as possible.

Obviously, I’m kidding. But I have really learned a lot in the last year…I can’t wait to see what the next will bring.

Not much in particular I want to talk about…just dealing with various things that have been happening recently.

I got a new video card recently – a GeForce 8800GTS 512MB from EVGA. It was a bit of a pain getting it into my case…it’s pretty much the same length as my motherboard, so it was a pretty snug fit (it’s nestled right up against my SATA connectors). Performance-wise, though, it’s a dream. I get anti-aliasing in Mass Effect now (as well as a much better frame rate), and games like Half-Life 2 Episode Two that would chug a bit on my old card now run smooth as butter.

Of course, as luck would have it, the same week I decide to upgrade, nVidia drops the 9800GTX to $200, and ATI comes out with brand new cards that keep up pretty well with nVidia’s current offerings. Such are the travails of the PC gamer :p

In the meantime, work has been…not really as interesting as it could be. After the problems we had on the site a few weeks ago, my team has dropped what we were working on before and has been working full steam on mitigation measures. This is kind of annoying for me since I was just getting my first taste of real software engineering(requirements gathering, writing technical specs, getting them reviewed, the whole lot) when this happened. I can’t complain too much though – the site is what keeps us running, and we’re beholden to the customers to make sure it stays up.

(And if you’re still waiting for me to tell you what actually happened…forget it. I like my job too much to risk it like that. If you must know something, get our official position from Jeff Bezos’ radio interview on KUOW this past week)

Speaking of work, in a couple of weeks, I’ll have spent a year at Amazon.com. I might have been in India by this point had it not been for the interim regulation that lets me stay here until my work visa starts on October 1st. Still, one year…what a year it’s been. There have been low points, but the good has outweighed the bad by a significant margin.

I really should do a proper retrospective before I forget.

In the shorter term, though, I was thinking of watching a movie this weekend since I don’t really have anything better to do, and the release of a Pixar movie is always reason to celebrate. Both Wall-E and Get Smart are looking like good candidates for my dollar…any recommendations?

A big news story I’ve been following recently is Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft. I can’t help but wonder what will become of the company after his departure…Microsoft is hardly the powerhouse it used to be back in the 90s, and has ceded a lot of ground this decade. I found a vitriolic blog post from a (now former) stockholder, who has used the occasion of Gates’ departure to dump all his Microsoft stock. It makes for very interesting reading.

Given the occasion, I’m wondering if I should pick up Microsoft 2.0 by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. I’m in the mood for some insight on where the world’s largest software company is going, and where it might be going wrong.

Speaking of Microsoft, I’m actually writing this blog post in Microsoft Windows Live Writer. Aside from the cumbersome name, it’s a really nice blog client that works with a wide variety of blog sites and services. Very cool, and easily the most impressive thing I’ve seen out of Windows Live so far.

On a final note, the Jun Senoue remix of Lee Brotherton’s Dreams of an Absolution is currently stuck in my head. Yes, I know it’s from the horrendous next-gen Sonic the Hedgehog – but this is one of the (very) few good things about that game. The others being the instrumental version of His World and this cutscene from Shadow’s story.

I sense my last.fm profile looks pretty messed up right now…

Monday was a repeat performance of Friday’s “awesomeness” at work (only worse), and I got home just in time for a wind storm to knock out all power for 5 hours.

So yeah, I was a little tied up.

That new 3G iPhone looks awesome, though.

Mine was pretty terrible.

I think I’ll go blow up some random douchebags in Team Fortress 2 to vent.

A couple of hours ago, after a pretty great Team Fortress 2 session and the ensuing post-game analysis between PenPen and I, I looked at the clock and decided it was time for me to go to bed. I signed off IRC, put my PC in standby mode, got myself a glass of water, stepped into my bedroom…

…and heard my pager go off.

I just got off the conference call a couple of minutes ago, after a good two hours of bleary-eyed log analysis and graph comparision.

I’ve only been working here for ten months, but I don’t recall ever being paged this often during my previous weeks on call…

I got my H-1B visa today.

Just thought you would like to know.

As you might have guessed from the title, this is another geekspeak-heavy post. I’ll try and make it digestible for the less technically inclined, as usual :p

This past week I took part in a course at work, meant to help Amazon employees understand Amazon Web Services (Click here if you don't know what those are). They’re basically a bunch of services that we vend to software developers to use in building applications. Examples of this are the Simple Storage Service (or S3) which is a simple data store which charges users based on how much space they use. There’s also the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is a service that lets developers purchase computing time to perform tasks that they can’t do with the resources that they already have (like, say, running complex operations on data sets). In any case, as part of the course, we had to build something using the services that we sell, without access to the internal tools that make our lives easier.

I teamed up with a friend from my team, and we set to work building a system that would allow people to search for MP3 downloads on the Amazon.com MP3 store (shameless plug!) using the lyrics from the song instead of the title or artist name. We did get it working successfully (about half an hour before the deadline), and presented it to the entire class. At the end an award was given out for the best project.

We didn’t win, but it didn’t bother me that much, mainly because of something else I found out from one of the facilitators of the course. Apparently, while testing our code over the weekend, we generated so much traffic to one of the services that the engineer who was on call for the service that week got paged, and had to figure out who or what was creating so many requests to the service.

So, we didn’t win, but we did cause some poor guy to get paged over the weekend.

Sometimes, it’s the little things in life that matter. :D