evolution creations

So as most of you know, by a margin of about 3% Hillary Clinton has taken New Hampshire. For those who are tracking the primaries, this was a very important win for Clinton as it means that the initial surprising lead that Obama took in Iowa is not a sweep.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think this country with the leadership of either Clinton or Obama will be 100 TIMES better off than with Mr. George “I fell off the short yellow bus” W. Bush. Let’s review some points here:

Bush has:

1. Created a large amount of debt
2. Plunged the US into war in a land that wasn’t even the original target after 9/11.
3. Caused strain on our military forces by committing us to a war that will not be over for a LONG time. No matter what people say, if we stay then we will be there for a long time, if we leave, it would be irresponsible so we will probably end up being there for a long time. Either way we look at it, withdrawal is not a clean option.
4. Privatization of our armed forces. This reminds me of the days back in Europe when kings would send private armies to fight, and the other side would do the same, and in the end they would just talk it over and decide who won and lost, instead of actually fighting a battle. What’s wrong with our armed forces and why is it cheaper to use private armed forces?
5. Can he wear a bigger belt buckle? Ok cheap shot, but still, you wonder I know you do!
6. Tries to pull off the home town feel of a good old boy, but America doesn’t want that comfort and cozy feeling. I’d rather have a no nonsense kick them in the ass type of person and ask names later, than someone who hides behind other people.

Now unfortunately I can’t say much for Clinton, but here are some things that I have for them:

1. Clinton gracefully put up with the scandals that her husband went through and you know what, they are still together and civil. That shows honor and integrity.
2. Chelsea Clinton, she has for the most part stayed out of the media eye, even through the scandals. This shows priority and family values. Regardless of what Bill has done. And let’s face it guys. Most guys are not the most honest and upstanding folks either. So let’s not pretend that what he did is so out of order. We have all done things or been involved in things that looking back we probably would have done differently. But you know what, that’s part of being human and making mistakes. How would you like your mistakes covered on the evening news for the REST OF TIME!
3. Clinton is a trained lawyer, and all three Clinton’s value education. Bill was a Rhodes scholar and went to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, Hillary went to Wellesley and Yale, and Chelsea went to Standford and Oxford. On the other hand, George W Bush went to Yale and Harvard Business School, Laura went to Southern Methodist University and University of Texas at Austin, and Barbara and Jenna went to Yale and the University of Texas at Austin respectively. Neither has sought out higher education and both have been involved in behavior that you would expect from people who don’t know any better (drinking under the age and having a fake ID to.. purchase booze). Let’s face it between the Clinton’s and Bush’s, there is just no contest. Smart, progressive, open minded, that’s the Clinton’s.
4. She’s a women, duh! I don’t want to get into genetics but men and women do think about things differently, and in the case of this country, it has only been run on the impulses and strengths of men. I think it’s high time to let a women take the reigns, not just because, but it’s time that we get a fresh perspective, and someone who can take charge in a different direction. Do we really want to have the cowboy macho mentality throughout the world? I’d rather have someone who is soft on military, and strong in diplomatics, communication, public relations, and most important the ability to LISTEN when your people, the people who you are suppose to be the voice up, speak up and tell you that there is something wrong. Unlike the current president who was just recently quoted as saying that the economy is basically ok. What is that! Does he not read the Wall Street journal that has headlines like we are looking at a recession or that the housing market is turned upside down, or that large companies are in financial troubles? Of course not, they must be teaching something else at Harvard Business School these days.
5. Communication, Clinton can talk. She can talk and not talk through people, but at people. She can look you in the face and from the hip be able to respond to you with something that is real and personal but still strong in it’s convictions. Bush on the other hand I wouldn’t give the benefit to be able to put a speech together to save his life.
6. Economics, Clinton may not know economics, but she’s going to try and will probably get folks around her who do know, but she seems like the type of person that can see value from no value. Bush on the other hand will give you:

So what do this mean? This means that you have to do your civic duty and listen carefully all of you voters, DO THE RIGHT THING! Go out and vote. I don’t care if you think that your one vote doesn’t count, but if you do to me and the rest of this country like you did last term and voted in a man who will go down in history as one of the most embarrassing mistakes that could have happened to this great nation, GET YOUR BUTT OUT OF THAT CHAIR and vote!

And there are options, yes there are options. Let’s say you are like me, and you work in the city and you have to commute in each day and you don’t have time to vote. Guess what, contact your voting district and get an absentee ballot. Figure out a way to make this happen, but do something–anything. I don’t care at this point if you vote for Mike Gravel the craziest man I see on the campaign trail, but just go out and VOTE! Do the right thing, don’t make the same mistake twice, and make this one count America. We have a chance, we have an opportunity to do something right, to take a situation and make something out of it. When you were small and something bad happened, didn’t your parents always use to tell you “When you get all lemons make lemonade”. Well let’s do that this year. 2008 is a turning point in American history, we hold our heads high, not because we are proud of what we have done, but proud of what we are capable of doing. We can wrong the rights of our past, and make the world a safer place to be–and to do this, we need a candidate who has the vision, patience, and understanding to know what the people want and to do what’s in our best interest.

I leave you with some words from the Declaration of Independence:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

And while we are not saying that what we have is no longer good, we are saying that we have the right and responsibility to do something about it, knowing that it won’t be done for us unless we stand together and make it a reality.

So as you probably have noticed around you, the “Made in the USA” stamp doesn’t appear on a lot of things these days. Sure there are those in manufacturing and textiles that are proud to put that stamp seal of approval hoping to latch onto hopeful Americanism–something that seems to have cropped up in a post-911 epidemic. You know what I’m talking about, the flags that you see everywhere, the bumper stickers and ribbon campaigns to “Support the Troops” and “Proud to be an American”, or the wrist bands, the pins on blazers, everywhere you look these days, people seem to be jumping on this bandwagon.

But that’s not the issue today (gives me an idea though for a future article!), the issue at hand is why is it that American’s don’t seem to be making things anymore, we invent or discover, and then ship that overseas or to another company who then ships it oversees, to have the product constructed or fabricated elsewhere. And that’s not to say that it’s made in Taiwan, but simply to say it’s not made on our mother land–America.

Why is that? I think one of the reasons for this is that American’s have become an entirely service oriented country, meaning we like to manage, we like to create, but we don’t like to get our hands dirty anymore. It’s this pre-Victorian view of things where the nobles and lords don’t get their hands dirty–they would rather pay the cheap labor of someone less fortunate who they know will take the work, and laugh with their other rich buddies how they are living the good life, not having to do any of the hard and degrading manual labor.

But wait, what does that do to our over-all social understandings? Does this enrich our understanding of the work and make us more humble? Or does this harden us because now we are competing not with quality, but quantity. Who can do more, faster, and louder. Why do I say this, because nobody cares about spending a lot of time anymore and doing paper work (now it’s computer work) in the proper way. Deadlines are now shorter, results are higher, revenue potentials and results are bigger and bolder. What has changed–the expectation of more at a lesser cost seems to be the driving force that we see nowadays.

Why would you say that expectations are not managed anymore? Well let’s look around us. People think that if they can get away with something, they will take advantage of that next time. Let’s look at a popular situation that we all have heard happen to someone we know or a friend of a friend. You are someone who has purchased a good from a store, but realize when you get home that it’s the wrong item. Unfortunately at this point in time, you have thrown away your receipts and because of a vacation that you had planned out, you aren’t able to return the item in the 14 days that the store has as far as their return policy. Also you have opened the item already and some of the original packaging has been lost/thrown away. So you come back from your trip, you go into the store with your head hanging low, and quietly explain your situation and request that they please take the return. The person that you interact with takes sympathy on your situation, understands where you are coming from, and against better judgment bends the rules and refunds your money.

Now look at the domino effect. This person perks up, and instead of thanking the almighty that there is still good and decency in the world these days, they do something similar, but this time instead of unintentionally throwing away the receipt or losing some of the original packaging, you do it carelessly because in the back of your mind you are thinking to yourself, well if it happens again I’ll do the same thing and expect that the same type of service will be presented. Well guess what, when you try and pull that off, you get someone who is a by the books individual, and they say no. And you know what, they have ever right to say no! You broke the rules, you didn’t follow the directions, you decided that the system was too good for you and that you “are” the system. Now a situation escalates, not because the store did anything wrong, but because your expectations on the situation were skewed to begin with.

Now this can be applied to many things, but the service industry has become more and more tough these days, because we are demanding and expecting more and more. People are looking into ways to cheat the system, similar to taxes. I can never understand why people do this, because if 1 person does it, they will tell 2 people, and they will tell 2 people, and sooner or later a whole lot of people think that they can get away with this grand idea, but in fact it is the honest ones who don’t bark and scream, who are left holding the bill at the end of the day. Is that fair?

Absolutely not. What about expectations in terms of your servicing company or vendors? Are they realistic? Are you in a business that relies on the business of other organizations or companies to sustain itself? Well back in the days, companies understood each other. Mistakes could happen, and people could talk calmly through it because they didn’t feel like they were being cheated, they felt like they were talking with a real person and not a sleezy wheeling dealing individual, and that their issues would be dealt with appropriately, even though they know that some of their complaints are just that–complaints. Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose, but it’s how you play the game. But if you can’t play the game and take the heat, well then get out of the kitchen I say!

What does that mean? It means that if you aren’t willing to admit that you are wrong, and to be civil to the other person on the phone or the other person across the table, then you are reinforcing this concept that began with very innocent beginnings and has now exploded into something that is out of control and you just do you very best to stay as far out of the damage path as you can. Funny thing is that if you do manage to stay out of the damage path, you again think you beat the system, and now you go back twice as determined to get twice as much thinking you will again cheat death. In reality isn’t that what it comes down to. The idea that you can pull one over on someone else and get something for nothing? What about if you are in a situation where you know that the company did something wrong, and they properly admit to it, and then fix it. Do you give the company the benefit of the doubt the next time something goes wrong, or do you hold it over their heads like a scarlet A and demand that they fix it because they failed in a previous instance. I’m sad to say that it’s probably going to be the later and not the more noble and honorable way out.

Companies do this to each other. Vendors do their best to provide goods and services, but you know what, mistakes will happen, delays will occur, pressure will be put on one side, and instead of dealing with that, everyone tends to do a slash redirect to point that energy to someone else. Put their balls in a vice grip and just squeeze is an appropriate example of this. Gratefulness is a thing of the past folks, and we think to ourselves or remind ourselves periodically how chivalry is dead–well I got news, that is the least of our worries! Who cares if we hold the door open for a lady, equal rights, and that means that men and women are playing on a level playing field. This goes the same for interactions between individuals in a service based economy. We have to be civil with each other, and learn to cope with the fact that we don’t get our way and just because we don’t doesn’t make you a lesser person. In fact I think this may be the root of all evils because it just pushes you to make yourself puff out like a bird who is trying to intimidate a larger animal because your instincts tell you that if you make yourself “seem” larger than you are, they will back down. Who said this was a predator/prey situation? I know I certainly don’t think of it in that way. But what compels people to think this way?

Personally I think it’s a lack of self awareness and self worth. You think that you are lower than people or have been treated badly in the past, you come at situations twice as aggressive and twice as determined to make the scales tip in your favor. This is the problem in the world and why managing expectations has become increasingly that much harder–nobody wants to feel like they got the short end of the stick. Well you can’t both have the big end, each should have 50% of the stick–nothing more, nothing less. You pay for what you get, and sometimes you pay more to get more. But the scales of economy don’t slide in your favor just because. In fact there is no favor so get that thought out of your mind completely. Do an honest days work, feel good about yourself, stop judging others, learn to look at yourself in the same way that you look at others, treat yourself like you treat others. I think if more people starting attacking themselves as they attack other people, the world just might be that much more humble.

So proof positive that YouTube has taken a hold of this world, we move pass the standard shaky camera and into professional video editing. Unreal video!

Forget that this is for Call of Duty 4, you almost want to say that this could be a promotional video for joining the army or something along those lines!

Now this next one is really interesting, for those who don’t like Akon, I would still suggest that you watch this, as it WILL BLOW YOU MIND AWAY! The sounds that David Sides is producing from his piano are melodic and in perfect harmony. Truly talent at it’s finest!

So in a major push in recent times, parents, government, and watch groups are putting pressure on the game industry to “clean up its act”. We see sites out there like GamePolitices.com where they rate the current trends in gaming and provide a letter grade on the quality of that particular rating. At this point, you might be asking yourself, what’s the big deal, let them go after the gaming industry. If you think that way, read on.

The big question here is who is responsible, the game industry or the parents, in making informed decisions on what their children should be playing or what they are involved in. This goes back to the age old questions of parents, such as:

- Education, are schools responsible for providing the sole, initial or foundations of education?
- Social skills, are schools also responsible for providing guidance and a mature and enriched environment to provide good social skills for children.
- Food, do advertisements on TV (TV that we let our children watch), influence or guide a child’s addiction to particular brands or products?
- Is the TV industry responsible for monitoring and having responsible viewing of shows?
- Is the movie industry responsible for what they put into movies and how they rate them?
- Is the music industry responsible for what they put into their music and how they are rated?

And the list goes on and on. If we are naive in thinking that any industry, institution or other party is responsible for influencing their children, I ask the questions:

1. Why is it that you allowed your child to watch this?
2. Why is it that your child believes this is acceptable?
3. What measures were taken to instill positive behavior and acceptable uses? How is this reinforced, and is the family/home environment appropriate to continue this positive reinforcement (or is it do what I say, and not what I do).
4. If you as a parent spent 1/2 the time on your children as you do blaming others for your short comings, then you probably wouldn’t be looking at who you should be going after next, as you’ll be too busy being involved with your children.

Let’s look at the education system for a moment, and then we’ll come back to video games. A lot of people would have you believe that the economy of scales within an educational institution are the sole reasons that children who attend that school are not able to score high, have a high percentage of graduates, high percentage of students continue on higher education, etc etc. While this is true that economy does make the world go round, it provides good salaries to attract quality teachers, facilities management, new technology, books, supplies, and other extra curricular studies, this is not the can do way to solve the problem. If it were then the Chicago school district should be doing wonders with the infusion of funds that it received, but instead it wasted them in blackhole projects and poor management of funds.

Looking at this from another angle, why is it that students of foreign origins have their children score higher, have a higher percentage of graduation rates, higher percentage of students continue to college and so on? Is it because they are smarter, harder working, genetically superior? If you believe this, then you shouldn’t read any further as you are probably the most gullible person on the face of this planet and have very low self esteem. The reality is that none of these are universally true (be it there may be certain individuals who are inherently smarter or more determined), but for the most part you have to look at it from a more holistic perspective. What about these children make them different than those who were born and grew up in America?

I would argue that there are a number of factors that can influence this, such as but not limited to:

• Environment
• Engagement
• Involvement

Breaking these down, you can look at environment as being the conditions that a child lives and breaths on a day to day basis that can affect their abilities. Do they live in a house that values TV more than books? Or board games verses video games? Or junk food vs health conscious foods? The list goes on. As a parent, you have to consider that these types of things drastically affect a child’s perspective, and would ultimately affect their abilities, growth and development. Just like you would child-proof a house when you first get a baby home, or dog proof a house when you get a puppy, you have to idiot proof your house and environment by making sure you are conscious of the various things and activities that occur in the house and how they may impact your child’s development. Eat dinner as a family, discuss issues–anger is not a choice, understanding instead of jumping to conclusions, open discussions about the hard topics–drugs, violence, patience, and culture. These are just the tip of the ice burg, but can make a big difference in the way your child views the world and how they live in it.

In terms of engagement, let’s look at this like you would a business. You want to keep your employee’s engaged–this means that you have to understand where they currently are, what their strengths are and how you can interact with those strength themes to get the best results, have open discussions to assess their current involvement, put them into situations where you can observe them either taking on challenges or stumbling, rewarding success and correcting short falls. These are all fundamentals when you manage a group or team in a workplace.

Now this isn’t to say that you treat your children like employee’s but engagement is still something that can be cross-utilized. You have to be engaged with your children by knowing that they are doing, what they are interested in, how you can participate or guide them through situations. Keep in mind that engagement isn’t “doing” or isn’t “forcing” but pointing them in a direction and seeing where they go, all the while you walk with them along the way and act as guide posts that they can periodically go to and read from in order to make informed decisions themselves.

Involvement is just what it saids, but keep in mind this is not doing, this is just acting as a facilitator that can be used to provide two sides of a perspective, but ultimately allow the child to come to their own determination, fail and learn from their mistakes and provide a nurturing environment that does not create a threatening environment for them to now want to take a chance, but also does not provide too much of a cushion that they feel that they can take any amount of risk because you will always be there to catch them. It’s a difficult balancing act, takes a lot of time, and patience, but the rewards are great.

So with these three guiding principles, we can aim to achieve a better position in a failing education system, because we are no longer relying on someone else to take responsibility for success or failure. It is up to YOU to establish, provide, and see through any course of action because the excuse that someone else should have done something is not the norm, but the exception.

Why is this important. This is important as we look back on video games and the reaction of several self-proclaimed evangelists who seem to make it a mission to force the industry into more and more constraining boxes and less and less creative as they are always looking over their shoulder to see who might object, sue or otherwise degrade their game because of content or intended or unintended use. Games like Doom and Duke Nukem were pioneers in their day; however, when you have parents screaming that the reason their children took guns to school and pre-meditatively gunned down their classmates were in part due to their exposure to these video games is completely ridiculous. How can brief exposure to a video game be more powerful than a parents environment, engagement, and involvement over 14+ years? If they were so diligent in their efforts, this shouldn’t be an issue.

So what’s the answer? The answer is that parents need to not only rely on a quick reference guide that can basically summarize key components within a game (such as the ESRB), but parents should be playing the game themselves, watching videos of in-game play, talking with other kids on their reactions of the game, talking with parents about their involvement with the game, playing the game with their child or observing playing behavior with child and friends. Basically you have to put all the pieces together to be as informed as possible, but this isn’t just having information fed to you, but you have to do some (a lot) of the grunt work so do not think that this is an easy task. Each game has to be treated differently, and each game will require a considerable amount of effort.

Parents have become lazy folks, and this isn’t the fault of the industry. We continue to look for more and more simplistic ways of looking at a situation and sitting back while that solution is fed to us on a silver plater. Gone are the days that we take pride in the fact that we were involved and participated as this isn’t serving any instant gratification and let’s face it we are a culture that loves gratification.

The game industry has one purpose and one purpose along–create video games that generate revenue. They do this by creating games that serve nitch communities, specific genres, creative games, games that push the envelope. Just like you wouldn’t stifle the creativity of a great painter (hell we watch them get hyped up on drugs and marvel at the art that they produce), and yet what would painters or other artists produce, if they had people rating their art as being too riske or inappropriate, or instilling the belief that there is hate or other harmful idea’s that could be misunderstood by impressionable minds?

I think the answer is two fold, first it’s ridiculous to even consider doing something like that, and second the produced art is going to hit that glass ceiling. We are there with games, as the envelope rarely gets pushed nowadays in fear of backlash by the consumer market. People have rights, they have the right not to buy, they have the right to choice. But with rights come responsibilities, so we have the responsibility of being sensible, the responsibility of doing our own due diligence when it comes to ourselves and our children, and the responsibility to not blame others for our own short comings.

We should be comfortable to make mistakes and admit we are wrong, as this only leads us to do things better the next time. But our pride can sometimes get in the way of that, as we are creatures that do not like to be put into situations where we are embarrassed or humiliated. Video games can challenge our minds and we have yet to tap the incredible potential that games have to offer. Why don’t we stop blaming them for not controlling the content that they produce, and instead focus our attention on environment, engagement, and involvement.

So as a follow-up to yesterday’s post, it looks like other’s are falling into the Content Delivery Network band-wagon. Check out this article from DataCenter Knowledge that discusses the patent infringement suit that Level3 Communications has leveled against Limelight Networks (actually I’ve not heard of these folks until this article, obviously Level3 is one of the major backbone providers). In the article they discuss how in the recent purchase that Level3 made on Savvis Communications, it also purchased Intellectual Property that Limelight is now infringing on.

This has become actually quite a common tact for companies to not R&D their own software or technology, but purchase other companies who have those IP holdings and then go after those would be infringers (that certainly isn’t to say that Level3 in any way intentionally or willfully purchased Savvis with the intent to do this, but simply pointing out that there are companies who have done this and have made it harder on the IP community in general). Makes you wonder who’s content delivery network is truly pure of heart and originally creative in it’s design.

So what’s the life lesson here? I’d say unless you are itching to jump on the bandwagon, let things cool down and the pieces fall. Typically the ones that are the most pure will survive the initial domino effects and will make it out with little to no scathing.

But on the other hand, if you are someone who absolutely needs CDN, I’d urge you to consider carrier independent clustered solutions. You have more control, and you know that you are the only ones that are using the server resources. No matter what advertising saids, there is a glass ceiling here folks, and you have to be realistic in knowing that companies will make it sound like they are catering to just you, when in fact while they are saying these sweet nothings in your ear, they are at the same time wining and dining someone else who they are promising the same thing to–it’s typical marketing strategies, and if you don’t recognize it and think you are above it, you are just setting yourself up for a harsher reality. Knowing the marketplace, knowing your provider/vendor, means that you are just that more competitive.

Realize that very few companies make it to be #1 on the backs of others, take the 100 most visited websites. Why are they great? They are managed by groups of talented IT folks who are passionate about making technology great, and the customer experience unbelievable. You pay for what you get, and unless you are someone who likes to sit in the backseat and let others drive, get back in the drivers seat and put your money where your mouth is.

So as someone who was previously employed by Hostway Corporation, now the largest webhosting company in America, I periodically check back on my former employers site to see what’s new in the web-hosting marketplace. Let’s face it, the world is turning digital, so you have to keep on the cutting edge in order to stay competitive.

So low and behold, I see something that certainly catches my eye, labeled: Hostway Edge Caching Content Delivery Network (CDN). Now as someone who has had more than 3 1/2 years in the profession, this certainly intrigued my interest.

Let’s go over some of the key points that Hostway is making:

• Faster load times — Our global network of servers can dramatically improve your load times by speeding data long the shortest route. It also makes audio and video files play smoothly by speeding the data transmission and eliminating pauses in streaming content.
• High availability — With content distributed across the globe, a server failure or disaster in one area won’t impact your Web site. Your content will be sent along the next-best channel to your customers.
• Scalability— Multiple servers give you greatly expanded bandwidth capacity. They can easily process temporary burst requests and other traffic surges.

Now let’s go over a few things here. First off, Hostway is a web-hosting company, meaning they are not an ISP, meaning they do not own their own fibre network. This is the case with most hosting companies, such as Rackspace or Aplus–hosting companies rely on backbone providers to provide network connectivity. I’m sure you’ve heard of these companies, some of the big names are Level3 Communications, Verio, AT&T, Cogent, Time Warner, and good old UUNET (formerly MCI). If network traffic is flying around the internet, chances are they are traveling over one of these providers. In fact, for me to get from my house to Google.com, I traverse one of these providers (Level3):

6 COMCAST-IP.car2.Chicago1.Level3.net (4.71.182.34) 41.871 ms 20.378 ms 20.328 ms
7 te-4-2.car2.Chicago1.Level3.net (4.71.182.33) 21.493 ms 21.509 ms 21.508 ms
8 ae-32-52.ebr2.Chicago1.Level3.net (4.68.101.62) 18.984 ms 18.920 ms 32.621 ms
9 ae-1-100.ebr1.Chicago1.Level3.net (4.69.132.41) 32.545 ms 32.553 ms 18.205 ms
10 ae-2.ebr2.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.132.66) 47.277 ms 50.774 ms 50.763 ms
11 ae-62-62.csw1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.82) 62.983 ms ae-72-72.csw2.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.86) 51.118 ms ae-82-82.csw3.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.90) 46.543 ms
12 ae-41-99.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.16.195) 43.577 ms ae-11-69.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.16.3) 43.531 ms ae-31-89.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.16.131) 44.038 ms
13 GOOGLE-INC.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.71.172.86) 42.583 ms 43.977 ms 45.734 ms
14 216.239.43.146 (216.239.43.146) 65.769 ms 72.14.236.213 (72.14.236.213) 48.585 ms 91.108 ms

As an end user, you typically don’t know that this is the case, let’s face it, folks like AOL really screwed it up for the rest of us, as they lead people to believe that the internet IS AOL (lol!). Really the internet is just several layers of networks on-top of networks with servers at various levels and points. When everything is said and done when you go to your browser and try to pull something up, such as http://www.google.com/ you are not just going from your computer directly to Google, you are passing through dozens upon dozens of servers to eventually get to your content page.

Ok, so back to CDN, so Hostway doesn’t own their own networks, they probably lease them and create virtual private networks where they can prioritize their traffic over their network space. It’s sort of like when you get a leased car, you drive the car, you maintain the car, you pile your friends into the car and go off to god knows where, but when everything is said and done the car belongs to the dealership and not you–same thing applies here. So if the network isn’t theirs, where does that leave us?

From what it sounds like, this is just an elaborate attempt to have HA over a cluster of servers that are spread out over various datacenters. Now let’s break that down. HA, what is that? HA is High Availability. This means that if you are someone who has a blog (like me!) you do not need HA. If your blog goes down, you wine and complain to your hosting company (like Hostway!), but when the day is said and done, I didn’t loose money from it, my business is not hurt because of this, I didn’t loose a bunch of traffic that was destined for my site due to click through ad campaigns, the blog goes down it’s not the end of the world (although there are some people out there that pretend that it does, let’s keep things on the up and up folks!).

For other people, like banks and Fortune500 companies, HA means everything. HA is basically a system whereby there is no single point of failure. When someone goes to http://www.chase.com/, let’s break down what potentially could be Chase’s HA architecture.

First, at the domain level, the name servers are distributed. What this means is that when you resolve the domain chase.com, the name servers that are authoritative for that domain are not all located in one datacenter. Think of it like you are putting all your nuts in one basket, if the name server that are authoritative for your domain are located in the same datacenter, what happens if that datacenter goes off the grid? All traffic to your site stops because there are no authoritative name servers that can tell you where the server is located for things like web traffic, email, etc. How do I know this to be the case? Do a simple whois lookup, or if you are running a linux box at home, run the command:

host -t ns chase.com

and you will see an output similar to the below:

host -t ns chase.com
chase.com name server ns1.jpmorganchase.com.
chase.com name server ns2.jpmorganchase.com.
chase.com name server ns05.jpmorganchase.com.
chase.com name server ns06.jpmorganchase.com.

If you go further into this, you will see that each of the name servers points to a separate IP address:

host ns1.jpmorganchase.com
ns1.jpmorganchase.com has address 159.53.46.53
Columbus, OH

host ns2.jpmorganchase.com
ns2.jpmorganchase.com has address 159.53.78.53
Lisle, IL

host ns05.jpmorganchase.com
ns05.jpmorganchase.com has address 159.53.110.152
Chicago, IL

host ns06.jpmorganchase.com
ns06.jpmorganchase.com has address 159.53.110.153
Chicago, IL

And each of their IP addresses will be hosted in different datacenters strategically located throughout your general geographic area (GeoIP most likely). As you can see each of the above IP addresses for their name servers are located around my area (Chicago, IL), but if one of their datacenters goes down in Chicago or it’s surrounding suburbs, there will be several other name servers to take it’s place to resolve chase.com. As you can imagine with a global company like Chase they will have hundreds of name servers out there to ensure that no one datacenter, no one network, no one provider will cause their site to ever be in a situation where people cannot resolve their domain.

So that’s the name server level, let’s look at their website. Most likely what they have is a complex network of front line servers. Now what these servers are most likely, are load balancers that look for a variety of things:

• Where you are coming from geographically
• What URL you are resolving either www.chase.com or chase.com (these can resolve two different addresses if you are not familiar with web protocols)

Among other things. What the load balances do is basically just hand off your request to the best available front line web server that will process your request. This means that at the initial stage there is no single point of failure as there are several load balancers that can take your request and pass it along to a web server. If one load balancer goes down, another one comes up (N+1 failover) or the request is routed to another load balancer that is already taking requests. The same concept would be applied in a situation where the load balancer is getting overloaded with requests, it will either pass the traffic to a less congested load balancer or it will activate load balancers that are just waiting to be used to handle the high traffic, then when the traffic dies down the extra load balancers stop taking requests and sit there waiting for the next period of high load/traffic.

So that prevents the load balancing to multiple web servers from ever being a point of failure. Now at the web server level, we look at clusters, and not just clusters, but server farms. This is to say that instead of thinking that www.domain.com resolves to a single webserver and that webserver is the authoritative place for content to be served, there are hundreds of webserver nodes that are in place just to process web traffic. This can be done at multiple levels, software or hardware, but the end result is that if a web server node goes down or experiences high load, another one will take it’s place (N+1) or the traffic will shift to another less busy web server node.

Now this is good and all, but you may be asking yourself, well that leaves the data that is actually being served, the content files or the database calls. As you can probably tell from the above, we can use similar architectural steps all the way down the line through the file storage system to the database system to cluster, balance, and fail over to servers or storage arrays that are located either in the same data center or in data centers around the world. The great thing about the information age is we are not limited to any one option, we can blend and expand both vertically (more hardware) or horizontally (more datacenters) to achieve better performance, uptime and ultimately a better customer experience.

So this in a nut shell is HA, the basic concept behind this is fairly simple, remove any single point of failure, from the network, to the datacenter, to the server to the data that is being served, and to design a system where by you can go into a single datacenter, flip the off switch and watch your site not experience a single second of downtime or flux in the customer experience.

Ok, so that was a long drawn out explaination of HA and that is still just scratching the surface. Let’s go back to Hostway’s CDN for a moment. I said that it looks like this is an elaborate HA cluster spread over their private network space. What does this mean for you and do the benefits out-weight the costs?

Let’s examine the speed aspects for a moment here to see if an end-user observes a difference. From their webpage, they provided two URL’s that you can test the speed difference using the original non enhanced website (I’m assuming that this is being served from just one server), as well as a URL for a page that is being served via CDN (multiple servers in multiple datacenters strategically placed around the world). Now let’s get some idea of what I’m testing this on. My connection is a Comcast 6MB w/ PowerBoost (means if there is extra bandwidth on the network, I can burst up to 12MB instead of 6MB), I tested from http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/ using the Chicago, IL location for my test. I tested it 3 times over a period of 5 minutes and below are my base line results:

Download Speed: 7076 kbps (884.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1413 kbps (176.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 6676 kbps (834.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1386 kbps (173.3 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 7586 kbps (948.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1445 kbps (180.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

Average Download Transfer Rate = 889.1KB/sec
Average Upload Transfer Rate = 176.83KB/sec

So you can tell from the above, on each attempt I had a fairly standard distribution on the speed tests with no great deviations.

Next, I ran 10 tests over a period of 5 minutes where I launched the first page (Original single web server), and clicked on the Click to Reload link in the upper right hand corner. My results were:

5.094
3.18
3.316
4.313
4.209
3.901
3.402
3.949
3.563
4.455
Average = 3.94

So an average of 3.94, that’s not bad! Next I tested the enhanced page (multiple web servers) using the same test method as above, and got the below results:

3.883
3.61
3.491
3.612
3.689
3.376
3.694
3.436
3.484
3.927
Average = 3.62

Hmm, now wait, that’s not as impressive as I thought. We are talking about less than .3 seconds average gain from the original page (single server) to the enhanced page (multiple servers). Let’s think about this–why would this happen?

Well the first thing I can think about is the idea that multiple servers in spread out geographical area’s is a good thing. From the Hostway site, I see that their servers are located in:

North America
Europe
Asia
Australia

So for all intents and purposes if the idea behind CDN is to find the network that will give me the fastest results, as a US based end user, we can immediately scratch out Europe, Asia, and Australia from the mix, as the network latency alone in connecting to one of these datacenters would destroy any gains in performance by having many servers working to serve my content.

And in North America, Hostway operates datacenters in Vancouver (NetNation), Chicago (Hostway), Austin (Dedicated Central), Tampa (PowerMedium), and Ft Lauderdale (Affinity). So for all intents and purposes, if I am a US based business, looking to use CDN to speed up my trafffic, my traffic would potentially be served from any of the above 5 datacenters based on the location of the requestor (the person in front of a browser looking for the website or content from the website).

Now that is great from a network perspective, but what about server and data storage? The questions that need to be asked, and they are not available from the website are:

1. Is this a true HA cluster, in that there are truly multiple servers acting as front end webserver nodes. So if Chicago goes down, one of the other datacenters will seemlessly pick up the traffic and not allow for any downtime.
2. What about the backend, how is the data being served up? Are they using high end file stores, such as NetApp’s to serve my data? Is there data replication between each datacenter so that if data is lost due to corruption in Chicago, that a copy will safely be in each of the other locations?
3. How often is data being replicated. You can’t have a large data storage network like this with real time replication (well you can, but the overhead is quite large). So how often is data updated between all the various storage backends?
4. Are there backups that go to the other locations, such as Europe and Asia, so in the event all internet traffic dies in the US, the other data centers in geographic locations around the world also receives a copy of the data?

Given the gains that I can see from an end user perspective, I’m not sure I’m convinced that CDN is all that it’s hyped to be. What are the chances that if you have a dedicated server in a Tier1 hosting providers datacenter will go down for a prolonged time? Actually when it comes to Hostway this has happened (Click here for link from Netcraft)!

Best practices. So don’t be shocked, this isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last, but as a consumer you have to be educated and prepared for the marketplace. Some of the things that you can do to ensure you have a good stable platform is:

1. Provider independent. A lot of people try to have services all from one provider, and while this makes your CFO happy because he only has one bill, this doesn’t provide you with any type of competitive advantage when it comes to negotiating rates, having the ability to pull the plug if something goes wrong, or flexibility in terms of geographic locations and server types.
2. You should always consider having name servers with different providers that are redundant and geographically located.
3. You should have several web servers that serve out your content. While in some HA clusters this is a complex process, you can simplify this greatly by using neat tricks on DNS (discussed below) and single server architectures.
4. Use a globally recognized redundant mail platform. Web hosts boast a robust platform, this that and the other. Why don’t you just throw in the kitchen sink while you are at it! Give up on this, and either go with the free version of Google Apps or the paid version for Enterprise use. I’ve used Google Apps for about a year now on my domain, and I have been quiet happy with it’s performance, availability, storage and features–best of all, it’s free! You email will be fully redundant because your MX records will be located in various datacenters run by Google, and the system is entirely web-based (although you can use Outlook or something on a POP or IMAP connection, but who needs it when you are already on the web!). The only downside is if you are a company that uses Blackberries, sorry to tell you, but Google Apps doesn’t have a nice integration with BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server). Hopefully the good Ph.D folks at Google will think up something brilliant as they always do. But think about it, your email is on the same platform that google.com is hosted on. Have you ever seen google.com offline? Netcraft doesn’t have any reported downtime on google, so you have to be confident that your email will always be there when you need it.
5. Make your IT person work for their pay! Goodness, this is a no brainer, your business process should not make the IT job easier, it should make it balanced between ease of use, economics, and best practice. If your IT staff have to put into place a manual process of updating information on 2-3 sources when making a change on the web, so be it. It will just force them to find a way to automate it through scripts and nifty replication techniques. Let your IT staff loose and they might wow you a bit!

So these are just a few tips, but you might be interested in what is mentioned in item 3 above. Well let’s say you are a company that needs geographic redundancy, servers in multiple datacenters with different providers, and 99.999 uptime or 100% uptime. Well one option is to make a gigantic load balanced solution using hardware/software load balancers, with heartbeat monitoring on servers and N+1 architecture, blah blah blah. Yes you can do this, and Yes this is the right way to do it, but there are other ways to achieve similar results.

First off, you can start with the DNS level. To do this, first you must understand the basic DNS setup. For a domain, lets say evolutioncreations.com as an example, your DNS would look like:

evolutioncreations.com IN A 192.168.1.1
www.evolutioncreations.com IN A 192.168.1.1

The above saids that if you go to either http://evolutioncreations.com or http://www.evolutioncreations.com they will both resolve to the same IP address: 192.168.1.1 and presumably your IT person or hosting company has setup proper host headers in the webserver so it knows what to do for either domain name.

The other way you can do this is to use round robin strategies. This can be accomplished by setting up something similar to:

evolutioncreations.com IN CNAME www1.evolutioncreations.com
evolutioncreations.com IN CNAME www2.evolutioncreations.com
evolutioncreations.com IN CNAME www3.evolutioncreations.com
evolutioncreations.com IN CNAME www4.evolutioncreations.com
www.evolutioncreations.com IN CNAME www4.evolutioncreations.com
www.evolutioncreations.com IN CNAME www3.evolutioncreations.com
www.evolutioncreations.com IN CNAME www2.evolutioncreations.com
www.evolutioncreations.com IN CNAME www1.evolutioncreations.com

then you would have:

www1.evolutioncreations.com IN A 192.168.1.2
www2.evolutioncreations.com IN A 192.168.1.3
www3.evolutioncreations.com IN A 192.168.1.4
www4.evolutioncreations.com IN A 192.168.1.5

This basically means that when someone goes to either www.evolutioncreations.com or evolutioncreations.com in a browser, the DNS will round robin through 4 different records and could point the customer to 1 of 4 servers that can be located in different datacenters with different providers. This way you would just need a single beefy server (dual proc/dual core) with loads of RAM, if you are running Apache and PHP, make sure it has mod_php enabled, and your Apache conf is properly tuned to allow the appropriate threads to be created and MIN/MAX values. If you are running a site that uses a database, make sure your my.cnf file has the appropriate number of max concurrent connections or user connections to ensure you don’t hit a limit.

What this means is that if your customers are having problems getting to your site, they will either:

1. Reload the current page, this will attempt to have the current server (www1-4.evolutioncreations.com) try to serve out the content.
2. They will try to go to the main site: http://www.evolutioncreations.com or http://evolutioncreations.com at which time DNS will most likely route them to another server that should be less loaded.

This is a simple way to have your site load balanced and provider independent. It does require that your IT staff update up to 4 different sites when making file changes and verify that version control processes are in place to ensure that each of the servers are identical. Does take some work, but not impossible.

Oh and one other thing, I just did a google search for “content delivery network”, Hostway is not the first, looks like other providers like Peer1 are also doing this, and with Peer1, they are a network provider (click here).

So most people that know me, know that every 2 weeks, a buddy of mine and I have our guys game night. So usually we’ll start around mid to late afternoon and wind up gaming through till the wee hours of the next day–usually stopping for an hour or two to refuel from some of the fine restaurants around us (that means greasy, fatty, and certainly not healthy, but damn good!).

On these gaming nights, we’ll play either MMORPG (Massively Multipleplayer Online Role Playing Games) or RTS (Real Time Strategy). In the recent past, our lineup has been some of the following games:

FlyFF
HellGate London
SilkRoad
GuildWars
Supreme Commander
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour

and for the most part it’s been good. But we are always looking for new games to play and expand our horizons. Generally we have been using the guideline that we are only interested in playing Only Purchase Once games or Free online MMORPG games as the subscription based games like World of Warcraft are just too expensive for my gaming habits (his are another story and he games ALOT!).

So we have found a new game for all you gamers: Universe at War. This is put out by a studio that I’ve not heard before (Petroglyph), but published by our good friends at Sega whom we all know and love from the days of the blue spikey haired speed demon! So the advertising for the game said it was for those who are interested in RTS games like StarCraft 2, but do not want to wait for that game to come out. And who can blame us, Blizzard has kept StarCraft 2 in the development pipeline for how many years? I think StarCraft 1 and Broodwars were both back in the mid-1990′s, so we are going on close to a decade since a new release. And the way that they have been developing StarCraft 2, everything is so very hush hush, and for the weekend warrior like myself, we need that instant gratification and gaming fix (we sound like a bunch of addicts!).

At any rate, back to Universe at War. This has turned out to be an AWESOME RTS game. I’ll compare it with Supreme Commander (SC) on a few points. First off, Supreme Commander is one of those games that is just fun. If you played the earlier versions of the game (now we are going back to the days of Total Annihilation here so hang tight), then you know that Supreme Commander is just TA on steroids. Bigger maps, more to build, more options, more strategies. In fact, Supreme Commander almost has TOO MUCH content. We find that our SC/SC:FA games will last in excess of 2 hours, and for game night, that is a HUGE amount of time! But that isn’t to say it isn’t fun, as it is, but you will find that your strategies become very massive and after awhile, everyone has so much in the game, that even the best systems will grind to a halt. The SC/SC:FA are designed to use multiple CPU processors so definitely go out and make sure that your system is dual-core or dual-proc/dual-core so you can run this game in all it’s glory. Also each race is basically a clone of each other, so the diversity in SC/SC:FA can sometimes be challenging. SC:FA does a better job at this as the races are a bit more unique.

Back to comparing SC/SC:FA to Universe at War. So in SC/SC:FA you have a lot of options and massive games, but in Universe at War those are skinned down to a more streamline style of play. You have your 3 races, but they are all drastically unique. One race is built for domination and brute force, the other on technology and mobility, and the last on energy. In many ways, Universe at War reminds me more of the original StarCraft in that each of those 3 races were all drastically unique and the style of your game play was also as equally unique.

If you have played Command & Conquer, you are probably someone who owns either now Command & Conquer: The First Decade, or have independently purchased most of the popular titles within the Command & Conquer (C&C) genre over the last decade. So it was with heavy hearts, that C&C3 was hyped up and when we purchased, installed, and played this game, we were nothing short of bummed out. First off, the maps are TINY! Whereas SC/SC:FA are probably too BIG, C&C3 is just too small to do anything. The game pretty much revolves around your ability to build quickly and rush your enemy as you will soon be fighting for the same tiberium resources because your bases are right next to each other. There are times when you wish Virtual Reality was a thing of the present, cause you could throw a rock from your base and hit your opponents base with ease. Also the game as a lot of cool weapons and builds, but you really never get a chance to use them. An average game will last less than 20 minutes in C&C3. In fact if I had to pick, I would say that of the C&C genre, C&C Generals: Zero Hour is probably my all time favor game to play (also there is a bug in the game where using Windows XP on LAN will crash your game unexpectedly, this has been fixed in Vista, and the game runs FLAWLESSLY–talk about BONUS!).

So in all, Universe at War is basically the middle ground between the two heavy hitter RTS, SC/SC:FA and C&C3. It has nice balance, the game play will last you on LAN with 2 enemies anywhere from 4o-90 minutes, the builds are numerous and within a class you have many various routes that you can take on the resource tree that will change the game drastically from game to game. The graphics are beautiful and the game takes full advantage of multi-core processors. There are a few small hickups in the game, but I expect the fine folks over at Petroglyph studios will be releasing patches quickly to address these issues, nothing major just some game glitches here and there–everything that you would expect from a new game. Who has had a game launch without patches or a few hickups–true gamers know this is to be expected and now shunned.

I would highly recommend that folks interested in RTS go out and purchase this game, whether it be for PC or Xbox360, you can play each other using the Microsoft Live feature, or you can play like I do and just amp up your internal network to a Gigabit connection, and periodically upgrade your gaming rig at the cost of your wife giving you that evil look that you love your computer more than you do her (of course not, but all you guys out there know what I’m talking about!).

So as you all know, I am a smoker. I didn’t start at the stereotypical age of under 18, some high school peer pressure, I hate my parents rebel act, but it started after my first semester in college and when I entered the work force. Let me tell you, that first job you get, makes you want to pull your hair out. Actually I can understand now why so many choose to stay in college and go from their undergraduate, to their graduate to their Ph.D–school is a safe zone that you are free to be creative and without any burdens of the real world expectations to produce and profit.

So I started with marlboro ultra lights, moved to lights, and then stuck it out through the home stretch on red’s or as they call them cowboy killers. As if smoking red’s somehow embodies the belief that you are strong as a cowboy and you are fighting against the odds to win where so many other daring cowboys had fallen. At any rate, I smoked those steadily through my various careers on through Hostway. Now that is interesting, as I became so much addicted to smoking, that I was going through a pack every few days. Now for some that isn’t a lot, but for me, that was a TON! So that went on for a few years. but I realized that slowly bits and pieces of myself were fading away–blowing away with the smoke and ash.

So I quit. At first I thought to myself that it was going to be harder than it really was, so I did the whole patch method. Boy does that not tell you some of the side effects! Let’s just say, stay close to the bathroom! So that got chucked out and I went cold turkey. And you know what, it wasn’t that hard. So I stayed off the horse for several months, and then work turned for the worst and things became difficult, and I got back on the horse. It’s funny what you go to when you are feeling stressed and under the pressure. Some people go to food, others to drinking, me to smoking.

So that lasted awhile longer and then I stopped again. This time I thought it was going to be for the long haul. But sure enough, Qwest Communications deal landed, and I was back on the horse! Let’s just say that as my time at Hostway started to spiral down the drain, I began to smoke more and more. So much in fact, that when I finally did leave Hostway and start with Lagan, I bought an entire carton of smokes with me to Belfast, thinking A) that everyone in Belfast smoked like chimneys and B) that I was going to also smoke like a chimney.

But you know what I found when I got there, that things weren’t at a point that they were for several months before. That I ended up smoking primarily out of habit, vs need. So you know what, when I got back to the States, I ended up quiting the habit. So as of today, I am now over a month off the horse and it feels—so so! Hey now, I can’t say it’s all joy and happiness as I’m hacking up a storm, but it does feel good again to not be burdened by the film and illness that is smoking. Hopefully this time it is for good, let’s hope and pray! So the New Years resolution has begun early, and let’s make it a good 2008!