I’ve been playing around with HiveMind, which seems like a very powerful framework for building applications. Unfortunately there seems to be little documentation on how to use it, and the learning curve is steep to say the least. So in an attempt to demystify it, here’s my take on “Hello World” in HiveMind. (more…)
Oh, to be back working on the Olympics, or some other event. Nothing quite beats venue-life, and the broadcasters seem to do it better than most.
Update: Well it looks like someone decided that this sort of insider information wasn’t fit for public consumption and this blog is no longer available. One rumour is that the author was concerned about the attention and resultant bandwidth costs. The conspiracy theorists would like to think NBC pulled the plug on it. Shame as I think it was a nice behind-the-scenes view, and as I said it brought back fond memories of my time at sports venues. If you’re still interested in the gritty details of HD broadcasting, the author is answering questions on AVSForum.
Although the entire article is interesting, it is the part about the two-pizza team that caught my attention. So very true, and something more companies should understand and practice.
I thought I had a pile of cool badges from venues and events, but Hubbell the Dog (WaybackLink) beats me hands down!
Back in January Ed wrote a nice summary of Superbowl 1998 and IBMs involvement. It brings a smile to my face, fondly remembering those times. How easy it is to forget the pain of the past as it fades from memory; something that our governments have failed to consider before they embarked on the inevitable war they are about to wage.
Work has kept me away from Blogging in the last few days - not a good start I know. I’m developing plugins for Eclipse which is possibly one of the most frustrating things I’ve done in a long while. It’s a huge and complex sprawling framework develop, and as if that weren’t enough, there is little if any documentation. Like arriving in a major city where they speak a foreign language, with no map or guidebook, and being told to paint the town red. You spent your time wandering around the framework looking for things that are similar to what you want to do, look how they do it and try to copy (sound familiar?).
If I remember right, this was pretty much how I learned much of the HTML and JavaScript that I know (certainly in the early days of the web). While this is fine for something a trivially simple as HTML, it’s not a good model for a huge object-oriented framework. Either that or I’m just not man enough anymore!
Walked home from the office - it’s a good 45 minutes to an hour traversing the City. You get to see a whole cross section of Boston. Decided not to go swimming: on Thursday night Community Running take up 3/5ths of the pool so it’s normally quite crowded. I’ll plan on going tomorrow before going to the Niketown RC Boston Marathon gathering.
I decided it was about time that I actually explained to people what it is that I’ve been doing whilst on assignment with IBM in the US of A. So, hold your breath, here’s the abridged version of a very hectic 20 months …
My assignment really started before I left the UK when I built the first web site for the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This site was not only a first for the IOC but, after a presentation to the IOCs Executive Board, lead on to our successful engagement with ACOG for the Atlanta Olympic Games site.
Once on assignment proper, I helped the Corporate Home Page team to build and staff a “web lab” at the 1996 National Education Summit hosted by Gerstner at IBM Palisades and attended by President Clinton and the Governors of the 52 (?) States. In the lab we continually updated the web site with transcripts, photos and audio of the sessions, as well as providing the only public forum for teachers and parents to air their views with the Governors. We also set up a number of live chat sessions for some of the Governors to talk over the Internet with schools in their home states.
Following on from this I spent the next 3-4 months working in Atlanta assisting with IBMs marketing efforts in the city during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. I was involved with two specific projects: connectivity to all the venues, and a “technology showcase” for the executive hosting program.
The connectivity side included specifying and ordering all WAN and LAN connections as well as coordinating (and in some cases actually doing!) the installs of the networking at all the venues across Atlanta that IBM was using to promote our Olympic involvement.
For the hosting program I was instrumental in specifying and building a technology showcase centered around a virtual restaurant and cybercafe in 2 hotels. The restaurant used multimedia laptops on each table to guide a diner through their meal; from ordering hors d’ourves through to recommending suitable wines. High speed networking between the hotels and to the Internet, a number of Notes servers and a local pager network were used to create this futuristic restaurant.
PlanetNet (now defunct) was the web site we used as the backdrop to this event, attended each night of the games by over 200 of IBMs top customers escorted by our executives.
After Atlanta I was appointed Technical Lead and Webmaster for the IBM Sports and Olympics group, with my main responsibility being the 1997 Grand Slam Tennis and Masters Golf tournaments. Previously these events had been done in an ad hoc manner by a variety of people. One of my roles would be to bring some technical consistency to all the events to ensure that they not only go off flawlessly, but to pull out the common elements so the company could learn from our investment in these things.
Our first event was the Australian Open in January, which proved interesting as much from a logistics standpoint as anything else. Traffic was 10 times higher than the previous year — a truly scary growth which no-one projected — and revealed some interesting patterns as a result of the time difference between Australia and the US.
After Australia I spent a great deal of time working with the IBM Home Page team, in the day-to-day running of the Corporate web site. Together with a number of the technical staff we developed a number of tools and designs which would help us for the coming year.
After a brief vacation, we went into the smallest event of the year in terms of staff and office space — 6 of us crammed into a 12×8 room — the Masters Golf Tournament. Unprecedented interest in the site, caused by Tiger Woods landslide victory, brought us nightmarish system problems on the first day (not helped by the fact that for the 3 days prior to the event, myself and half the team had been struck with food poisoning!).
By day 2 of the tournament, and Gerstners executive walk-through, things were on an even keel again after a very long night re-architecting the whole site :-). We got things working so well by the end, I even got to get out and see Tiger make his last put on the 18th green to win his first green jacket at Augusta.
Beside the overnight turnaround of a potentially damaging press situation, the other highlight of the Masters was the extent to which we used Lotus Domino for the first time at a major event. Despite our reservations we managed to seamlessly serve over 10% of the site from Domino, speeding up our whole authoring process and hence the time taken to put articles on the site.
Post-Masters the business realised that we needed to begin seriously looking at what we we’re going to do to host the Nagano Winter Olympic Games in February 1998. It was projected that the site would need to be capable of handling 100 million hits a day, with over 5 times that at peak. An architecture team was formed comprising of the key technical staff in each of the areas needed to build the complete solution, including network, hardware, software, systems, security and support. As the “web head” on the team, my role was to bring the understanding of how event sites work and pull the overall systems/server architecture together. To share this role, I was paired with Cam Ferstat, an asignee from IBM Australia.
The beginning of, what became known as, “the Longest Summer” started with the Deep Blue II chess site. In 1996 Deep Blue’s popularity had caught us unawares and we we’re determined not to suffer the same problems again. All of the IBM home page SP2 complex was turned around to host the site which saw upwards of 21 million “hits” on the busiest day: the highest traffic’d web site IBM has ever built! We even managed to mirror the site in real-time to a machine in Portsmouth for European surfers to get the news that bit quicker.
After the sucess with using Domino at the Masters we took the decision to author the entire French Open site (also known as Roland Garros) in Domino. We were aware of the problems scaling Domino to the levels needed to support a Grand Slam site so devised a proxying mechanism to sit infront of the Domino servers which we knew would handle the load. Despite no-one to help develop this other than myself Glenn Druce from Lotus, we managed to cobble something together and prove that Domino is a viable — albeit quirky — platform to build a live event site on!
In addition to scaling Domino beyond it’s vanilla limitations, we mirrored the site in the UK and in the process learned a lot about the flexibility and applicability of Notes spread globally managing timely data.
Wimbledon is only two weeks after the Paris tournament, and for obvious reasons we chose prior to France to build a “traditional” site with no more Domino than we had proved worked at the Masters. As a result it was possible for us to use the vanilla IBM Global Network (IGN) hosting complex in EMEA to master the site, mirroring it to our SP2s in the US. While only 10% of the traffic hit the EMEA servers, the content was always sent there before being mirrored to the US, and gave us an opportunity to drive the EMEA complex to levels it hadn’t seen before.
In the midst of all of this I spent time designing the front end (FE) component for the fledgling Managed Intranet Service (MIS) which was being designed and ideas thrown around. This project is still in a holding state, but my design has sparked a number of calls from other services and has been discussed at length with Global Business Systems.
From the outside the US Open site contained nothing new, but on the backend the site was completely new: it was decided from a long way out that this event would be used to test the Nagano architecture we had been working on, and to that end all the hardware, software and network was built and installed from scratch in the month leading up to the event.
We tested and clarified many of our architectural decisions: from traffic balancing, to fail-over and redundancy; hosting multiple sites (the United States Tennis Association (USTA) ran on out complex during the event) and managing multiple content streams. To a greater extent this site is the culmination of a years worth of my experience doing events and contained too many “firsts” to list here. Some of the highlights being ICS’ ability to handle event traffic (we tried it at both the Masters and Deep Blue with no success) and transparent geographic traffic balancing. Overall the testing went very well with very few stones left unturned: a very good position to be in with over 4 months to go before the Nagano games.
Immediately following the US Open, I returned to the UK. In fact, during the event my mailing address was the Marriot Marquis, Times Square, NY since I had vacated my flat in Tampa prior to starting work on the event.
Ongoing I will continue to be involved as a key member of the Nagano architecture team, and one of the two webmasters for the site, with Cam. As a result of my experience with the other sports events, I am also advising the IBM Interactive Media Center (IMC) in Atlanta, who will now be responsible to produce and deliver these sites, on what we need to do to build a “cybercasting” team and infrastructure to support them.
In general the assignment has been a sort of “baptism by fire”: being thrown into high pressure, high profile situations, many of which I had little technical experience of and having to deal with them. I’ve learnt an enormous number of skills, both technically and personally, that I don’t believe I could ever have learned by staying in the UK. I have had exposure and hands-on experience to some of the latest software and products from IBM, Lotus and our competitors, and have made a wide variety of contacts across the company with some of the key technical staff who genuinely understand this technology.