“Chaos Monkey.”

Remember that Amazon Web Services outage last week? One firm that relies heavily on AWS was untouched: NetFlix. Why do you think that is?

Here’s a hint:

We’ve sometimes referred to the Netflix software architecture in AWS as our Rambo Architecture. Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.

If our recommendations system is down, we degrade the quality of our responses to our customers, but we still respond. We’ll show popular titles instead of personalized picks. If our search system is intolerably slow, streaming should still work perfectly fine.

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

We’ve all seen annoying, silly animated GIF files before, but the odds are that you haven’t seen anything as cool as these animated GIFs they’re calling ‘cinemagraphs’ that seem to capture a single moment somewhat longer than a photo, but less immersive than actual video. Here’s an example:

In truth, they sort of remind me of the moving pictures in the “Harry Potter” world newspapers.

Definitely check these out. There’s more here.

This is brilliant:

Just go watch.

Perhaps the most popular and enduring of Doctor Who’s companions was Sarah Jane Smith, who first showed up with the Third Doctor in 1973, but who was best known for her adventures with the floppy-hatted, long-scarf-wearing Fourth Doctor through about 1977. Gamely played by Elisabeth Sladen, Smith was sort of the viewer’s proxy in riding along with the Doctor’s various adventures — attractive, sure, but not the almost pure cheesecake of some later companions (cough Leela cough, not that I minded at the time).

She even resurfaced in the recent revival, appearing opposite Tenth Doctor David Tennant a few times as an older, wiser Sarah Jane. So loved was she by the Doctor Who faithful that she got her own show for a few years, even.

Sadly, though, Elisabeth Sladen died today, of cancer. She was 63.

[This pretty much rocks](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQtCPTspsag even though I don’t completely understand the principles involved. Just watch it anyway.

During my trips to Wichita, I had occasion to observe, from quite a ways off, a very unusual airplane.

The customer there makes airplane parts, and among the parts they make are components for both the Boeing 737 — sort of the default American airliner; if you’ve flown Southwest, you’ve been on a 737 — as well as the new 787 “Dreamliner,” a tremendously large plane indeed. The 737 bodies leave the plant on a rail head that backs up into the actual building, which is super cool in and of itself. But the 787 parts are too big for rail, or for truck. So what to do?

Turns out, Boeing just made a bigger plane specifically designed to carry superbig parts back to Seattle for final assembly. The entire tail section swings open like a giant toy so that enormous components can be placed inside. How cool is that?

Now, of course, this begs the question: What do they move parts for THAT plane around in? Sadly, the answer is not “an even bigger plane!” Apparently, they’re custom jobs done in Seattle.

Fifty years ago today, mankind stopped being a strictly earthbound species. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the planet. Eight years and change later, mankind had walked on the fucking moon.

Tragically, Gagarin himself died in a training crash a year before Apollo 11, and didn’t live to see it. Cold War or no, my guess is that he’d have been pretty pleased with what the space race bought us as a species, regardless of which flag was on the side of the capsule.

Celebrate Yuri’s Night any way you see fit.

Star Wars Prequels Unreasonably Dangerous and Defective, South Carolina Federal Court Finds; go read the whole thing, as it includes some delicious snark.

the Lucas Defendants asserted the affirmative defenses of contributory negligence, assumption of risk, unclean hands, and equitable estoppel, essentially arguing that Plaintiff knew or should have known of the films’ lack of artistic merit and was thus barred from asserting any tort claims based upon his viewing of same. See In re: The Last Airbender, 523 F. Supp. 2d. 147 (N.D. Ga. 2010); In re: Ishtar Litig., 111 F.2d 102 (9th Cir. 1988).

In denying the defense motion for summary judgment, the court rejected the Defendants’ reliance on In re: Bob Dylan Live Performance Litig., 867 F.3d 539 (S.D.N.Y 2006), in which that court held that a once talented artist can devolve and become so well known in the community as a disappointment that damages are not recoverable as a matter of law. See also Shyamalan v. United States, 543 F.3d 129 (6th Cir. 2008).

This multipart, multimedia feature on time zones is pure gold.

My Kindle experience last night is an exemplar of how tech done right looks magical. When a vendor is less careful about the details of their implementation, though, you end up with situations like my mother’s; I just spent an hour on the phone with her helping her sysadmin her sewing machine.

Paul Baran died late last month. You don’t know the name, but his work informs your daily life in countless ways; Baran was a pioneer in networking, and his work on ARPANET paved the way for the public Internet by which you reach Heathen, among other wonders.

In 1971, when working on ARPANET, he and his group published a list of ways the nacent network might inform our daily lives in the future. All 30 are part of our daily lives today.

On this day in 1975, two nerdy dudes founded a company that’s done wonders for the length, creativity, and pervasiveness of cursing in the workplace.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t start on MSFT related invective until at least 12 or 13 years later, but I’ve more than maceio for lost time since then.

There was a time in web development when it was common to need a spacer or placeholder image of a given size. It’s a shame, then, that the use of PlaceKitten is not more widespread:

A quick and simple service for getting pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code. Just put your image size (width & height) after our URL and you’ll get a placeholder.

Like this: http://placekitten.com/300/250, which produces a kitten 300 pixels wide by 250 pixels high:

Enjoy.

BoingBoing has a great montage of classic video game deaths that you should watch.

The Blackberry maker has been playing catch-up since the introduction of the iPhone, and is now getting it from two sides in smartphones (with the addition of Android) while somehow thinking its new tablet will compete with Apple.

Jean-Louis Gasee has some thoughts that are probably much more right than wrong, and the situation boils down to this: The Blackberry ruled an era where it had no real competition, and where an app ecosystem was at best an afterthought because it shipped with every tool you were ever going to use.

We’re not in the world anymore, and RIM doesn’t know how to deal with that.