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Last week I was again privileged to attend another marvelous four-and-a-half days of ideas, innovation, design, empathy and fun at TED. Last year the conference was held in Monterey, CA with a simulcast setup in Aspen, CO. At that time I was invited to join the gathering at Monterey and enjoy the sessions down there. This time the venues changed; the primary event was at Long Beach, CA (Beach) while the simulcast was at Palm Springs, CA (Mountains, Desert). I was a guest at the Palm Springs venue which was beautiful (check my video here) and about 28 degrees celcius, which is quite important when coming from a cold country like the Netherlands.

Because I arrived early I subscribed for one of the pre-conference safari rides (great opportunity to meet new people. If you ever go to TED, be sure to be a day early and catch one of those trips. Don’t fall for the “you should not wear flip flops because of the scorpions”, we did not see any scorpions, snakes or any other animal that tried to attack us). The next day the conference started and it was great. During one of our many “pool party’s” which are excellent events to meet new people and share ideas, people started asking me what the difference was between the ‘main thing’ at Long Beach and the experience at Palm Springs. So for people that want to attend TED but are unable to decide to which location to apply for I’ve created a summary of the differences that came across. Please note that this is the way I’ve experienced it, and that I might differ a lot from other experiences.

Ted@Longbeach is the main thing therefore most of the ‘big’ speakers are in that location and when they are speaking you’re actually there to experience it. No matter how much effort goes into the experience being shared with Palm Springs (and the TED crew do put in a lot of effort, more on that later) nothing beats being in the same room as the speaker / performer. But.. imagine 10 different kind of couches, seats and ‘beds’, high quality screens and a HD satellite uplink from Long Beach. Meanwhile a continuous supply of food and beverages (we should have one of those Google Café’s in our office) keeps you from getting hungry or thirsty. I’m not sure about the actual location (since I’ve not been at Long Beach) but the Riviera at Palm Springs is very nice. Though some of the other TEDsters and myself were thinking of joining the pool pleasure while attending the conference; what about screens at the pool?

The biggest difference between PS and LB are the TEDsters themselves (assuming the people at LB are similar as in Monterey). Among the LBTedsters are speakers, philanthropist and famous actors / artist. People that are well accomplished in life and (generally speaking) very set on their goals and purposes. Events and chats amongst attendees are somewhat more formal. Ideas need to be well considered and talked about but as soon as people are motivated they’re willing to put in a lot of energy. At PS the ambiance is much less formal. Many people show up after the conference at the local pool parties, discussions are very energetic and everybody gets involved. Friendships are being formed easily and just after a day most people know each other (this is of course also because PS only has 400 people while LB has over 1200).

To summarize, I think idea creativity (thinking of new ideas and have your ideas tested) is something that happens a little more with the people at PS while the folks at LB (again all in general) are more about the actual implementation and possibilities. If you ever get the chance of visiting TED, apply to Palm Springs the first year. Gather ideas and meet (new) people to test and elaborate on them. Then apply for Long Beach to get your idea going. Either way, it’s not an experience you’d want to miss!

Update: i’ve redone the clip in vimeo, which is 30 times better than Youtube.

Ofcourse i’ll write some more about Velocity later on (we had some more nice sessions to write about). However, i just created a little clip of Bart and me renting a Ford Focus (see below). I’m not going to get some sleep. Tomorrow i’ll change hotels to one close to Fisherman’s Wharf.

In short: today is already much better then yesterday! First we had a great talk from Steve Sounders about HTML / JS optimization. The thing i didn’t know is that the order and methods used in creating HTML and JS based sites is very determend for the actual speed of your site in a browser. For example: if you have a image load after a javacscript section the browser will (by default) not preload the image (the js will cause a blocking situation). So Steve mentioned a lot of methods to get around this. The thing is, for me it still feels like working around a bigger problem. The fact that browsers still have different interperations for the same type of source is irritating to say the least. I also not understand that the above situation occurs. Why not start a massive pre-fetch operation after parsing the HTML? I can understand that such an operation is useless when followed by a script that decides wether or not the script actually needs to be loaded. However, this also can be scanned by a parser.

Steve was followed up by Adam Bechtel from Yahoo. He compared major infrastrutures with plumbing. An extremely good presentation. Not specificallly because it was new information, but more because the way of thinking while desiging a infrastructure. Since at IC&S we do this often for our customers, this was very refreshing.

David Ulevitch (everydns.net, opendns.com) has a good story about this method called anycast which is basically, using some loopholes in BGP to create real network load balacing and automatic failover. By assigning a /24 subnet to a single server or a cluster of servers those /24 can be assigned it’s own BGP route. This route will be announced all the way to your connection provider. If this is done at multiple locations traffic will be routed to the nearest costpath location (which is the location which has the lowest networking path cost). So, automatic balancing occurs. When one of those locations has a fall out, the route is deleted and all traffic will ‘failover’ to one of the alternate locations. Why is this kind of dirty? Well, flapping can occur, in which case the BGP routing entry will be created and deleted in routers all over the world multiple times (this can lead to damping in which case the uplink providers will delete the route). Also,  because the smallest subnet that can be routed with BGP on the internet is a /24. So your server will use up this complete subnet of ipnumbers. This problem can ofcourse be fixed by using multiple hosts on this cluster and duplicate it completly somewhere else.

After this dark scheme of BGP hacking Adam Jacob came on stage to tell us about building automated infrastructures. This was a very cool talk. He basically explained what tools to use to create a completly automated infrastructure (hence the title of his talk). What was so nice about it is how easy this actually is. Ofcourse, at we do stuff like that already at IC&S but we learned a lot of new stuff. The part about how to deploy a platform on EC2 and extent it when needed with just a few click was very interesting. Parts of it we’ll most certainly use for our Jitscale service.

Currently i’m listing to Peter Zaitsev about mysql scaling and performance. Since his english is quite hard to understand and he’s – as he’s telling us himself – not providing a silver bullit for performance solutions on mysql the talk is not really interesting. Let’s see what’s next!

Another day at Velocity has started! We’re now looking at how Faceball should be done correctly. This is the howto video. Everybody get their thanks (as if the conference is over already!) More later!

So, we’re still alive and kicking here at Velocity.. altough the jetlag is getting to us right now and people around us have to start talking slowly for u to be able to understand

As a roundup; it was a nice day, a few good speaker, some not so good. I think i’m a bit spoiled by TED at which every speaker was marvelous there were no dull moments to be found. Anyways, i’m looking forward to tomorrow which, looking at the schedule, has some nice sessions. At this time we’re waiting for the Ignite sessions to start. These sessions feature startups that can present their idea’s to an expert audience (us). Tomorrow morning one of the ignitees wil be the winner. No idea what they’ll be winning though.

Below is a little clip i shot on our way from Velocity to Beni Hana’s. Bart and Justin conclude the first day of Velocity in this clip. Have fun!

I’ve created a little clip about the first morning here at Velocity (all the way down in this post). I must say, some of the items are interesting; Javier from Hyperic announced a very nice platform (Cloudstatus) that measure cloud performance. Since cloud computing is a center point in our new Jitscale service (site will be available soon) the measurement of the quality of the cloud is very important for both the quality of the service as well as monitoring the area’s of improvement. Other items are not too good to handle while having a jetlag. I’m blaming it on the jetlag for now.. Currently we’re attending a session about Content Distribution Networks (like Akamai, Limelight). It’s not too bad but because it a panel based session it’s not really a coherent story.

To describe the quality of the session: Bart has grabed and put down his laptop for about six times already

More later!

Update: Whoops forgot to include the movie!

Hi all,

This will be about me in conjunction with my experiences on a technical level. So if i’m seeing or doing something which is cool enough to tell about, i’ll post it here. Tomorrow (sunday) i’ll be leaving to San Francisco for the Velocity 2008 conference. Although I’ll be missing my wife and my little buddy Kyan a lot, i think i’ll have a good time learning about new developments with regards to high performance web platforms.

I’ll use this blog (and our corporate blog) to tell about our experiences. I’ll also use this blog to upload some video’s and everything else i’ll come across with!