Vos Virtual Network

It appears that YouTube has gone down on Saturday morning (at 09:30AM Eastern Time), or is unreachable. Not sure how long the outage will last. I first noticed that some YouTube embedded flash videos where not showing up on my blog. So, tried to access youtube.com directly, and got this message:

Next I ran a DNS test using my trusted rebol console (and hit escape getting bored waiting for a youtube DNS response):

Still a little curious about what was going on, I ran some more advanced diagnostics:

DiG 9.2.4 <<>> -t A youtube.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 55581
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;youtube.com. IN A

;; Query time: 1818 msec
;; SERVER: 69.56.222.10#53(69.56.222.10)
;; WHEN: Sat May 3 06:56:59 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 29

That is a really slow DNS response. Trace-routes were failing from multiple sources? Is it really down, or is DNS just responding sooooo slooooowly that nobody can reach it? So that told me it could be taking 1818 milli-seconds for a DNS reply. Compared to 1 msec for google.com, and 43 msec for vvn.net. Yep, that confirms it. Something is happening with YouTube this morning.

I ran more tests from multiple sources just to check/confirm response times around the globe (using Host Tracker). Yep, YouTube is having trouble this morning:

If you know what’s going on, or what happened, please leave a comment. More later…

Updates (these are my updates as I hear about them, not necessarily an exact chronology of events or blog alerts this morning):

09:02AM (or is that 10:02) Paul McNamara at NetworkWorld News said his 6 year old son Max scooped the story, and published YouTube is Down, Everybody Panic.

10:13AM Mashable also reported YouTube down around the globe, about 6 minutes ago.

10:23AM Center Networks is speculating that a DNS hack is the culprit.

10:30AM It appears that YouTube.com is back online from my location, but still unreachable from many locations around the globe [responses: 12 Ok 33 Fail live report @10:30AM] (not reachable from Argentina, Brazil, France, Russia, and several major US cities, etc.)

10:41AM Chemboy at nerdsrule seems a little too happy that YouTube went down.

10:48AM I think Khyri got the real scoop, on what happened when she ran a Whois query.

11:11AM YouTube is working great from my location in Detroit. However, YouTube is “still down” (because of DNS trouble) at many locations around the globe - responses: 17 Ok 22 Fail

12:44PM Looks like YouTube DNS is fixed. Only Brazil having trouble - responses: 40 Ok 1 Fail

Tags: DNS, outage, trace route, youtube

Scenario: You are finally convinced that Ruby on Rails is a great platform for building web applications, and so you try it out and build this awesome new website in only 3 weeks of development. You launch version 0.99 beta and everyone thinks it’s cool. Maybe it’s something like Insoshi, or Twitter. (Insoshi is hot new social networking platform (FOSS) written in Ruby on Rails (RoR). Yes, they eat their own dog food.)

Scene 2: TechCrunch posts an article telling the world about your cool RoR Open Source Social Networking stuff. This is great free publicity, but can your application handle the TechCrunch effect? Will your RoR Social Networking application be able to handle the spike in traffic? Can you handle the success of becoming a very popular new application? (Rumor mill… Twitter is having scaling problems… said to be abandoning Ruby on Rails. However DHH, the master architect of RoR, joined Twitter as D2H on 29-Apr-2008, and instantly had over 1200 followers.)

Scene 3: Slashdot comes back online after being down for 5 hours, and someone posts an article about your hot beta site — sez its cool. Will it suffer from the Slashdot effect? How will your application perform under peak load? Does it scale up to handle thousands or millions of hits per hour?

Scene 4: You can’t handle the TechCrunch effect and Slashdot effect all on the same day. Your web site crashes and burns. Your dream, website, and reputation is ruined — all in one day.

Scene 5: You wake up from the nightmare. It was only dream. It’s morning. You make some coffee and read the technology news. You check out the new Ruby on Rails performance monitoring tool from New Relic, and you listen to the Mashable podcast interview of Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic. Lew says they wrote the New Relic performance monitoring tool using Ruby, so he’s proud to say they eat their own dog food.

Scene 6: You get back to work — a little wiser.

Tags: RoR, Ruby, ruby on rails, twitter

Star Parker, founder of the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Eduction ( CURE ), has written 3 books. Uncle Sam’s Plantation, published in 2003, is her second book. ISBN:0785262199

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. [ Wikipedia article about Star Parker ]

Back Cover Synopsis:

“America has two economic systems: capitalism for the rich and socialism for the poor. This double-minded approach seems to keep the poor enslaved to poverty while the rich get richer. In Uncle Sam’s Plantation, Star Parker offers simple yet profound steps that will allow the nation’s poor to go from entitlement and slavery to empowerment and freedom. Parker shares her own amazing journey up from the lower rungs of the economic system and addresses the importance of extending the free market system to this neglected group of people.”

Gary from Kansas City says: “This lady is bold and very aware of what is going on in America, especially in the black community. She is saying what everyone’s thinking but afraid to say.”

Jason Sheck says: “Growing up a ‘privileged white male’ allowed for me to become complacent and uninformed of America’s most significant social ills. Star Parker’s book has totally showed me the reality that people are facing everyday in this country.”

Tucker Anderson says:

Star Parker doesn’t hesitate to speak truth to power, since she has the credentials to do so. She has lived the self destructive and joyless life so prevalent in the welfare community and she has overcome incredible obstacles (often self imposed). Thus, while anyone can fairly disagree with her often controversial conclusions and recommendations, she clearly has the moral legitimacy to present them. These are insights invariably gained from personal experience and sharpened by an inquiring mind.

… the book describes the devastating effects of government dependency not from an academic perspective but rather through the eyes of someone who has escaped from the addiction which entraps so many individuals. The book is almost conversational in tone, yet provides many powerful philosophical insights and much well reasoned discussion. At times, some of the imagery created by the author’s prose almost becomes poetic. While I was familiar with both the author’s background and much of her philosophy, I still found the book both enjoyable and thought provoking.

Mr. Club Soda says:

… a once free people are inexorably drawn into the bondage of the nanny state and the soft bigotry of lowered expectations. Star Parker, a black woman who was once a slave to the cycle of welfare and abortion, calls it Uncle Sam’s Plantation, which is an apt description of the powerful force government’s endorsement of vice and misery has on regular people, and particularly the disadvantaged.

The book is also referenced in the International Journal of Public Administration, Volume 30, Number 1, January 2007, pp. 77-93

Abstract:

“African-American and Latino under-representation in the Information Technology (IT) industry appears to be perpetuated throughout institutions in society. An examination of the institutional and ideological social forces which arguably perpetuate the exclusion of African Americans and Latinos from greater representation in the IT field will be provided.”

Tags: dependency, diversity, empowerment, free market, welfare

From the Free Refill Department, the Better Late Than Early Department, and the Boy Who Cried Wolf Department, comes this interesting news item:

Java is “really open” Open Source now. Almost.

Yahoo reported this hot Java news on Earth Day, and Slashdot reported it and rehashed it on World Book Day, eWeek analyzed it last Wednesday, and snail mailed it on Monday, and I’m finally mentioning it on Bring Your Child to Work Day. I hope my 13 year old daughter doesn’t ask me to explain the difference between FOSS and “free beer”, or stump me with questions about how the CDDL is different than the GPL. I just enjoy drinking the free coffee. I drink the free coffee every day at work. Why? I just like it. Don’t ask me any difficult questions.

But seriously… all joking aside, seems like Jonathan Schwartz really gets it.

Tags: FOSS, GPL, java, open-source, Sun

Google goes green today with an alternate logo to celebrate Earth Day, which the USA started celebrating on April 22, 1970.

Michael Arrington says Twitter is now such a vital part of the technology ecology, that service outages barely matter, and as he says “I need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.”

Wired Magazine looks back to frightful days in World War I, remembering the trench warfare — chemical weapons; poison gas — on this day in 1915.

I’m thankful to be alive on the privileged planet today, and I realize that every breath is a gift. I need the earth more than the earth needs me… I need more oxygen, just like SlashDot needs more electricity to keep the creation/evolution debate going.

Yesterday, WordPress wizard Matt Mullenweg, jazzed up his blog with a new spring theme. I wonder if he designed it that way, or it just evolved by itself.

Zeldman (ALA) published a couple interesting and helpful articles on the Why and How of Ruby on Rails this morning.

Creating new stuff isn’t easy. Meticulous and beautiful designs don’t just happen by accident. Computer programs don’t write themselves. However, some scientists (like Richard Dawkins) theorize that DNA wrote itself. So, if you follow that theory, you can Twine your PC to some random Twitter feeds, go to the beach all afternoon, and when you get back, your new Ruby on Rails program will have written itself. Try explaining that one to your boss. Or better yet, find some VCs who will invest in it. (The only catch is that they might have to wait billions and billions of years for the ROI). That plan might work for you… but for programmers looking for some good advice today, you might want to check out StackOverflow.com (a new advice service for programmers) — from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.

Back to the Planet - After a flaming descent, and a “scary crash landing”, Korean, Russian, and American astronauts are glad to be back on planet earth after a visit to the International Space Station. Yi So-yeon, a nano-technology engineer from Seoul, Korea — spent 11 days in space. Peggy Whitson had been gone for 192 days (and needed help walking), and now Peggy holds the American record for most days lived in outer space — 377 days.

Tags: earth day, rails, RoR, twine, twitter, WordPress

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

The video is kind of funny, and does reveal some tidbits of truth about the complexity of enterprise java development. But those who have been reading about Ruby and JRuby for a while realize that you can run Ruby and Ruby On Rails with Java.

But if you think about it… guess that goes to show you there’s a-lotta-truth here.

Tags: java, Mac, rails, RoR, Ruby, ruby on rails, video

Thin is a Ruby web server that glues together 3 Ruby libraries:

1. the Mongrel parser, the root of Mongrel speed and security
2. Event Machine, I/O library with high scalability, performance and stability
3. Rack, a minimal interface between webservers and Ruby frameworks

So, Thin is the new dog in town. Did I mention that Thin is fast and flexible?

Thank-you Marc Cournoyer !

Tags: comparison, mongrel, rails, RoR, Ruby, ruby on rails, web server