Brian Alvey

C.K. Sample linked to this gorgeous picture of Tony Stark which showed how the Iron Man movie would look if it had been done by Pixar instead of Marvel. It made me wonder what Marvel movies would be like if Pixar made all of them, so I speculated in a bunch of tweets using the hashtag #PixarDoesMarvel.

Here they all are:

• THOR STORY: When Beta Ray Buzz crash lands on earth, Thor and his warrior friends help him defeat evil emperor Grog.
• A BUG’S WIFE: When Spider-Man is captured by the Sinister Six, Mary Jane Watson worries that he’ll miss their wedding.
• MUTANTS, INC.: When Magneto captures Banshee to harness the power of his screams, Professor X’s students must save the day.
• FINDING BARON NEMO: Captain America and amnesia-stricken Prince Namor search the globe for Baron Nemo during World War 2.
• THE INCREDIBLES: It’s a movie about the Fantastic Four and this time Pixar doesn’t have to pretend that it isn’t.
• SECRET CARS: Heroes and villains become cars and are forced to race each other on a planet created by the Toyota Beyonder.
• GAMMATOUILLE: Chef Bruce Banner has a secret. He can only make his famous soup when he turns into the Hulk.
• WOLV-E: He’s the best there is at what he does, and what he does is carve Sentinels into scraps in this alternate future.
• UP NORTH: Canadian super team Alpha Flight travels to Paradise Falls after Snowbird is kidnapped by a discredited explorer.

Why yes, I do have three young children. How did you know?

This morning I turned off my alarm and fell back asleep for about 20 minutes. I snapped awake after a crazy dream and was lucky to make it to a 9am meeting.

First, I’d like to thank my subconscious for waking me up without my alarm.

Second, I’d like to tell my subconscious that this was a bizarre way to wake me up.

In my dream, Jason Calacanis was standing next to me in his usual pink collared dress shirt while I sat in front of a giant media PC and edited audio files. We were working on the latest audio track for one of our customers. Jason and I were back in a startup again and this time our business was making jingles for radio commercials. Our customer was a skin cancer clinic.

Jason: Think of some popular Spin Doctors songs. We can use one of those.

Me: So like Spin Doctors instead of Skin Doctors?

Jason hated when I made obvious puns, so why was he making one? [Editor’s note: this was your mind telling the story here, Brian.] Jason had preferred the name “Engadget” over my “Gear Eye” as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was popular then, but he said that one day it would be an obscure reference. He was right.

Jason: Right. We could use a Spin Doctors song. I know the lead singer! He and I…

Me: …played chess on a cruise around New York City for an hour. Like twenty years ago. I know. I don’t like it. The best “skin” angle I can think of is “Two Pinches” instead of “Two Princes.” That sucks.

Jason: What if we do it like they’re the A-Team? A bunch of mercenary doctors in scrubs with skin cancer blasting weapons.

Me: Maybe. “I love it when a cure comes together!” Hey. What about Ghostbusters? There’s a team with weapons. And we could use the Ghostbusters theme! “Who you gonna call? Growthbusters!“

Jason: I love it.

Me: “I ain’t afraid of no growths!” Wow. I love it too.

Jason: The song is old. We can get rights to use it cheap. We just have to find Billy Ocean.

Me: Billy Ocean?

Jason: He did Ghostbusters.

Me: No he didn’t.

Jason: Yes he did. He did the Ghostbusters theme and the one about Get Into My Car and Private Booty Queen.

Me: Private Booty Queen?

Jason: Yeah (singing) “Private Booty Queen, now we’re sharing the same dream…”

Me: That’s Caribbean Queen!

Jason: Sounds like Private Booty Queen to me.

[Editor’s note: Seriously, listen to the song again. This is an easy mistake to make.]

Me: I don’t even have to Google it. It’s Ray Parker, Jr. He did Ghostbusters.

And then suddenly I was awake. [Editor’s note: You wake up suddenly?]

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UPDATE: I have been informed that I have blogged about my Jason dreams before. Very oddly, I used the exact same Billy Ocean song as inspiration for the title of that post too: Get out of my dreams, get into my church. It was nearly five years ago and somehow the awesome domain name Kabbalahster.com is still available.

Jeffrey Zeldman posted an interesting reader letter, called Letter of the Month.

The author wrote Jeffrey to explain that his Designing With Web Standards book had changed his entire career.

I remember what I now refer to as a pivotal moment in my web career. I was sitting in bed reading your book. I knew nothing really about CSS (other than for setting fonts/colours and I couldn’t see what was wrong with the old way of doing things). However as I read, it was like a slow realisation. I remember vividly turning to my wife and saying “This book is amazing. I am going to have to relearn everything I know about building websites”. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On one hand the enormity of what you were suggesting was overwhelming but on the other hand it was just the injection I needed in my own career.

I reached the end of the book and made a decision. I was going to move the whole of Headscape across to standards based design. Not only that was I was going to do it as soon as possible. By 2005 we had made the transition and have never looked back.

The author was Paul Boag, whose Boagworld podcasts I’ve enjoyed. As the author was revealed it felt like reading some of Brando’s fan mail — signed by a young Al Pacino.

It reminded me that I had the opposite reaction with Jeffrey.

When I’ve talked to people recently about working on several projects with Jeffrey when Happy Cog was a one-man shop, I’ve said something like “I was a designer and Zeldman was a designer. But he had a book, so I did the server-side work.” That’s an oversimplification of course. Front-end web design work in the days of Netscape 4 and the Great Browser Wars was a nightmare. Working in SQL stored procedures and ASP and VB Script was harder than HTML in many ways, but 100 times easier than dealing with browser compatibility. All the code I wrote was guaranteed to run the same way over and over, regardless of the visiting browser.

So thanks in part to working with Jeffrey, I quit doing web design and never looked back.

Two weeks ago, our Crowd Fusion team was right in the middle of the big cloud outage at Amazon. All of the big brands using our platform run on Amazon servers.

George Reese from O’Reilly had the best early recap and perspective of the dozens of stories I read:

If you think this week exposed weakness in the cloud, you don’t get it: it was the cloud’s shining moment, exposing the strength of cloud computing.

In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn’t Amazon’s fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon’s cloud computing model. The strength of cloud computing is that it puts control over application availability in the hands of the application developer and not in the hands of your IT staff, data center limitations, or a managed services provider.

Here are some excerpts from our story in the trenches:

After informing the Amazon representative that we had failed over to the west coast and that we no longer needed this running instance, he urged us to decommission all the US East instances that we were not using in order to free capacity in that region.

He was impressed that we had successfully failed over to the US West region when so many others were still down and said: “You were one of the very few to have a west coast contingency plan and recover quickly. Bravo.”

Read our very detailed Crowd Fusion cloudpocalypse story here.

[This post originally appeared on the Crowd Fusion website, which has been replaced by ceros.com.]

As a company who works with several enterprise customers in Amazon’s cloud, Crowd Fusion would like to remind everyone of what life outside of the cloud can be like. Remember, in 2007 when a Texas pickup truck rammed into a Rackspace Datacenter and took a large part of the internet offline for three hours? That was the result of one truck.

We are much happier living in the cloud than we were back in the days we were using traditional servers. There are multiple benefits to the cloud that are attractive to both us and our customers, including the ability to launch a multitude of servers when traffic starts to heat up for a breaking news story.

However, we also are intimately aware that to live in the cloud, you actually have to be more diligent about architecting and planning for failure. There aren’t any trucks that are going to run into your data centers, but there are days like Thursday April 21, 2011, when Amazon Web Services experienced escalating problems in one of their regions.

The Morning

We experienced EBS failure in the early AM on Thursday. As luck would have it, this only affected 4 of our 28 EBS-based instances, and none of those instances were single points of failure. As a result, none of our clients (like TMZ, Tecca, and News Corp’s The Daily) experienced any downtime during the early parts of Amazon’s issues. We run multiple accounts and Amazon rotates the availability zone names per account, so it’s unclear how many of those instances were in the one affected availability zone. We suffered degraded performance temporarily while we were able to remove those instances from our application’s connection pool.

At roughly 10:30am EDT, an Amazon representative via Amazon Gold support indicated that we would be unable to provision new instances in any US-east availability zone due to EBS API queues being saturated with requests. We asked if we could expect our currently running EBS instances to fail, or were we simply unable to use the EBS API to create/restore/backup volumes? Our rep answered, “Currently running instances are not affected. This only affects the ability to restore and launch.” We were still 100% up but on less hardware, so we accepted temporary higher utilization of our hardware while the EBS API issues were being resolved at Amazon. Amazon asked us to disable all our EBS API calls in order to help alleviate their queue problem.

The advice we received from our Gold Support was corroborated by an Amazon Health Status update at 11:54am EDT:

We’d like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We’re starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

Contingency Planning

In the past, we have seen Amazon EBS volumes suffer degraded performance, often during EBS snapshot operations. During those times, we have had to disable EBS snapshots, and sometimes pull MySQL slave databases from our application’s connection pool or promote a MySQL slave to a MySQL master. After the second time this happened, we decided it was prudent to have a replicating MySQL slave in the US West region as a contingency plan.

We had a disaster recovery process in place for spinning up our entire infrastructure on Amazon’s US West region in under an hour.

Loss of Master Database

At 12:45pm EDT, one of our customers reported having problems posting in their CMS. At 12:50pm EDT, their MySQL master databases went to 100% CPU i/o wait and was unavailable. For a customer whose business is publishing stories ahead of their competition, this outage was mission critical.

Normally, our immediate response would be to promote a slave and continue to operate in the US East region. But because there was no indication from Amazon that these issues weren’t spreading across all EBS volumes in all US East availability zones, we decided the best course of action was to failover to the US West region. Less than 45 minutes later, our customer was back online. Roughly an hour after that, things were stable enough where they were able to continue posting breaking news posts.

Amazon Recovery Call

The next day, on Friday at 3:30pm EDT, our client’s master database in the US East region finally recovered. It was at 100% CPU i/o wait for over 26.5 hours. That’s 25 hours after we had our customer back up and running on the West Coast. Two hours after the database recovered, we received a follow-up phone call from Amazon support informing us that our EBS volume had recovered.

In an attempt to confirm the functionality of their recovery process, we were asked if our volume had been recovered to the state it was in before it was lost. It was. We had not lost any data.

After informing the Amazon representative that we had failed over to the West coast and that we no longer needed this running instance, he urged us to decommission all the US East instances that we were not using in order to free capacity in that region.

He was impressed that we had successfully failed over to the US West region when so many others were still down and said: “You were one of the very few to have a West coast contingency plan and recover quickly. Bravo.”

Plan for Failure

When designing large-scale web applications, if you are not designing for failure at every piece of infrastructure, it’s not a matter of if you’ll fail, it’s a matter of when. This is not specific to the cloud, but the cloud makes planning for failure more essential.

As much as we hate to admit it, the cloud is simply more susceptible to failure than dedicated hardware. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one is complexity. There are just more moving parts. There are layers of virtualization, there are multiple tenants, and there are APIs developed by the cloud providers for the purpose of programmatically controlling hardware resources. The major advantages of this complexity far outweigh the drawbacks: more flexibility and more cost efficiency.

We were downright lucky we had a US West contingency plan. It is an expensive endeavor to have multiple mirrored instances running on the more expensive coast just in case everything goes down. We hoped we’d never have to actually use it, but in hindsight, it was the best possible solution to the situation, and a solution we will continue to use in the future. And like most companies affected by this outage, we already have many planned improvements to our application’s tolerance for failure.

Amazon EBS

Amazon’s EBS technology continues to be the best AWS cloud solution for MySQL database storage. For larger instances, the performance difference compared to an instance’s local drive is substantial. The EBS snapshot feature allows us to create backups without putting additional strain on our instances, and the restoration period is shorter.

The major disadvantages to using EBS are degrading performance and reliability concerns. Like all things in the cloud, as long as you plan for failure of an EBS volume, it is still the best possible option.

It’s been argued that the sites that didn’t go down don’t rely on EBS, but relying on any one piece to be 100% available is still a single point of failure you have to plan for. During one of our EBS failures, we were actually able to restore functionality within minutes by restoring data to the local disk instead of EBS.

We’re sticking with Amazon

Amazon is the only cloud provider that allows us to failover to another region without extensive effort, and they have growing geographical coverage for even more failover options.

Amazon is also leading the pack with more cloud services like SQS, CloudFormation, S3, SimpleDB, SNS, EMR, RDS, etc. As other cloud providers advance their features and options, the choice won’t be as easy.

Update: Amazon finally issued their apology with a summary of the outage details.

Eric Snider used to work for Cinematical before AOL bought The Huffington Post to improve AOL’s leadership position as the place where brands go to die.

I was just going to link to his scathing Leaving in a Huff post on Twitter, but there were too many great quotes for 140 characters:

• “Say what you will about AOL, but when you perform work for them, they pay you. They’re old-fashioned like that.”
• “That’s how newspapers operate, and goodness knows that industry is running smoothly.”
• “We were like stewardesses handing out peanuts on the Hindenburg.”
• “He knows that when space aliens invade, and a weaselly human swears allegiance to them in exchange for not being killed, the weaselly human always winds up getting killed anyway.”
• “We may be whores, but we are not sluts.”
• “You will note that, as with most professional communiques regarding the termination of a subcontractor’s services, this one begins with the traditional ‘Hi there.'”
• “You’ve got fail.”

And many, many more. It ends with a recap of the wild email thread where people at AOL were still asking bloggers who were fired or resigned to pitch posts. For pay. I think.

Enjoy.

Note: While I’m against a lot of things that are going on and it’s easy to jump on the AOL hating bandwagon, I understand that there is always a logical consolidation of overlapping divisions and brands in a merger. And sometimes companies take the opportunity to trim profitable divisions that don’t overlap with newly merged brands under the pretenses of that merger. Which is probably what happened to Download Squad. There is psychic organizational overhead in trying to manage 100+ brands, so sometimes sites get shut down for reasons other than profit and traffic.

I also don’t believe the unpaid HuffPo bloggers deserve a financial settlement. “Implied contracts” aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Mathew Ingram said it best in Blogging for HuffPo Is Like Writing Open-Source Code. The only settlement Arianna Huffington will face on this front is with karma.

[This press release originally appeared on the Crowd Fusion website, which has been replaced by ceros.com.]

Crowd Fusion Announces it is the Content Management System for The Daily

New York, NY, March 16, 2011 — Marking a little over a month since The Daily was revealed, Crowd Fusion officially announces that it is the content management system behind the industry’s first national daily news publication exclusively available on the iPad. The editorial and production staff of The Daily use Crowd Fusion as a key part of their next generation digital newsroom. Crowd Fusion is responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure to support the rich media content for The Daily app as well as its website, http://www.thedaily.com. Additionally, after working with Apple and The Daily to offer a subscription option on the iPad, the Crowd Fusion platform now supports Apple’s new subscription model as an integrated enterprise plugin.

“To successfully launch a product as ambitious as The Daily, we knew we’d needed to build so much more than just the app itself,” said Ariscielle Novicio-Ablan, Vice President of Technology for The Daily. “Crowd Fusion was the perfect partner for us, offering a full set of software and infrastructure solutions for both the scalability and flexibility that this project needed.”

“When News Corp first approached me about this project, I found myself listening to all their needs and saying, ‘We could do that, too,'” said Crowd Fusion CEO and co-founder, Brian Alvey. “For The Daily, our platform provides an end-to-end solution for their newsroom’s writing and workflow. We’ve built media management tools that pull in videos, photos, wire articles and custom data feeds from a large number of sources. All of this in a  publishing platform capable of handling millions of subscribers downloading new issues, sharing content on Facebook and Twitter, and posting both text and audio comments.”

“One of the more interesting aspects of this project for us has been marrying the old with the new: building a workflow system and tools for a team of editors and designers accustomed to working in print, television and online who are now able to re-imagine their craft for the first time,” said Craig Wood, Crowd Fusion COO and co-founder.

“The Daily is all about the user experience and bringing first-rate content to our readers in the most effective and compelling way,” said Greg Clayman, Publisher for The Daily. “Every step of the way, Crowd Fusion has helped to make this vision a reality, successfully building the foundation and tools for our storytelling capabilities.”

About Crowd Fusion

Crowd Fusion is a high-end publishing platform for media companies and brands. Crowd Fusion’s cloud-hosted CMS makes it easy for large teams to collaborate on original content, aggregated content and topic pages. Crowd Fusion’s unique rendering engine enables customers to build personalized, engaging mobile applications in addition to traditional websites. Founded in 2007, Crowd Fusion raised $3 million from Velocity Interactive Group, Greycroft Partners and Marc Andreessen in July of 2008.

There’s a great post by C.K. called Dear Apple: You’re not “Post-PC” until you cut the cord.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving everything I’ve seen about the iPad 2 and I plan on grabbing one next Friday when they become available, but watching the event from Wednesday, the use of the phrase “post-PC” was just blatantly incorrect.

I agree with C.K. that it’s really hard for Apple to declare PCs dead when you have to plug your iPhones and iPads into computers running iTunes to do anything, but I have the feeling that Steve Jobs has already planned all of this stuff out so perfectly that if it isn’t true today, it will be true soon.

You know how Apple designs iPhones and iPads with copy and paste, cameras, dozens of ports and 3D laser sensors and then they trim out the features so they can sell you a new iPad every year for the next 3 years?

I have plenty of faith in Apple to carry us into the magical post-PC age. I’m sure we’re just a software update or two away from full-on iTunes on my iPad without no PC required. When I close my eyes, I’m already there — waiting for C.K.

I’m in the second row of the paidContent 2011 conference at the amazing TheTimesCenter and I just watched a panel called “Quality, Quantity and Mass Content.” Larry Dignan from ZDNet hosted a panel that included Jason Rapp from Mahalo, Chris Ahearn from ThompsonReuters, Luke Beatty from Yahoo’s Associated Content and Lewis D’Vorkin from Forbes and True/Slant.

The feedback I got from other audience members is that Larry asked a couple of tough questions, but the panel was mostly evasive, especially on the topic of Google’s “Farmer” update.

Felix Salmon told the panel that Twitter is his best place to find news and links and asked when these publishers’ sites are going to be as good as Twitter. I’m not really paraphrasing. There were no great answers from the panel because the question was flawed. Of course Felix’s Twitter stream is full of golden content, he follows really smart people who like many of the same things he likes!

A comparison of Felix Salmon’s personalized Twitter stream vs. content farms is apples and oranges. If Felix was forced to spend an hour watching the straight not-signed-in stream of every tweet ever, he’d say it was way worse than *any* content site, especially if he was comparing the generic Twitter firehose to a content site in a vertical he cared about. We all see low quality content on Twitter every day in Twitter’s trending topics list. Lady Gaga is not on that list because she’s the best content, she’s in there because she’s liked a little bit by a really wide audience. The top ten of all topics on earth will always be the lowest common denominator content, not the highest quality content. It’s not targeted and neither are Google results.

A better question for that panel would be:

When are you going to let me personalize my experience of your content into a format that looks like my Facebook/Myspace/Twitter stream — filled with the topics I care about and devoid of the content I despise?

I don’t think any of those publishers are working on that.

TechMeme comes really close without exposing actual personalization controls because they made topic and source constraints that already matched hardcore tech/investor preferences: TechCrunch, Engadget, Boy Genius Report, The New York Times, ReadWriteWeb and the WSJ’s MediaMemo and BoomTown. Oh my god, it’s like TechMeme knows me.

It will be a real shame if publishers are waiting on a combined Bing and Facebook to deliver everyone a useful, personalized view into their content. Big publishers are worrying about giving up 30% cuts and all kinds of control to Apple, but they’re not looking at content consumption preferences and taking control of their own destiny.

I was a grand jury judge for my buddy Jason’s LAUNCH conference in San Francisco last week. There are two kinds of LAUNCH judges: celebrity judges who spend a half day on stage judging live presentations and the grand jury kind that watch all of the presentations and then pick winners for LAUNCH awards. I was one of the working judges.

There were three groups of presenting startups. 1.0 companies were all companies launching for the first time. 2.0 companies were announcing a new product. LAUNCH Pad companies were not scheduled to present on stage. They rented tables and tried to catch the attention of people passing by for a quick demo. If they caught the attention of a judge, they could be nominated to actually spend three minutes on stage pitching their product.

From the LAUNCH Pad companies, I picked an Amazon cloud-hosted GoToMeeting/Webex competitor called MeetingBurner. Not surprisingly, Joyent CEO David Young told them they were using the wrong cloud. That never gets old, right? LAUNCH Pad winners included GreenGoose, whose wireless sensors can track daily activity, and fluidinfo, an openly writable shared meta data service for everything. GreenGoose closed a $500K angel round that Friday and fluidinfo was voted “most likely to need Crowd Fusion as an interface.”

In the 2.0 group, Disconnect won for best technology. It’s a browser plugin that monitors how much of your personal data is being shared with third party sites, like what gets sent to Facebook when you’re visiting ESPN. I spent some time with Disconnect’s genius creator Brian Kennish on Friday and told him I hoped Disconnect would fail so I could hire him. Seriously!

The overall winner in the 2.0 group was Stack Overflow. I sat out on this vote because I was quoted in Joel’s Careers 2.0 press release.

Some of the 1.0 winners were Room77 (best overall, see the view from your hotel room before you book it), NeuAer(best tech, automate your digital life) and Cabana (best design, a Photoshop/Pipes-style interface for making apps without coding). The NeuAer example that really stuck with me was how you can script your devices so that every time you turn your car off, your smartphone can drop a map pin so you don’t have to remember where you parked. Very slick.

All of the winners are listed on the LAUNCH blog. Between the 1.0, 2.0 and LAUNCH Page companies there were 140 great companies competing for 13 awards. What a fantastic event.