Werner, Amazon, Paxons

I just realized as I write this entry that I never blogged about Amazon's amazingly good selection of Werner Vogel as their CTO. I've been a fan of Werner's weblog for quite some time, and I find that he usually offers a great combination of academic and practical viewpoints towards issues involving connected systems.

On that note, Werner's looking for distributed computing people, and he lists several bullet points that are great examples of the things that real distributed systems architects should be aware of. Now, obviously he's fishing in different water than me, but if I ever had a candidate refer to The Part-Time Parliament, I think I'd probably fall over. (And then I'd immediately duct-tape him/her to the chair until I could convince someone to draft an offer letter.) BTW, if you're looking for the Paxos paper, you can download a version published in TOCS from the ACM digital library (if you subscribe), or the original is available from HP here.

Demo Setup for VSTS

I've got my VSTS demo system up and running, and I'll be taking on the road for a talk for the Orange County Visual C# User Group on Tuesday night. Here's what I've got:

• A Dell 5150 with 2 GB RAM
• An external WD drive
• A VHD with a domain controller that also acts as my VSTS data tier
• A VHD with the VSTS application and client tiers
• An optional pure client tier on a laptop when I want to go big for a demo

Although it's great to have a demo setup, another big benefit is that I can carry my VSTS setup around with me, so if you see me out somewhere, ask me for a demo ;)

And BTW, the December CTP bits are a much simpler install than previous releases. Even an author can do it...