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So here’s what Rackspace says happened yesterday: In the second incident at approximately 6:30 PM CST Monday, a vehicle struck and brought down the transformer feeding power to the DFW data center. It immediately disrupted power to the entire data center and our emergency generators kicked in and operated as intended. When we transferred power to our secondary utility power system, the data center’s chilling units were cycled back up. At this time, however, the utility provider shut down power in order to allow emergency rescue teams safe access to the accident victim. This repeated cycling of the chillers resulted in increasing temperatures within the data center. As a precautionary measure we decided to take some customers’ servers offline. These servers are now back up, as are the chillers. ...

The WGA strike has really captivated me, for some reason. Here are a bunch of links to interesting strike-related material. Lost creator Damon Lindelof writes about the strike on the New York Times op-ed page: The motivation for this drastic action — and a strike is drastic, a fact I grow more aware of every passing day — is the guild’s desire for a portion of revenues derived from the Internet. This is nothing new: for more than 50 years, writers have been entitled to a small cut of the studios’ profits from the reuse of our shows or movies; whenever something we created ends up in syndication or is sold on DVD, we receive royalties. But the studios refuse to apply the same rules to the Internet. ...

Google’s SDK for the Android mobile platform is now available for download. I’m eager to read what people have to say once they start digging in. Update: I’ve installed the Eclipse plugin and I’m downloading the SDK (which is required in order to play with the Eclipse plugin). I’m a bit surprised that the Android SDK is Java, but I’m not sure why. I had a pretty good idea that would be the case when Bob Lee twittered that he’s on the Android team. He’s the creator of Google’s Guice dependency injection framework. ...

Just a few links for Armistice Day, or Veterans’ Day if you prefer: Every year, Teresa Nielsen Hayden writes an Armistice Day post. Don’t miss it. The New York Times ran an op-ed about Frank Buckles, the last living US veteran of World War I. Henry Allingham is the oldest World War I survivor in the UK. The last Anzac died in 2002. World War I in the News keeps track of the surviving World War I veterans. If you want to read one book about World War I, I’d suggest starting with Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. World War I seems like it’s part of the distant past, but it’s worth studying it is the classic example of events taking on a life of their own. That should serve as a warning to us today. As threats are made, plans are laid, and pieces are put into place in our ongoing spat with Iran, war becomes more likely. Eventually, if we’re not careful, that war will begin because one side or the other goes one step too far, and events dictate a response that ends in hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths. It hardly matters whether most people on both sides don’t even want a war. We’ve seen it happen before, and it can easily happen again. ...

Tyler Cowen points out a paper examining the link between right-wing terrorism and the study of engineering. I think that Rands’ essay on living with nerds may shed some light on this topic as well, although terrorism and religion were not among the subjects covered.

I’m kind of obsessed with the WGA strike. The best site for strike news I’ve seen a pointer to so far has been Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily. It’s a general Hollywood business news blog, but obviously right now the writers’ strike is dominating the show business news. The WGA is also posting videos on YouTube. Turns out TV writers really are funny.

One of the minor annoyances with OS X over the years had been that Apple’s iCal application’s icon has a date on it, but only showed the correct date if the application was open. When the application was closed, it showed the date July 17. The fact that the incorrect date was prominently displayed on the screen whenever iCal was closed was a slight annoyance. With OS X 10.5, the problem is solved. The latest version of iCal shows the correct date whether or not the application is running. How this was accomplished has been a bit of a mystery, but Mac developer Ahruman has figured it out. ...

Greg Knauss has a theory on why developers often make poor managers. Here’s a snippet: The manager must be involved with each and every project, but at the highest level. He doesn’t care about the race condition that’s plaguing the project three levels down, he just cares what the impact on the schedule is going to be. And when he gets that information, he gratefully moves on. He gets to talk to a lot of people, and go to presentations and say “we” when listing progress, and assemble the stakeholders at the steering committee to gain consensus to move forward. Digging in isn’t what managers do. If they do, they’re micromanagers, or “assholes.” The programmer, though, wants to be involved deeply and profoundly in just a few projects — he wants to own them, top to bottom. Maybe it’s a whole program, or a single feature, or some underlying library. Whatever. He wants to live in it, neck-deep. He has to worry about all — literally all — of the obscure technical details that make computers go. Jumping between projects — context switching — is a great way to burn a programmer out, because the cost of unloading one project from his head only to load up another one is enormously high. The idea of switching between two projects in a day, much less ten, is not only exhausting, but depressing. ...

Comet is a new term that’s been coined to describe the modern incarnation of server push. Most Web applications that update a Web page in real time use polling to grab updates from the server. Comet refer to Web pages that maintain a live connection to the server and allow the server to push data onto the page whenever it likes. Alex Russell explains exactly how Comet works and provides some pointers to the server-side tools that provide Comet support. ...

People for Internet Responsibility has launched a new effort to monitor network providers for violations of network neutrality called NNSquad. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever see a law enforcing network neutrality, and there are very good arguments that such a law would be impossible to enforce or would hurt more than it helps. Network providers aren’t going to post on their Web sites when they discriminate against various forms of traffic or against various content providers, so it’s up to users to keep an eye on them and gather the information that enables markets to work. That’s where NNSquad comes in: ...