NetKernel News Volume 3 Issue 17

March 30th 2012

What's new this week?

• Repository Updates
• Tom Latest
• News Snippets

Catch up on last week's news here

Repository Updates

The following update is available in both the NKSE and NKEE repositories...

• http-server 2.13.1
  • The dynamically generated httpRequest/Response endpoint is now marked as threadsafe for concurrent access. Thanks to Chris Cormack for discovering this oversight.

Tom Latest

I've got jet lag and a hundred things to catch up on so I'm afraid this is a pretty content-lite news article this week. But to make up for it Tom has been carrying the flame and has produced a couple of blogs over the past two weeks while I've been distracted...

---

http://practical-netkernel.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/space-listing.html

http://practical-netkernel.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/troubleshooting.html

As always your questions, opinions and ideas for future posts are welcomed at practical<dot>netkernel<at>gmail<dot>com.

In case you missed it Tom's book is now a wrap and has been released to manufacture - which means it can be resolved here and should be reified as a representation soon after.

You can also see that it now has a cover - which features a long-tail. Not sure if that's got hidden meaning.

News Snippets

The news in brief...

• Last time we discussed the NKP LoadBalancer. This is now getting a final coat of polish and will be released as an install in the NKEE repos in the early part of next week.

• We are threading the needle to build the final release of the unspeakable Enterprise Utility License Meter. This too will be available early next week.

• Engineering Fact of the Week: The internet is lossy - a high-volume cloud-based site that connects home to a data-center typically sees 0.5% connection loss. That is, 100% of requests go out, only 99.5% get all the way there and back again, 0.5% disappear. If you're using REST to phone-home then you must plan to fail-safe with error-handling and retrys. If, on the other hand, you're using NKP, it will automatically keep the connection alive, reconnect and retry. So it provides a resilient and tolerant foundation for cloud-DC links.

• Mississippi is not an easy word to spell. It is even harder to say if you have a lisp or you are six and have no front teeth.

• Next week things will be back to normal, and I'll be rambling on about something or other to do with Sets, Resources, Thermodynamics with all the usual philosophical clap-trap you've come to expect... Incidentally did you see the connection between the bag and the wheel last time? Both are sets. The wheel is the set of all points a fixed radius from the hub and when rotated provides an accessor to the set of all spacial points at a height of one radius from the resting surface. Two of mankind's best efforts are direct physical manifestations of sets!