First I hope everyone will be participating in Earth Hour tonight at 8:30pm to 9:30pm in their local time zone.

My blog has been pretty quiet recently because I’ve been busy getting up to speed at the new job.  We’ve re-branded ourselves and our product as Pulse Energy.  We had a launch party at the offices of Busby Perkins + Will, one of the foremost architecture firms in the world when it comes to designing green and LEED certified buildings.  The Mayor of Vancouver came, we served Enertini’s complete with dry ice garnish.  It was a good time.

One of the project’s we’ve been working on is monitoring energy savings during Earth Hour for some of the bigger buildings around Vancouver.  So tonight, for an hour, many buildings will be shutting off HVAC systems, lights and more.  For those not in the Pacific time zone you can check it out on our site in real-time (but if you’re in the Pacific Daylight zone please wait until after 9:30 when Earth Hour is over — we can all live without email, tweets, FaceBook and YouTube for an hour!).

We have some very interesting technical work at Pulse.  Our software is making a real difference in helping companies with large building portfolios improve their bottom line and reduce the impact on the environment. We’re looking for smart people in the Vancouver area to join us as developers, QA engineers, information architects, business analysts and more.  Check out our current postings. We’re always looking for good people.

March 28th, 2009 | general, technology | No comments

I’m not very creative with names which makes me respect a name with an interesting background, twist or hidden meaning.  

Since I met Martin Logan, a colleague at Orbitz, and listened to what he had built with Erlang and how passionate he was about the language I’ve kept my ears open for Erlang news and stories.  I even dabbled with writing a bit of Erlang and working through Programming Erlang from The Pragmatic Programmers. But I always thought the name Erlang was a contraction of Ericsson Language giving credit to its heritage of being developed internally at Ericsson.

But tonight I learned it is not.  Or at least not entirely.

Since reading Release It! at the Orbitz Book Club I’ve followed Michael Nygard’s blog for the very practical advice he gives on operationalizing systems.  I spent a portion of my afternoon working through some capacity planning numbers to prepare for a site launch.  Thinking Michael might have some interesting insights I opened up his blog in NetNewsWire and was happy to see a new post to read before digging in to the archives.  But how appropriate when I saw the subject was using Erlang models for capacity planning.

It is a great article and something I’ll hopefully be able to put in to practice.  Scaling and capacity planning is somewhat of a black art.  If anyone thinks they have a clear approach to removing the mystery there are lots of people who would enjoy seeing Size It! on The Pragmatic Programmers list of titles.

But it was all too coincidental that a Danish telephone engineer named A. K. Erlang developed capacity planning models for early phone networks and the switches produced by Ericsson which scale so well and have minimal downtime have largely attributed  the success to having been written in Erlang.  Of course Wikipedia gives some insight into this and even has a citation to back it up:

“Erlang is named after A. K. Erlang. It is sometimes thought that its name is an abbreviation of Ericsson Language, owing to its origin inside Ericsson. According to Bjarne Däcker, who headed the Computer Science Lab at the time, this duality is intentional.”

December 1st, 2008 | technology | No comments