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

People have been telling me if I can survive November I can survive the rainy and grey climate of Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest in general.  This November must be an anomaly because while there has been a lot of rain there have been some spectacularly sunny days.  Yesterday was one of them and it was perfect for hiking and to get out and explore an area I haven’t seen yet: West Vancouver.

Coming from the topographically challenged Midwest, scenes like this put a huge smile on my face every time I see them.  

It was a perfect day for hiking but if I had a boat I’d have joined two kayakers I met.

Most of the day was spent hiking at the aptly, if uncreatively named, Lighthouse Park on Point Atkinson.  This will definitely be the place I’ll bring visitors.  It is easy to get to and the trails are nice and wide for people of all athletic abilities and the views can’t be beat.

There is a major street in Vancouver named Arbutus.  While many of the North-South streets are named after trees I didn’t realize Arbutus was a tree.  Common to the Pacific Northwest I’d never seen or touched one before.  It is ideal for burning because it burns long and hot.  Unfortunately I don’t have a fireplace but I’ll file it away until I do because they keep telling me how cold it is going to get.

After thoroughly exploring Lighthouse Park we continued on to Horseshoe Bay where many of the ferries leave and on to Whytecliff Park to take in the sunset which was a great way to end a beautiful day.

November 24th, 2008 | outdoors, photography | 1 comment