Abe Diaz

I had played  with WOL (Wake-On-LAN) some years ago but now with the way tablets are spreading and being able to RDP from them to any computer this old school trick makes it too easy to turn your computer on from anywhere and be able to log into it remotely (for those little things that your mobile browser just can’t do yet).

I want o give a shout out to Mathew who’s post had me up and running in Win7 in less than 5 minutes.

PS: try the WOL Sniffer, it works like a charm.

I have been meaning to write this down but as always the muse has escaped my thoughts these past few days. I was inspired a while ago by a writer called Derek K. Miller; like a viral cat video his last tweet and his famous “last post” caught my eye. After reading them and googling the heck out of him and his story I asked myself if I would do such a thing when I died and the answer (which wouldn’t surprise those who know me) would be Absolutely YES!

Now the question would be… what would I write about. I believe my family and loved ones would take a huge chunk of space but I also would love to recall if possible anyone who ever touched my life in any way, from childhood to adulthood and so on. Now imagine if every person in the world had that same chance; to have the the knowledge that their time was near and being able to send a message from the other side. What would some of the ones that we lost too son would have said.

I think Derek as many other had done in the past made clear that death is not the end that we can keep tweeting and blogging from the other side. I think we should all start the habit of scheduling tweets and posts and along the way compose a journal of the whom and how that changed our lives. You might not be surprised by the message your grandmother or wife would leave you but wouldn’t it be nice if we could all tell that person who gave you a ride or shared a cab with you on a rainy day in a distant location of how that moment made you feel. I do think it would make some of our digital noise more pleasant. Now go and read his story and start writing yours.

On a world where image is all it is a breath of fresh air to see how companies like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are handling media response to their “down time”. As Oscar Wilde would say: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” and on an ever expanding internet world many face the same issues as the big guys on the block when scaling up and scaling out.

As seen on Mashable’s Post Mortem section no matter how strong our error handling frameworks are there is always room for improvement as seen on Facebook’s article on their “worst outage ever”. We are used to seeing the “FailWhale” but what most people don’t see is how Twitter is usually quick to post on their blog the what, and how the problems were solved. As many sites are moving to other dbms’ like MongoDB we learn a bit from FourSquare’s “re-indexing” problems.

I believe every developer team should have a Post Mortem Wiki or blog were new resources can learn from previous mistakes and a sense of collective knowledge can be shared by the whole team.

Have you implemented this idea in your daily life? Is this part of your Development team practices? Let me know.