Hasta La Gadget!

Considering how far away Mars rover Curiosity is – and how busy it is chewing through rock samples – we’re guessing the exploring robot had a little help from NASA putting together its New Year greeting for Times Square last night. Teased in the final hours of 2012, the clip was beamed up to the huge Toshiba screens above the crowds as part of the tech company’s official sponsorship of the New Year celebrations.

The video itself is pretty cheesy, and we’d have loved to have seen more of the red planet and less of the WordArt. Still, it probably fit the mood on the night; new year revelry is not really the best time or place for announcements of new Martian discoveries.

Those discoveries could well increase in number as Curiosity heads into its first full year on Mars. The rover’s new year resolution is to climb Mount Sharp, a three mile high peak at the center of the crater Curiosity landed in, on a hunt for new evidence that the planet might have once supported microbial life.

That journey will take nine months, the Jet Propulsion Lab team responsible for the Curiosity project at NASA says, with frequent stops along the way to take samples and do other testing. There’ll also be a pause for new software to be installed before Curiosity begins its slow trundle.

Here’s Curiosity’s New Year message from Mars is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’ve already seen cockroaches turned into unwitting puppets for human overlords, but never have we seen dominance quite so casual as with Brittany Ransom’s recent Twitter Roach art project. While part of the exhibition, one of the insects wore a modified RoboRoach backpack with an Arduino add-on that took commands from Twitter: mentions including specific hashtags steered the roach left or right by stimulating its nerves. Yes, that meant the poor roach rarely had the dignity of seeing its master face to face, although there’s some consolation in knowing that it wore the backpack for limited periods and had a required 30-second pause between instructions.

As to why Twitter Roach came to be? Ransom tells CNET she imagined the currently dormant project as a reflection of the “overstimulation” us humans encounter in a digital world. We can certainly sympathize given our livelihoods, although its existence makes us nervous about 2013. If we’re fighting off remote-controlled insect armies a year from now, we’ll have to admit we had fair warning.

Continue reading Twitter Roach takes guidance from tweets, ushers in a terrifying 2013 (video)

Filed under: Robots, Alt

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Via: CNET

Source: Chicago Artists’ Coalition

Amazon has publicly apologized for the outage that stopped Netflix users from spending Christmas Eve slumped in front of How It’s Made re-runs while slurping egg nog, blaming human error for the server downtime. According to Amazon, a developer inadvertently deleted part of the “ELB state data” which handles load balancing – which servers deliver content to each user across different locations – and it took several hours of testing and troubleshooting to figure out what had gone wrong.

“The service disruption began at 12:24 PM PST on December 24th when a portion of the ELB state data was logically deleted. This data is used and maintained by the ELB control plane to manage the configuration of the ELB load balancers in the region (for example tracking all the backend hosts to which traffic should be routed by each load balancer). The data was deleted by a maintenance process that was inadvertently run against the production ELB state data. This process was run by one of a very small number of developers who have access to this production environment. Unfortunately, the developer did not realize the mistake at the time. After this data was deleted, the ELB control plane began experiencing high latency and error rates for API calls to manage ELB load balancers” Amazon

Unfortunately, the initial efforts to take a snapshot of the system configurations prior to the accidental deletion – a process which took several hours – did not work. A second method was cooked up, which was more successful; however, installing it and bringing all of the systems back online was not so straightforward as simply overwriting the patchy section of data.

Instead, Amazon’s AWS team had to merge the new ELB state data with the old – a process which took almost three hours alone – and then spent a further five hours gradually re-enabling all of the service workflows and APIs in a way which did not affect any correctly running process. Amazon says the system was operating normally by 12:05PM PST.

“Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize. We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement in the ELB service” Amazon

As well as the apology, Amazon says it has implemented new policies to make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again. The ELB state data is now harder to delete without specific approval, rather than under blanket permissions for the small number of developers with access, and Amazon has updated its data recovery policies with the new skills it was forced to learn. “We are confident that we could recover ELB state data in a similar event significantly faster (if necessary) for any future operational event” the company’s data team says.

In fact, Amazon plans to make some lemonade from the Christmas Eve lemons, building new server systems that can automatically recover data rather than wait for human intervention. “We believe that we can reprogram our ELB control plane workflows to more thoughtfully reconcile the central service data with the current load balancer state” the AWS team suggests. “This would allow the service to recover automatically from logical data loss or corruption without needing manual data restoration.”

[via Bloomberg]

Amazon: Sorry for Netflix downtime, here’s what we got wrong is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The new year as always brings with it the desire to make a change: eat better, save more, learn a new language, floss every day. We asked some smart bookish types if they have any particularly literary resolutions for 2013 — they’ve got some great ideas for kicking off the new year.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has passed legislation to block the impact of across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts that make up the fiscal cliff.

The vote was an overwhelming 89-8 and came well after midnight on New Year’s Day.

A House vote is expected before Wednesday.

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