Simon G's Blog

" Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems " edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard Murphy contains a number of insights into Google's SRE practice. It is a bit repetitive at times but this assists in drilling in some of the key points. My key take aways were: Google places a 50% cap on all aggregate "ops" work for all SREs - tickets, on-call, manual tasks, etc. The remaining 50% is to do development. If consistently less than 50% development then often some of the burden is pushed back to the development team, or staff are added to the team. An error budget is set that is one minus the availability target (e.g. a 99.99% availability target will have a 0.01% error budget). This budget cannot be overspent and assists in the balance of reliability and the pace of innovation. Cost is often a key factor in determining the proposed availability target for a service. if we were to build an operate ...

The Messages application wasn't working for me on macOS and I was wanting it to work with my Google Chat / Talk / Hangouts service. It appears that with macOS High Sierra a workaround is required. After struggling to get it going I finally got it going after some searching on the Internet and trying a couple of supposed fixes. What ended up working for me were the instructions on  https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/gtalk-messages-solution-found-high-sierra.2073393/ with a couple of tweaks. The tweaks were required to support 2FA which is enabled on my account. The instructions, repeated here so that I can find them again if required and to assist others having the same problem, are as follows: Go to System Preferences / Internet Accounts and delete your google account. Open Terminal and run the following commands (Warning: This will delete your history!): find ~/Library/Preferences -name "*iChat*" -delete rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Messages rm -rf...

Arranged by Mike Riversdale, the NZ Google Barcamp 2010 brought together a bunch of people from throughout New Zealand to engage in discussions with a focus on Google. Here's a synopsis of my notes from some of the sessions I attended. Location Based Services There was a good discussion re GPS / Location apps that would be great for Primary School kids.  Some of the key areas discussed (which are definitely not limited to only being suitable for kids) were: Museum tours (such as My Tours ). Scribble maps enables you to easily scribble on Google Maps. Augmented reality and being able to visualise what a street looked like in 1910. History Pin has already collected some good content from the past. This is adding a time dimension to location. Simile (MIT) is focused on develop...