Thinking Clearly .

If you’re following us on Twitter (and if you’re not: for shame! :>), you’ll already know we’re giving 3 talks this week at SemTech, a big industry conference in San Jose. If you’re going to be there, you should try to catch all 3:

• What to Do with an OWL Reasoner: Introduction to Pellet —Evren Sirin and Mike Smith.
• Pronto: Probabilistic Semantic Web Ontologies—Pavel Klinov.
• XACML-DL: Analyzing Web Access Control Policies—Mike Smith.

Which together offer a representative slice of what we’re working on these days: OWL DL reasoning, a core biz for us; policy management, which is up-and-coming; and probabilistic reasoning, somewhere between the two.

Looking forward to chatting with lots of folks this week. Safe travels, everyone.

Our hosting provider, Joyent, apparently took some kind of hardware hit today; they haven’t said, yet, whether it was a disk or controller or something else, but we stopped being able to SSH into our container last night. So I filed a ticket. (I forgot that we have 24-hr emergency tech support. Doh!)

Then today HTTP stopped and we couldn’t ping the sites, etc. Doh!!

After a call to the now-remembered emergency line, we get the container rebooted (it must really be bad, then, since, generally, you don’t fix things in Unix by rebooting), but there was no /home volume mounted. Ouch!

After the RAID was rebuilt, apparently, we got /home, and things got a lot better here today. Joyent has been pretty solid (modulo some weird Java bug we can’t track down), but we just launched the new Pellet site yesterday, so it being down today is a real bummer.

Computers suck! Okay, shit breaks, and that’s the reason for ZFS, RAID, etc. (I think this part of the outage was only about 30 minutes, which is good, but not great.)

But it would be nice if Joyent would give us some more info about what was wrong. I’m not sure why, but more info would make me feel better…