The Festo Sky_liner story is compelling:

It takes a fair amount of skill to fly a kite. However, thanks to its Sky_liner project, Festo has become the first company to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve fully automated control with the aid of mechatronics, therefore tying in a new development with its core competency of automation using moving air.

Wow, if they can do this then I can see actually bringing a kite to my next picnic. Then I read the next paragraph and noted:

The two kites are operated automatically indoors, using servo motors and artificial wind.

If they were automating flight with genuinely fluky and unpredictable (e.g. real-world) conditions I think they could use the term “automation” more accurately. If you have to create a special environment for something to work properly, it should not be considered a complete demonstration of “fully automated control”.

Imagine a fully automated security control system. Now imagine artificial network traffic…

I find this article very unusual.

The government of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius has contacted the faculty of computing and information technology (CIT) at Uganda’s Makerere University about the possibility of recruiting 300 IT experts.

First, it is an IDG news article that appears in CIO.com and highlights events in Africa. Second, it mentions that the demand for IT expertise is driven by growth in banking. Are you banking or doing business via Mauritius yet? Another example of how the expansion of Internet commerce, and subsequent trans-national security issues, really has only just begun.

News is slowly starting to trickle out about a massive explosion at a Houston data center run by The Planet. You may be familiar with this operation. Ironically, they were just awarded
for their management practices:

The Planet privately held dedicated hosting company’s Vice President of Facilities, Jeff Lowenberg, has garnered SearchDataCenter.com’s first-ever ”Data Center Manager of the Year” award.

The award recognizes excellence in data center project management, according to senior site editor Matt Stansberry. Mr. Lowenberg was recognized for his work that will save the company over $1 million on energy costs in 2008 alone, based on the implementation of new ”green” data center efficiencies.

It becomes even more strange when you note that Lowenberg has been slashing power consumption in an “efficiency” operation:

Initial results demonstrate that while critical server loads increased by 5 percent, power used for cooling decreased by 31 percent. Overall, the company experienced power reductions of up to 13.5 percent through a broad range of improvements. The new green initiatives were conducted across its six world-class data centers.

That was May 29, 2008. And then this (also documented here) happened:

May 31 – 10:46pm

On Saturday, May 31st at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

I do not have many details on this but there are some blogs and forums discussing how the fire department prevented the company from running redundant lines. While it may be possible to somehow allocate blame to local regulations or even the fire department inspectors for risk that was run by management, the bottom line is that the risk was accepted by The Planet management and a massive catastrophic failure has happened on their watch.