{"id":7473,"date":"2019-12-24T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-24T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/?p=7473"},"modified":"2020-01-10T14:22:40","modified_gmt":"2020-01-10T22:22:40","slug":"of-reindeer-and-reliability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/of-reindeer-and-reliability\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Reindeer and Reliability"},"content":{"rendered":"

This guest post comes to us in timely fashion from Friend of the Blog James Bonang.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2019Twas the night before Christmas, and Santa\u2019s days were numbered. My daughter had just turned seven and, on Christmas Eve, approached me with the question: \u201cDaddy, is Santa Claus real? The kids at school say that it is actually your parents who place the gifts from Santa under the tree.\u201d<\/p>\n

Caught off guard, I paused briefly, then responded \u201cYour parents? Clarisse, are you suggesting that there\u2019s a worldwide conspiracy to deceive children into believing in Santa Claus, that every adult in the world is a co-conspirator, and that they have all managed to maintain this deception for years in the face of questions from clever and ever-inquisitive young children? Have you been listening to Oliver Stone again?\u201d<\/p>\n

Blank stare.<\/p>\n

I remembered a news broadcast about how NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, tracks Santa Claus on radar and reports his position for children and said \u201cLet\u2019s go to the Air Force\u2019s website and see where Santa is right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Look of astonishment.<\/p>\n

I threw open the computer and stirred the mouse. The machine arose from its long (measured in microseconds) winter\u2019s nap amidst the clatter of the fan motor (suggesting something was the matter), when what to my wondrous eyes should appear, but Google\u2019s minimalist user interface. Over the keyboard my fingers flew like a flash (apologies to Clement Moore, though I do type pretty fast). We looked up the appropriate web address for the \u201cNORAD Santa Tracker\u201d website<\/a>, which is historically associated with the U.S. Air Force, though maintained by volunteers (at no expense to the taxpayers).<\/p>\n

Her brow hinted at deep concentration as she carefully examined the page; her expression signaled \u201cthis looks pretty official.\u201d<\/p>\n

We read the details concerning the radar cross section of Santa\u2019s sleigh and how Rudolph\u2019s nose is easily detectable due to its pronounced infrared signature. After a little explanation from dad about radar, the electromagnetic spectrum and satellites, her nods indicated \u201cthat sounds plausible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOK. It\u2019s time to check his current location,\u201d I said. Her eyes lit up with anticipation. We displayed a page that showed his whereabouts and that plotted each leg of his journey. (I noted the radar track coming down from the North Pole and, having grown up during the Cold War, thought briefly \u201cHmm, I sure hope that\u2019s Santa.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere is he? Where is he?\u201d she said, barely able to contain her excitement.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d I said, pointing to the satellite image of North America, \u201che appears to be somewhere in Wisconsin.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s in Wisconsin! He\u2019s in Wisconsin!\u201d she said, jumping up and down. \u201cWhere\u2019s Wisconsin?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, Wisconsin is here and you are over here in California,\u201d I said, tracing out the two states on the computer screen. \u201cThe children in Wisconsin are already asleep.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWow! He\u2019s almost here! I\u2019ve got to get ready!\u201d she said, dashing out of the room. Soon thereafter, she too was fast asleep, having carefully prepared a plate of cookies and a large glass of milk.<\/p>\n

Santa made his appointed rounds right on time that year, after, of course, receiving his customary Air Force escort.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a child in your life who may be having doubts, the NORAD Santa Tracker provides everything you need. The Santa Tracker website displays Santa\u2019s current location, where he\u2019s delivered presents, and his next appointed round (using Bing maps, satellite imagery, and impressive CGI graphics no less), which adds to the anticipation of the evening. There\u2019s also a phone line operational on Christmas Eve, as well as email, staffed by sixteen hundred volunteers, including many personnel from the U.S. and Canadian armed forces.<\/p>\n

When your child is done chatting with them, the website offers a collection of entertaining holiday-themed games to pass the time (the occasional adult might find several of them inexplicably addictive too). The site also stealthily disguises educational content on Holiday traditions that your child might unwittingly be fascinated by. (In Spain, Christmas dinner is never eaten until after midnight. Who knew?) Of course, your child will be learning geography too as they follow Santa around the world.<\/p>\n

There are lessons for programmers in all this too. Consider the unusual nature of the site: unlike amazon.com or wikipedia.org, the Santa Tracker site is dormant for most of the year. Things pick up in December, culminating in a massive burst of traffic on December 24th. This spike in load can\u2019t be allowed to overwhelm it; it just can\u2019t go down. Other sites might see usage profiles similar to this on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but the Santa Tracker\u2019s operational availability requirements lie in a league of their own. (Michael Nygard explains how difficult this is in his book Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software<\/em><\/a>, available from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.)<\/p>\n

How do they do it? The Santa Tracker site uses a cloud-based solution built on Microsoft\u2019s Azure platform. Microsoft employs three Azure-based data centers, two in the U.S. and one in Europe, to provide scalability and reliability.<\/p>\n

By a strange coincidence, the computer hardware and software technologies built into NORAD\u2019s Santa Tracker were pioneered in the 1950\u2019s, by another highly reliable distributed system used by NORAD to track, well, other things.<\/p>\n

In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device, signaling that its bombers would soon be able to deliver nuclear weapons to the continental U.S. by flying over the North Pole. America\u2019s antiquated air defenses, with their manual information processing approach, wouldn\u2019t suffice. A better, largely automated, means had to be found. The Semi-automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, system, developed and deployed during the 1950\u2019s and up to 1962, not only gave America the air defense system it needed, it advanced computer technology by a generation. SAGE introduced networking and distributed systems, along with cathode ray tube monitors with pointing devices, not to mention reliable magnetic core memory in its AN\/FSQ-7, or “Q-7” computers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite the use of vacuum tubes, the SAGE computers achieved remarkable reliability for the time, exceeding the reliability of solid state computers arriving much later. SAGE employed two computers in a duplex configuration at each of its sites: if one computer failed, the other took over. If both computers failed, another site took over, much as is the case with Microsoft\u2019s data centers today. The system achieved 98% operational availability, not quite as good as today\u2019s NORAD Santa Tracker but astounding for the time.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t only hardware innovations that contributed to the system\u2019s reliability: SAGE was a large-scale software development effort too. James Wong\u2019s delightful description of his work as a programmer on the SAGE system, available here<\/a>, will be distressingly familiar to today\u2019s programmers, even though he had to code in assembly language, a rarity today. The reliability techniques pioneered by the SAGE system live on, though their heritage remains largely forgotten. Unlike the traditions that surround Christmas, traditions haven\u2019t formed around these reliability techniques; we often must learn them anew.<\/p>\n

Speaking of traditions, it may strike you as a bit odd that a modern, technological Christmas tradition – tracking Santa – has formed around an organization charged with defending North America from nuclear attack. How did that come about?<\/p>\n

By accident, how else? In 1955, a child misdialed a number advertised by Sears as a direct line to Santa, and instead reached United States Air Force Colonel Harry Shoup, the duty officer at the Continental Air Defense Command, NORAD\u2019s predecessor organization. The public relations opportunity didn\u2019t go unheeded, and NORAD\u2019s annual reports on Santa\u2019s whereabouts began. It\u2019s a Christmas tradition destined to live on.<\/p>\n

Another tradition of the Christmas season is to give thanks, particularly to those whose efforts go unnoticed or unappreciated. In that spirit, my hearty thanks go out to all the volunteers behind NORAD\u2019s Santa Tracker, and to all the volunteers who track those other things and who keep us safe. They let the magic live on for my daughter, if only for a little longer, all those years ago, and much more.<\/p>\n

Clarisse is all grown up now, but still returns to the Santa Tracker site. She\u2019s a computer science student at a local university and likes to study the latest web interface enhancements. I can\u2019t help wondering if visiting the site back then might have kindled her interest in the field. Perhaps. And perhaps the efforts of those volunteers will benefit your child as well.<\/p>\n

Now, if you\u2019ll excuse me, I need to check the latest reports.<\/p>\n

“One unidentified sleigh, red, powered by eight reindeer, altitude 14,000 feet, heading 180 degrees…”<\/p>\n

Almost here.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoon, Santa Claus, Reindeer Night\u201d<\/a> by Yuri_B is licensed by Creative Commons 2.0.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This guest post comes to us in timely fashion from Friend of the Blog James Bonang. \u2019Twas the night before Christmas, and Santa\u2019s days were numbered. My daughter had just turned seven and, on Christmas Eve, approached me with the question: \u201cDaddy, is Santa Claus real? The kids at school say that it is actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":7488,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[837,835],"tags":[29,810],"class_list":["post-7473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cafe","category-technology","tag-culture","tag-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7473"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7493,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7473\/revisions\/7493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}