
Building a Graphics Card For the Internet: A tour of the newest Imgix datacenter - zacman85
https://imgix.exposure.co/building-a-graphics-card-for-the-internet
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KaiserPro
What do you guys use the mac minis for?(I mean whats the compelling function,
they must do something amazing to justify the cost and lack of features)

I also notice that you don't appear to have any physical isolation between the
hot and cold aisles, is that just for the photos?

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zacman85
Having OS X in our stack allows us to tackle a lot of use cases that come out
of the prototypical design process. Format support, color profiles, color
space conversion, typography, etc. are all mastered in OS X, but lacking in
other operating systems. Apple has had the best imaging scientists in the
world working for the last 30 years on getting these features right. We want
to be able to leverage that expertise, whenever it makes sense, to produce the
highest quality image. In this case, the consequence of that decision means
racking Macs.

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angersock
So, what does that all have that isn't covered by, say, ImageMagick, OpenCV,
or whatever?

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kogir
ImageMagick clearly grew up in environments with short lived processes - the
command line, php, etc. Run it in a long lived process at your peril, and
watch all your memory leak away. I also don't think it makes very good use of
available GPUs at all.

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lelandbatey
Can I cross post some of the images from the blog post over to a community
based on images of excellent cable management[0]?

Also, I have to say I really like the API(?) for manipulating images via url
parameters, and even more, I really like that you used it on this blog post.
When I went to pull the images from your site, I was able to get the full
resolution versions of those images just by making some minor edits to the
urls. This made making an album really easy[1].

[0] - [http://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn](http://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn)

[1] - [http://imgur.com/a/OFVqX](http://imgur.com/a/OFVqX)

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skuhn
Sure, as long as it references imgix. It would be nice if it linked back to
the Exposure post too.

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brokentone
This is one of the most beautiful photostory layouts I've ever seen. But I
couldn't focus on the text at all.

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jayd16
When you click a photo it loads the fragment url and gets added to the back
history but when you hit back it doesn't close the photo takeover. That's
pretty annoying but otherwise it works well.

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radicaledward
You seem to have some missing content on your homepage:
[https://imgix.exposure.co/](https://imgix.exposure.co/) Two white boxes on
the right. I'm on Chrome 36 on OS X if it helps? It looks like the content is
just plain missing. I disabled adblock but it didn't help.

The ascii art logo in your web site's source code is amusing!

I had no idea what the "Enjoyed" button at the bottom of the page was for.
When I clicked it, the counter incremented. Is this some new stand alone like
button that people are doing?

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taylorhughes
That's imgix's profile on exposure.co, not their website. Exposure is a
separate product/company.

imgix website: [http://www.imgix.com/](http://www.imgix.com/)

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hughw
Apropos. I'm reading this article, killing time waiting for my EC2 high
compute spot instance to finish converting 33,000 TIFF images to PNG and
resizing them.

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coops
What's it like to administer a cluster of Mac Minis? Do any of the popular
open-source orchestration tools work?

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skuhn
We mostly operate the OS X and Linux hosts using the same or similar tools;
Ansible for automation, ssh / rsync / git for getting files onto hosts, and an
automated network installer that fills the same niche as the one we use with
Linux.

All of the core infrastructure is shared between OS X and Linux systems --
same DNS caches, NTP servers, etc. -- so there's no additional work there.

There are some things that are a little tougher to do on OS X. The userland
utilities are different (and anything GPL is trapped on GPLv2 versions for all
eternity, such as bash and rsync), and sometimes we have to work around that
or build local packages.

Ansible doesn't really know about things like launchd processes or cron jobs,
and OS X has nothing analogous to useradd, so we had to write some modules and
implement branching in common playbooks to handle tasks in different ways on
Linux and OS X.

Ultimately they run Unix, and once our environment is deployed onto a server
you don't really notice the operational differences on a day to day basis.

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billconan
Apple‘s operating system offers numerous advantages over other platforms when
it comes to image processing.

what? like only support opengl 3.0?

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lobster_johnson
How does CoreImage etc. compare to Intel's Image Processing library (IPP)?

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pyvpx
who did your photography and how difficult was it to get permission to shoot
inside the datacenter you colocate at?

the shots are excellently done.

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skuhn
Our datacenter provider was great about it, we got approval in a matter of
hours. We never photograph anything that doesn't belong to imgix or provide
details that would identify the building, so that makes the approval process
much simpler.

The photography was all done by imgix's lead designer Miguel Cardona, and I
helped out a bit by finding things for him to shoot. I think he did a great
job -- it can be a real challenge to get visually interesting shots in a
datacenter environment.

