Video Streaming Alpha test. Next Alpha Test - Sunday, Mar. 1 @ 4PM ET

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As you've probably noticed, this evening we went live with a new design for the overall site.  Huge thanks to Tom Shebest in the Hostmysite.com Marketing department for putting together a design that is lightyears ahead of our old one.

Along with this new design, we've added a stream on the home page which will be live when the bike is racing and for our friends from Code Project, the ability to get the web service documentation as a PDF.

We've been using a hardware load balancer and two physical web servers for about a week now. Previously we were running from a single web server with the database server running directly on there. Now, however we're on multiple virtual machines powered by VMWare.

Your request for this page goes something like this:

1. www.theworldsfastestserver.com resolves to our load balancer VM running HAProxy which determines which web server is on-line and ready to accept your request.
2. HAProxy then forwards your request onto the chosen web server (currently only 2 but if we need it we can quickly deploy additional web servers).
3. The web server handling your request makes any database queries to yet another virtual machine (again, we can add additional servers to handle database requests as well)

Welcome back to another installment of "What's new on the bike!?"

It's been a week since our last post, so I'm sure everyone is curious what is going on in the world of speed, streaming data, and server technology. This comes from our wireless communications expert on the bike, Brett B:

We now have two wireless cards (Verizon Wireless USB760) -- one for each server. The cards have a typical download speed of 600-1400 Kbps, and a typical upload speed of 500-800 Kbps.
The cards both utilize Verizon's 3G EVDO network (Rev. A), and each card will allow one of two video streams to be pushed to the darwin streaming servers in the datacenter, as well as streaming the telemetry data (accellerometer, GPS, etc.) from the databases on the bike to the caching proxy server we have, also in the datacenter.

We have lost a dear brother today, and he will not soon be forgotten. Mike Brooks was with Darby Customs since the beginning and was the one who maintained the shop's sanity on most days. He was also the one at the shop 6 days a week and Shawn's cigar smoking buddy. Although he will not be around to help complete any more projects with us we will think of him every day.

Mike was recovering from a minor car wreck 3 weeks ago -- he was found in his favorite place, his lazyboy chair. While he was not mentioned as a team member he did many behind the scenes things at the shop to help Shawn keep his sanity on the dragbike project. He will be missed on the world’s fastest server project and all the others we will do.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Mike and his family.