A good and universally harmless way to put an easter egg into the product is to use only source code comments.
Not silly one-liners, mind you. I mean whole paragraphs of stories, ASCII art, or humorous meta-code.
I've done exactly that once in a while. The audience, of course, is fellow programmers who maintain the code for years after you've left... this allows you to target satisfyingly subtle or complex fun to those who are more likely to enjoy it.
My all-time favorite? An ASCII art version of the front cover to Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Reader's exercise: what would be appropriate in front of Duff's Device?
Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all?
The U.S. does not have any (official) national citizen database (despite attempts to change that), and the various U.S. states do not have them either. As a result, to be able to vote, voter registration is required.
When registering, a citizen typically has to prove their eligibility to vote (which varies by state law), the most popular method being proof of citizenship and the location of your residence.
Of course, don't take my word for it. There's a more thorough discussion of the issue and how it is implemented in various countries around the world (with references) on Wikipedia.
"...Has anyone done this, or had experience in designing Web applications to scale seamlessly across both environments? Is there particular load-balancing hardware we can use to do this?"
A "global" (DNS) load balancer will do. The function of such a device is to monitor the health of multiple sites that can receive traffic, and direct traffic among sites that are confirmed as "up" according to your specifications. A short (<60 seconds) TTL is given in the DNS answer to force local DNS cache servers to expire quickly and check for DNS changes caused by an outage.
Normally such a device answers with A (IP address) records. However, in case your Cloud provider requires their own DNS (to balance load among their cloud sites), it is possible for your "global" balancer to hand out an appropriate CNAME record to defer resolution to your cloud provider's DNS.
Assuming you also have a traditional load balancer in front of your 2 dedicated servers, then what you'd probably want to do is set up the "global" load balancer to:
Hand out the A record of the load balancer in front of your 2 dedicated servers, if it is up and the servers behind it are responding.
If your own servers are not responding, then hand out a CNAME pointing to the hostname your cloud provider is serving for you.
Sorry to pitch only a single product, but the only enterprise-level DNS product I know of that will hand out both A and CNAME records is F5's "Global Traffic Manager". They put it on a 1-unit standalone hardware, or you can get it as a software add-on to existing (traditional) F5 BIG-IP load balancer hardware.
I work for a vendor and so I get to see the view from the inside out on this.
Most times, when a vulnerability is discovered by a professional security group or an upstream vendor, they both tell us what it is, and propose an "embargo" date for when they plan to make it public.
This gives vendors time to react properly but still serves the public with disclosure.
Most networking equipment these days have a separate "admin" interface from the rest of the "traffic" interfaces. The intent of that is you can secure the "admin" connection and only access admin functions (like APIs) through that.
But as bright as some some Senior Network Engineers (with a string of letters after their name) are, yes, you can count on an increase of vulnerabilities!
Cisco is a late-comer to this game, by the way. Some other (even popular) network vendors are based on unix/linux with a rich configuration API.
This bill says nothing about encryption. At most, there is a bullet-point in the findings section (899-B, item 3) that suggests how the internet is used may be part of the study.
On the other hand, in about 18 months after passing this bill, the study is supposed result in a report. Everyone set their alarms - we'll have to see what the study says about privacy and encryption.
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Not silly one-liners, mind you. I mean whole paragraphs of stories, ASCII art, or humorous meta-code.
I've done exactly that once in a while. The audience, of course, is fellow programmers who maintain the code for years after you've left... this allows you to target satisfyingly subtle or complex fun to those who are more likely to enjoy it.
My all-time favorite? An ASCII art version of the front cover to Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Reader's exercise: what would be appropriate in front of Duff's Device?
Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all?
The U.S. does not have any (official) national citizen database (despite attempts to change that), and the various U.S. states do not have them either. As a result, to be able to vote, voter registration is required.
When registering, a citizen typically has to prove their eligibility to vote (which varies by state law), the most popular method being proof of citizenship and the location of your residence.
Of course, don't take my word for it. There's a more thorough discussion of the issue and how it is implemented in various countries around the world (with references) on Wikipedia.
"...Has anyone done this, or had experience in designing Web applications to scale seamlessly across both environments? Is there particular load-balancing hardware we can use to do this?"
A "global" (DNS) load balancer will do. The function of such a device is to monitor the health of multiple sites that can receive traffic, and direct traffic among sites that are confirmed as "up" according to your specifications. A short (<60 seconds) TTL is given in the DNS answer to force local DNS cache servers to expire quickly and check for DNS changes caused by an outage.
Normally such a device answers with A (IP address) records. However, in case your Cloud provider requires their own DNS (to balance load among their cloud sites), it is possible for your "global" balancer to hand out an appropriate CNAME record to defer resolution to your cloud provider's DNS.
Assuming you also have a traditional load balancer in front of your 2 dedicated servers, then what you'd probably want to do is set up the "global" load balancer to:
Sorry to pitch only a single product, but the only enterprise-level DNS product I know of that will hand out both A and CNAME records is F5's "Global Traffic Manager". They put it on a 1-unit standalone hardware, or you can get it as a software add-on to existing (traditional) F5 BIG-IP load balancer hardware.
"That's a nice tattoo you got there, sir..."
"But it's a birthmark! ... why are you looking at me like that with a scalpel in your hand?"
or McDonald's had invented the Internet.
McDonalds may not have invented the internet, but they did advance food networking...
Not only are two people in New York and Los Angeles testing the same flavor when they eat their hamburgers, they may have even come from the same cow.
The entire US Navy Electricity & Electronics Training Series (NEETS) is online in PDF book format here:
http://www.phy.davidson.edu/instrumentation/NEETS.htm
This explains virtually every part of electronics you could possibly want.
(Bonus: as it was produced by the US government, there is no copyright; download, read, print, copy, etc. as much as you'd like.)
I work for a vendor and so I get to see the view from the inside out on this.
Most times, when a vulnerability is discovered by a professional security group or an upstream vendor, they both tell us what it is, and propose an "embargo" date for when they plan to make it public.
This gives vendors time to react properly but still serves the public with disclosure.
Most networking equipment these days have a separate "admin" interface from the rest of the "traffic" interfaces. The intent of that is you can secure the "admin" connection and only access admin functions (like APIs) through that.
But as bright as some some Senior Network Engineers (with a string of letters after their name) are, yes, you can count on an increase of vulnerabilities!
Cisco is a late-comer to this game, by the way. Some other (even popular) network vendors are based on unix/linux with a rich configuration API.
This bill says nothing about encryption. At most, there is a bullet-point in the findings section (899-B, item 3) that suggests how the internet is used may be part of the study.
On the other hand, in about 18 months after passing this bill, the study is supposed result in a report. Everyone set their alarms - we'll have to see what the study says about privacy and encryption.
FYI: This bill is known as S.1959 in the Senate.