CIO has a good interview with Rob Reeg, president of Mastercard’s Global Technology and Operations. He discusses their infrastructure and processing architecture. Definitely worth looking at if you’re interested in how credit card transactions are processed.
Interviewer: How big of an infrastructure do you have to support and maintain? It must be huge.
Reeg: Actually from a pure server footprint standpoint… we probably have fewer actual footprint servers because of techniques like virtualization that help us leverage one box to do multiple things.
Where it gets interesting is philosophically: We try to put [transaction] processing as close to our customers, the banks, as possible. When we talk about the global network, we have small servers that sit with the bank customers that connect to our network. What it does is it gives us intelligence there at the end of the network. So as a transaction comes through, we can take a look at that transaction and decide how do we best process that transaction for the benefit of all those four parties in the model.
As to processing, the majority of transactions we’re looking at relate to how do we process them as fast as possible in the most accurate way. The way to do that is by peer to peer: If you’re using your card in Europe, in London, say, and you swipe your card as you check out of hotel, we can route that transaction to the hotel’s acquiring bank in London directly to your issuing bank and get that message back for approval without ever going through St. Louis or some big data center in the middle of all that.
You can read the full article HERE.
Den of Geek has an interesting interview with Angus MacLane, Pixar’s supervising animator of Wall-E. He reveils plenty of good insights into the development process of Wall-E, but my favorite parts are about the software (of course):
[Interviewer] And does the software you use alter much as you go along, over a three year production cycle?
[Angus] The software for the actual execution of the film doesn’t change that much. Because you really need to lock it to one piece of software. Maybe there’ll be an update here and there, and they’ll be individual sub-programs developed. For example there was a program developed for Wall E just to get his treads to lock to the ground, so they recognise the ground and wrap around and drive as you translate him along. That was technology that was developed as an offshoot from a very similar program from Cars, in keeping the tyres on the ground. But that’s about as automated as we get. Everything else is pretty much hand animated.
I also liked this little tidbit:
[Interviewer] Finally, for anyone looking to break into animation, what advice would you give them?
[Angus] I would say be persistent, and keep trying. A friend of mine, he’s a music composer, he’d got some advice from an old pro when he started. And the old pro said to him that people who succeed in the business are not those that are the most talented, and they’re not the people that know the most people, but they are the people who are able to endure. I think that there’s something profound about that. It’s the old saying, it doesn’t happen by mistake: it’s opportunity met with preparation. So when you get the opportunity, make sure you’re prepared.
You can read the whole interview HERE.
