Local hiking

Spent an hour yesterday walking arround Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve very pretty area in the middle of the burbs.

Zion Canyon

We also escaped to this magnificent canyon.

Red Rock Canyon

Went to Vegas for a wedding and escaped to see these amazing cliffs just west of the city.

Wealth and stupidity study

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/04/24/if_youre_so_dum.html

Google is not God

Demonstrable ignorant racial profiling at work

Ouch

Sports Utility Vehicle

The neighbors have become accustomed to seeing this sight roar by at the weekends but it never fails to amuse a few fishermen at the slip. The boat shed, which also has to house cars....

Big disks are here

Thanks to Hans for sending me this link for Hitachi's 7K1000 Terabyte Hard drive, now if I put five of these into my servers we have some real cheap storage.....

High Performance Web Sites

Some good links reported by a colleague who attended the Web 2.0 expo:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514211/
http://stevesouders.com/examples/
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#h-13.6
http://alistapart.com/articles/sprites
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397
http://crockford.com/javascript/jsmin
http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/shrinksafe
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html
http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/pagedetailer
http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/
http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/
http://getfirebug.com/
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/11/28/performance-research-part-1/
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part-2/
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/03/01/performance-research-part-3/
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/04/11/performance-research-part-4/
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/03/high_performanc.html
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/04/rule_1_make_few.html

Lawn care

Just signed up two different compannies to take care of the yard:

Chemicals: Scotts
Grass cutting: Lawn and Turf

Will be interesting to see what kind of a job they make of it.

SB Prank

But was it real?

One to watch while you should be working

http://sjl.funnyordie.com/v1/flvideo/74.flv

Better than snogging?

"Chocolate caused a more intense and longer lasting "buzz" than kissing, and doubled volunteers' heart rates. Dr Lewis said: "There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz. "A buzz that, in many cases, lasted four times as long as the most passionate kiss." He said substances in chocolate were already known to have a psychoactive effect, but that allowing it to melt on your tongue could be the secret to maximising the buzz."

Not in defense of Microsoft

This morning I read a great number of blogs which were sneering at Microsoft’s apparent attempts to get the pending Google DoubleClick deal examined by regulators due to the possible monopoly it creates.
If one removes the anti-Microsoft hate mongering and just imagine it was instead Joe Shmo who was suggesting it was examined where would the bloggers stand? Would they have a real opinion?
Where do I stand? A few things cause me to stand on the shoulders of giants and say “Examine it please” 1. If this deal happens 80+% of internet advertising would be powered by Google, 2. Google is moving into Print Ads, Radio Ads and TV ads, and last but not least telephone ads, if people to not regulate this activity we are in danger of having the vast proportion of share of voice across all media controlled by one company.
We can forget about the “do no evil” principles, there are too many examples of that being a thing of the past now, we can forget about the best intentions of the current management, it is only a matter of time before the markets are able to manipulate the behavior of the company (if they can’t already).
So the question is should one act now or allow it to happen and then cry about it later? I suggest action now would be a good idea.
I can block their ads today with a good open source plug in, but given they host the largest open source project sites, sponsor many activities in the OS community, it is only a matter of time before they think about making it really hard to stop the ads….
Maybe I am wrong, maybe I am just paranoid today, I did wake up this morning having a very weird dream about buying a newspaper (something I never do).

Agile Development Portal on MSDN

The boss lady forwarded me a link to this new collection of resources on MSDN. I havent dug into them much yet but it looks like some good content.

Kayak rolling

I found a great youtube group with video of Kayak rolling.
here is just one example:

Bad bugs

Ex-contractor sentenced for sabotaging Navy subs

Saving for the future

I read this article in slate with mixed emotions, it seems to me that the writer is missing the point that 401K is actually a good home for peoples retirement savings, and that the majority of the US underutilize them. If everyone used them more, then the US pension situation would probably not look so bleak. Also the horizon of short term investment returns he discusses seems to be too short to really be anything other than emergency funds, anything longer should be able to be locked away for long enough to find shelter from the short term gains taxes.
We use UIT, VA, IRA, 401K etc and have been able to grow annualy at a steady rate, maybe we are just lucky?

Google Custom Search

If you are intersted in hearing from one of the great minds (Rajat Mukherjee) beind the Google Custom Search concept this article makes a good read.

In case..

you would like more dancing dogs...

Not a sleeping dog

but very well done....

Sleeping dogs

Some people just wont seem to let them lie down and take a nap. Anyway just so I am clear, as if I had not been already, part of my belaboring around cheap disk is that not every need in an enterprise is five nines, I can imagine for example that Google does not keeps all their click stream data on massively redundant highly available disk, perhaps they have a cheaper disk solution for that massive amount of data which they can afford to loose occasionally? Perhaps this leads one to consider if the epithet "enterprise" is the good term to classify infrastructure components by? Perhaps instead the various levels of reliability should be used.

Bank account information is no doubt held in a highly secure, robust, redundant and available solution, how should one describe this? Perhaps I should shut up and just read the ITIL spec as I am sure it has a great set of definitions. I did a little digging and found that maybe there is a another classification of storage infrastructure by the work done in the Information Life cycle Management community. Anyway I read some marketing literature from Hitachi (see image) which resonated with me. Hmm just found another thing to explore, Storage Virtualization, found a vendor here with some interesting technology, I wonder if I can find any open source solutions to try. Okay I am clearly just behind the times, 6 months behind thousands of others apparently... Openfiler will be today's project to see if has anything to offer us.

Going climbing

Yesterday I made plans with a friend to go to Taylors Falls do do some climbing. Looking forward to it as I have not been on the rock since I was climbing on an island in the middle of the Potomac with my father, but that is another story, one which i must tell when I can find the photographs as it involves canoe mishaps drowned rats and damp climbers :)

Found this link to some topos of the Falls routes, never been there but it looks fun.

Hamster power

Clearly very green, but I am not sure about the ethics involved. That said if you are British you will get a kick out of what is being shredded ;)

Google ranking

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

"This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below.
In addition to the ranking factors, at the very end of the document are the results of 4 questions I asked the panelists regarding search rankings at Google. Since I had the attention of such distinguished folks, I couldn't resist getting a few more valuable answers."

Viewing foreign sites in English

If you like me do not have great foreign language skills then you might find one of Google's latest experiments useful, they have implemented on the fly translation of web pages, it has successfully allowed me to read a couple of Japanese articles on local search engines and while not perfect it allowed me to get the main gist of the article.

Google on NPR

There was an interesting article on NPR this morning, which mentioned the continuing dominance of the big G in the world of search, it then went on to review the journalists experience of their new voice based local search which is still in experimentation phase but looks to be an attempt at a soon to be audio ad funded free 411 service.
Unfortunately the article focused on the challenge of getting the speech recognition software to understand the request rather than on the quality of the search results. If you think its tough using it as an American try it with my accent....
Clearly there is a long way to go with the voice recognition including making the detection of Minneapolis better! But that aside it will be a useful service as long as they can keep the ads from being too intrusive. And find a way to deal with vehicle noise impacting the sound quality for the speech recognition... Another good reason for having a digital headset with built in noise reduction ... I love mine...

Sharing disk from OS X

If you ever need to share disk from OS X with Windows machines you may start banging your head on the table, there is no simple gui to help you here but there is some great technology built into the OS, it just is not well documented.
I found this link which describes how to edit the smbd.conf file to enable shares using Samba to be visible, another interesting challenge is NTFS drives are read only in Tiger so the drives need to be repartitioned if you need write access.

Not Enterprise storage

The search for cheap disk continues with some more research, into transfer speeds. At the moment the speed of transfer is not limiting us, but in the future I would expect it to, we are currently using USB 2.0 which has a raw throughput of 480MBits/s, the Western Digital drives provide a number of different connection points, including (drum roll) FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b) which has a throughput (yes you guessed it) of 800MBits/s. Our plan then would be to hang the drives off the Fire Wire as the next step up.
A colleague of mine asked a very sensible question which is why not just purchase the drives as network attached storage, a couple of reasons came to mind, but I am not sure if they are really valid, First we are able to control access and monitor utilization very cleanly through the Unix (like) OS, second if we want to boost performance or reliability using RAID we can do that also through the OS.
We are also experimenting with other manufacturers of drive units; we use LaCie drives for backing up developers laptops and these have much quieter fans which is important in an office environment. We also need to find a drive that does not shut it’s self down for thermal reasons, or at least provides a mechanism for us to reduce load on it if it is getting hot…..
A second point about this storage question, the real challenge is price, as previously stated we are not looking for enterprise reliability/quality, we need capacity that is up for 48 hours at best, in fact due to the improvements in processing that time may now be as little as 12 hours in the future, and this processing will need to take place probably once a month. So my revised specs become: 2 TB, 12 Hours a month, No backup, No redundancy, No high availability. Hence the oranges to apples comparison with highly redundant highly available storage is both crass and frankly silly.
I read an interesting if dated article in SearchStorage.com which ends with the suggestion of outsourcing your storage needs. This is indeed a viable solution for us, we may look to either mount S3 as a pseudo drive or alternatively we may look to move the processing to the Elastic Compute Cloud as an experiment, the transient storage problem would then evaporate.
More to come, we made a major breakthrough this morning in processing which could blow this problem away completely by reducing our data volume considerably.....

Cheap disk

A couple of fun projects this past week:

1. Building a 2 TB transient file store
2. Learning about Amazon S3

Part of a project I am leading at work requires a large amount of disk to be available for a short period of time, read 2 Terabytes for 48 hours. I asked the datacenter to provide some estimates for cheap disk, the price ranges was CENSORED, not quite what I had in mind, instead we constructed our own low cost solution; a low end Mini-Mac, with two Western Digital 1TB drives hanging off it. No I don’t claim this is fast, I don’t claim it is redundant or fault tolerant (it could be if we doubled up the disk and striped it.) but.... the grand total came to $1500, not bad, it keeps running fine for long sequential read writes, the drives don’t like it if the heads start jumping around the disk too much, and they tend to overheat.

The second interesting project has been using the S3 storage service provided by Amazon, the scary part is the lack of SLA, they charge by bandwidth up and down and by GB per month storage. We are using the service to move large amounts of data reliably between Alexa and our datacenter. I tried a number of tools to access S3 and found that by far the most reliable is the S3 Organizer add-on for Firefox. More to come on this initiative as we gain experience suffice to say I won’t be buying any more disks for my home….

Kick Ass Sony Walkman

Internal Kodak Commercial

Damaged goods

Skim Kayaks

I was reading Sea Kayaker magazine last night and came a cross an ad for this great looking boat, I think I need one....

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska

This morning on NPR an feisty old senator from Alaska was interviewed, (Senator Ted Stevens) he was discussing the apparent disconnect for his support for a bill to reduce CO2 emissions from car exhausts and a bill to allow drilling in Alaska. His argument was as simple as if we don't drill in Alaska they will drill it up from somewhere else and burn it. So to extend that concept further we should sell munitions to the insurgents in Iraq because they will get them from somewhere else otherwise. What a dumb ass. It's a shame though, he is obviously a man of great character who has done great work for his country, but now he needs to retire and enjoy the beautiful area he has made his home.

Ochlocracy

Having read the "Bloggers code of conduct" and being undecided about whether it is well intentioned idocy or just plain ridiculous I came across this very cool dictionary site.
so rather than say what I realy think about the manifesto I will provide you a link to it and promise that this site should be considered not safe for work in a mild way, and that yes I will censor comments but I will allow them to be anonymous. So that means I cant wear any of the damn ass badges they are propsing, thank the lord for that.
Property is theft, resistance is futile, the mob will rule.

Cliche finder

For those of you who just dont know what to write try the automatic cliche finder.

No tossers

We are having our next office informal gathering here:

Should be fun.

Presentation Porn...

Read this and couldn't help but giggle.

Bored in Antarctica?

"we hooked the sled to the robot and went for a ride. The robot, it turns out, can haul its own weight (nearly 200 lbs.) on a sled and hardly notice it...Snow surfing behind the robot is not very exciting however"

If blogging is journalism

If blogging is journalism (sometimes) then should News Search return Blogs? And then why do I need a blog search?
Blog search (and any non derivable content classification scheme) is a challenge as it requires some editorial process to manage the crawl parameters (or index filter in the case of Google), one organization who creates a single source for all Blog URL's would be a nice service, some Co's are doing a half decent job, no one seems to want to give up their great list.
TypePad and Blogspot make up a huge percentage of blog search hits from general purpose search engines, but a large proportion of professionally relevant blogs are hosted on corporate or news sites so a mass assumption about hosting services would miss the mark for professional blog search.

Technorati V Google blog Search

I use neither but apparently I am not alone. this article in search engine journal gives one perspective, Robert Scoble whose opinion I respect a little more give another here.

Easter gift

... for the man who has every thing.

The old ones...

.... are the best ones: SOAP V Rest debates
http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple/
http://duncan-cragg.org/blog/post/getting-data-rest-dialogues/

Great words of wisdom

Words and Phrases You Should Avoid

Recursion gone crazy

T-Shirts for the girl who has everything

http://www.lochers.com/

Awesome

glumbert.com - Supermarket 2.0

Danger Will Robinson

Interesting paper for people developing Ajax which points to novel to hijack Web 2.0'ish sites.

You'll never hit Snooze again

Large Rabbits missing in NK

Heard about this on NPR on the the way to the office, apparently the Rabbits are missing presumed eaten....
http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?article_class=2&no=345656&rel_no=1

Amazon S3

Damn S3 is fast, cheap, and seems reliable so far.
If you want to try it out Jungle disk is a very basic Windows app that lets you use it for archival.
I have been using iDisk for my Mac but that is soooo expensive in comparision.

Thanks Amazon, for the disk space and the women....

Dazed and confused

Okay - well I don't think I am, but I just finished ready a McKinsey Survey on adoption of Web 2.0 practices.
And their number one adoption was (pause for drum roll) "Web Services" err, excuse me, that is very err old school, I thought Web 2.0 was all about deriving value from users participation, that is according to Tim O'Reilly.
LinkedIn is Web 2.0, the project I worked on in 2001 with WEb services at Prometric is not.....
Come on people if, consultant firms are going to stand up and be self proclaimed experts they had better at least agree on the basic concepts they are going to go on about.

Scarred for life

I dont know if I will ever be the same now that I have watched this link that Mike forwarded arround the office:

Grrr

Unfortunate fodder for mal informed CTO's I wish they would not do this:
ZDNET
Gartner
I would argue that SOA provides you well defined security risks, for which technology exists to mitigate. None SOA architectures are much harder to isolate threats within - the surface area of SOA is small and as I have already stated well defined.

If you don't know how to deal with this - get in touch and I will connect you with a plethora of great companies that can help you out.

Blogger death threat interview

The following is a CNN article from this morning.