January 2008
19 posts
S3 numbers revisited: six orders of magnitude does... →
OK…. I should have realized in my original posting that the Oct 2007 10,000,000,000,000 objects figure was the source of the problem. I knew S3 could not be doubling every week, and that Amazon could not be making $11B a month, but didn’t see the now-obvious error in the input.
So what sort of money are they actually making?
Don MacAskill pointed me to this article at Forbes which says the...
Google maps gets SFO location waaaay wrong →
Before leaving Barcelona yesterday morning, I checked Google maps to get driving directions from San Francisco International airport (SFO) to a friend’s place in Oakland.
Google got it way wrong. Imagine trying to follow these instructions if you didn’t know they were so wrong. Click on the image to see the full sized map. Google maps is working again now.
Google maps gets SFO location waaaay wrong →
Before leaving Barcelona yesterday morning, I checked Google maps to get driving directions from San Francisco International airport (SFO) to a friend’s place in Oakland.
Google got it way wrong. Imagine trying to follow these instructions if you didn’t know they were so wrong. Click on the image to see the full sized map. Google maps is working again now.
Amazon S3 to rival the Big Bang? →
We’ve been playing around with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).
Adam Selipsky, Amazon VP of Web Services, has put some S3 usage numbers online (see slides 7 and 8). Here are some numbers on those numbers.
There were 5,000,000,000 (5e9) objects inside S3 in April 2007 and 10,000,000,000,000 (1e13) in October 2007. That means that in October 2007, S3 contained 2,000 times more objects than...
The Black Swan →
I got a copy of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable for xmas.
In London a couple of weeks ago I pointed it out to Russell as we wandered through a Waterstones. He picked it up, flipped it open, and immediately began to make deadly and merciless fun of it.
For me this is the kind of book I know I’ll want to read if it’s any good, and which I know I’ll (try to) read in any case...
Worst of the web award: MIT/Stanford Venture Lab →
I’ve just awarded one of my coveted Worst of the Web awards to the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab.
Here’s why. They are hosting a video I’d like to watch. You can see it on their home page right now, Web 3.0: New Opportunities on the Semantic Web.
If you click on that link, wonderful things happen.
You get taken to a page with a Watch Online link. Clicking on it tells you that this is a “Restricted...
Final straws for Mac OS X →
I’ve had it with Mac OS X.
I’m going to install Linux on my MacBook Pro laptop in March once I’m back from ETech.
I’ve been thinking about this for months. There are just so many things I don’t like about Mac OS X.
Yes, it’s beautiful, and there are certainly things I do like (e.g., iCal). But I don’t like:
Waiting forever when I do a rm on a big tree
Sitting wondering what’s going on when...
Understanding high-dimensional spaces →
I’ve spent lots of time thinking about high-dimensional spaces, usually in the context of optimization problems. Many difficult problems that we face today can be phrased as problems of navigating in high-dimensional spaces.
One problem with high-dimensional spaces is that they can be highly non-intuitive. I did a lot of work on fitness landscapes, which are a form of high dimensional space,...
Giselle is served an apple martini, but she... →
Well that’s a relief.
One email a day →
I’ve got my email inbox locked down so tightly that only one email made it through today. That’s down from several hundred a day just a few weeks ago.
All the email that doesn’t make it immediately into my inbox gets filed elsewhere. I deal with it all quickly - either deleting stuff (mailing lists), saving, or replying and then saving.
I’m spending way less time looking at my inbox wondering...
Free wifi at Stansted →
I’m at Stansted heading back to Barcelona. There’s free wifi here (on the merula network in the waiting area for gates 1-19), for the first time I’ve seen it. At first I didn’t understand their web page, then I read the login box which clearly says to enter merula as user name and password. It works.
Wifi on a bus →
I’m on the X90 National Express bus from Oxford to London. At the bus stop before we left I pulled out my laptop to do some work on a presentation. I noticed there was an open wifi signal and thought I’d connect quickly to pick up my mail.
It turns out the wifi network is on the bus.
I’m now speeding down the motorway, it’s gray and raining outside, and I’m sitting here warm and online. I...
Tagging in the year 3000 (BC) →
Jimmy Guterman recently called Marcel Proust an Alpha Geek and asked for thoughts on “what from 100 years ago might be the hot new technology of 2008?”
Here’s something about 5000 years older. As a bonus there’s a deep connection with what Fluidinfo is doing.
Alex Wright recently wrote GLUT: Mastering Information Through the Ages. The book is good. It’s a little dry in places, but in others it’s...
Both my kids beat me at Connect 4 →
My 2 older kids got Connect 4 for xmas.
I’ve liked Connect 4 for a long time. The first TCP/IP socket programming I ever did was in 1987 and it was code to let two people on the net play Connect 4 against each other, with graphics done using curses code written with Andrew Hensel. Later I wrote a machine opponent that used some form of Alpha-beta pruning and which was popular among a few CS grad...
More email customization →
My recent email changes are working out well. Yesterday morning I woke up and didn’t read email. That’s because I didn’t have any email!
Well, I did, but procmail had filed it all into mail/incoming/IN-20080103.spool because none of it needed immediate attention. I have set VM up so that it knows to look for an x.spool file if I ask it to visit a file called x. That’s one line of elisp in VM:...
I just deactivated my Facebook account →
I just deactivated my Facebook account. This has nothing to do with Robert Scoble’s account being disabled earlier today, I’m just sick of Facebook. It does nothing whatsoever for me, except send messages that can and would otherwise have been sent in email. I don’t want to use a tool that encourages people to send me messages on a website that I then have to go log in to. I don’t want some...
Amazon just billed me 14 cents →
I’ve been messing around with Esteve setting up an Amazon EC2 machine.
We set up a machine the other day, ssh’d into it, took a look around, and then shut it down a little later. Amazon just sent me a bill:
Greetings from Amazon Web Services,
This e-mail confirms that your latest billing statement is available on the AWS web site. Your account will be charged the following:
Total: $0.14
...
My email setup →
I like customizing my environment. I’ve spent lots and lots of time doing that over the decades.
Some examples: My emacs environment has about 6000 lines of elisp that I’ve written to help me edit. I have over 500 shell scripts in my bin directory (30K lines of code), and certainly hundreds of other scripts around the place to help with other specific tasks. My bash setup is about 2000 lines of...
I resolve to waste less time online →
It’s new year’s day. I never make new year’s resolutions. But today I’ve finally taken a step I’ve been meaning to take for a while, and it happens to be Jan 1st, so there you go.
Over the last 2 months I’ve spent lots of time running around talking to people and not producing any code (or much of anything else).
I’ve also found it increasingly hard to get anything useful done (by useful I...