What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]
Saturday November 06, 2004
What are all of these stupid people doing in my country? There were some severe system problems last week that pretty much knocked this site out of commission, I'm hoping it's all in the past now.
In the meantime, the Big Lie that waging war on Iraq has some relationship to 9/11 and terrorism apparently has been successfully Jedi mind-tricked into the American psyche and we're destined to have four more years of high crimes and misdemeanors. It just makes me wonder what is up with the rest of the country. Plenty of folks abroad are, evidently, equally perplexed by this election, as we see in a recent Daily Mail cover.
If you're single, there are some Canadians offering asylum. I'm thinking of packing up the family and moving to New Zealand or something. Just to keep track of where I don't want to be, I'm reckoning with the map: 
Source: http://www.electoral-vote.com/
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Do you live in a state of stupity? Apparently 59,054,087 of you do.
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I was never particularly enamored with John Kerry, in fact I would've been happy with a Wesley Clark-Howard Dean ticket. Nonetheless, I don't think Kerry would have been so driven to a war that he would have disregarded counter-indicative intelligence and the advice of allies to wage one.
Another idea that no longer seems entirely ridiculous is to secede from union. Seriously, who wants to be part of this country when California's vote is under represented in the electoral college and yet our youth are being sent to Fallujah to wage war against a culture and people most people here know little of. We're the country's vegetable stand and it's cannon fodder. I don't think so. Suddenly, Ecotopia sounds like a reasonable proposition.
Independence for California! ( Nov 06 2004, 01:12:57 PM PST ) Permalink
Saturday October 23, 2004
Rock stars and actresses What is it with rock stars and actresses? Hopefully there's no home made videos of them but apparently Lars Ulrich and Connie Nielsen are a thing.
Remember Lucilla in Gladiator? Yea, that's Connie Nielsen.
| Here's a guy with two sons and a wife of 7 or 8 years going to fashion shows, art auctions and movie premiers with his Danish girlfriend. Oh, Lars: you're so damned hollywood! Apparently the paparazzi in Denmark have kept tabs on them as well. |
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Back in the old days o' Metallica we had loads of fun but didn't go to fashion shows, art auctions and movie premiers. We didn't sip fine wines either. Oh well, I hope the dude is happy.
( Oct 23 2004, 07:29:35 PM PDT ) Permalink
Friday October 22, 2004
Technorati's referer-driven cosmos There's a it's-so-simple-it's-cool feature on Technorati. You can construct a link to get the cosmos for a page simply by linking from it a specific URL.
After raising the notion with Tantek, he plugged the trivial bit to enable this on the Technorati site..
Check it out http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/referer.html (ok, so I'm not very popular in this big 'ol cosmos but anyway...). This is what you do:
Try it! ( Oct 22 2004, 07:54:11 PM PDT ) Permalink
Thursday October 21, 2004
Technorati Party All work and no play makes Ian a dull boy, so to keep me jazzed Technorati is having a party!
OK, I lied. It ain't about me, it's about our new office and the major milestones that Technorati is achieving, the agony of startup setbacks and the ecstacy of... having fun! The details:
- WHEN
- Thursday, October 28, 7 p.m.
- WHERE
- Technorati, 665 Third Street #207, San Francisco
- WHAT
- A party to catch up, and celebrate the move to our new offices!
- RSVP
- rsvp@technorati.com. As space is always limited, please be sure to RSVP.
Here's Dave's original post.
( Oct 21 2004, 04:34:11 PM PDT ) Permalink
Tuesday October 19, 2004
The MUNI gods frown on me I specifically didn't walk from BART today because of the downpour of rain, I transferred to MUNI to take the N-Judah down towards the Caltrain station. What a mistake!
Sure, I have a rain parka but that's not the point, I wanted to avoid having my backpack get saturated. So after waiting about 10 minutes, a two car N-Judah rolls into Embarcadero station at aroun 8:40 or so with the robotic audio announcement "two car. mission bay. now approaching...." A crowd piles on; I don't think the MUNI scheduling people have realized that a lot of people work near the ball park.
Out on the surface streets at Harrison, the driver announces that it's the last stop and that the next N would arrive in 3 minutes! Why would they cut the route 3 stops short?! Everyone spills out into the deluge of wind and rain; the shelter there hardly has adequate room, so most of us are getting wet. BTW, that was train cars number 1481 and 1483, in case any MUNI hacks are reading this. Almost 10 minutes later, I ended up getting back on the first train as it showed up on the opposite side of the platform, going the other way -- I was getting concerned that the rain would soak through my backpack and get my powerbook wet. On the way back to Embarcadero station, I saw the "next train" -- it was packed; looked like there would barely be room for all of the folks who'd withstood the rain waiting for it. I finally got another train and got to the office by 9:10am. Thanks for the convenient adventure, MUNI!
( Oct 19 2004, 09:36:51 AM PDT ) Permalink
Thursday October 14, 2004
Add To The Reading Queue I should take a week off of work so I can sit around and read (like that could ever happen).
So many books, so little time
- Hibernate in Action
- If the slashdot review glowed any brighter, it'd spontaneously combust.
- Agile Database Techniques : Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer
- Weighing YAGNI against the PITA'ness of data model changes has bit me before. Data modeling and iterating over model revisions are often the hard part in agile development cycles. I'd expect Scott Ambler to offer useful insights into lightening what is often the heaviest part of a projects development.
- The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
- As one who actively looks for opportunities in subverting the dominant paradigm, I'm interested in Clayton Christensen's follow-up to The Innovator's Dilemma.
Someday real soon, I'll build a little app with Amazon's ListLookupOperation to integrate wishlist items with my blog and perhaps fold it into an Attention.XML data source.
( Oct 14 2004, 10:36:56 AM PDT ) Permalink
Friday October 08, 2004
Who is the Master of Puppets? Could this be a picture of a wired George Bush on Salon.com?
See for yourself, Bush's mystery bulge I hope Kerry brings it up in tonight's debate, may be pat him down.
I will occupy- Metallica, 1986 ( Oct 08 2004, 11:49:12 AM PDT ) Permalink
I will help you die
I will run through you
Now I rule you too
Come crawling faster
obey your Master
your life burns faster
obey your Master
Master
Master of Puppets I'm pulling your strings
Interfaces and wire protocols for web services A lot of great feedback emerge during and after the Technorati hackathon.
The hackathon percolated a lot of interesting ideas. One of the bits of feedback that caught my attention was from Chris Fry:
There are some drawbacks however to not having a WSDL and to not using SOAP. (1) You are bound to HTTP; (2) If you version the contract how do you notify your clients? (3) Related to 1, no SOAP Headers; (4) No public contract other than your documentation.
This sounds great, getting Technorati developers out of the wire-protocol-awareness business (unless they want to be in it) is one of my goals for future development efforts with the Technorati API. The direction I'd like to take it is an "all of the above" implementation where API consumers can fiddle with the low level if they want to (via REST w/XML, REST w/XOXO, xml-rpc or whatever interface to du jour is desired) but also provide a SOAP interface for those who want to use WSDL to skip all of that.
We have some work to do internally at Technorati to get us to that point though.
( Oct 08 2004, 10:58:31 AM PDT ) PermalinkGoogle's Velocity Accelerating If you measure development velocity as the number of funcitonality points per time interval, then Google is definitely accelerating.
Check it out:
- Gmail Atom Feed Coming?
- According to internetnews.com, Google is enabling feeds of gmail mailboxes to make feed readers lightweight mail clients (well, readonly clients). I'm imagining subscribing to mailing list digests through gmail and reading them through a feed reader will become an adopted practice. Additionally, gmail's search capabilities are getting some augmentation.
- Google Searches Books: Google Print
- As has been widely publicized, Google Print seems to be Google's response to A9 ...so far Google Print has been down half the time I've tried to use it but I wouldn't bet against them executing well on it.
- Google queryable via SMS
- I'm imagining all kinds of goodness out of this... querying Froogle for prices while you're shopping bricks-n-mortar venues, looking up local bars and restaurants (and Dodgeballing them!)
- Gbrowser
- John Doerr says that he doesn't see browser in Google's future but still, if it quacks like a browser builder, it's probably a browser building duck.
So what's next from Google? An Orkut that isn't all-Brazil-all-the-time?
( Oct 08 2004, 10:31:29 AM PDT ) Permalink
Tuesday October 05, 2004
Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam Wow, the pictures this morning are fantastic!
If you haven't checked it out, stop what you're doing and check out Mount St. Helens right now!
( Oct 05 2004, 10:03:09 AM PDT )
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Wednesday September 29, 2004
Coming Up For Air Who has time to blog? The procession of emergencies that has afflicted Technorati lately has left me little time for peace (or even, as in the case of the only previous post I've had time to make in nearly two weeks, civility).
As reported on by Dave, the chaos really crescendoed last weekend with an electrical outage at the colo facility. The service is on the mend but we still have a ways to go. The database repairs are proceeding. The hardware upgrades are mostly completed and it looks like we're going to setup camp someplace that will be a huge step up from the ghetto colo we've been in.
Here comes the sun. It's alright.
( Sep 29 2004, 10:37:10 AM PDT ) Permalink
Monday September 20, 2004
The Optimal Time to Optimize in Operations One of the recent hassles I've had recently was with a hardware migration that needed to proceed quickly. The clock was ticking down on the disk capacity utilization on some key database hosts. Now suppose one of the sysadmins wanted to perform "preventitive fsck's" and "table consistency checks" -- when you're dealing with over 100 GB (closer to 200 GB, actually) of data, these are not quick propositions. In fact, they might take days. Ergo, just not feasible. Given the time, would it be optimal to sanity check every subsystem's functionality? Perhaps. But when struggling to beat the clock, you just gotta say, "Not now, Poncho!" Sometimes the only effective action is fast action.
First of all, the only times I've ever needed to do a reiserfsck has been after a cold power loss (and reiser is usually fine even after one of those). So the fact that this sysadmin wanted to do a reiserfsck "preemptively" made even less sense. As far as doing a table consistency check, with innodb this is never needed on an anticipatory basis. In my experience, innodb either is able to keep itself consistent with its own journaling or it's just hosed... not a lot of grey in between. Again, the only exception has been in cases of a cold power loss. Sure, sometimes other hardware problems, low level disk defects, will manifest themselves as problems with the filesystem or a database's data file. But usually there are other indicators as well (kernel complaints in syslog, etc). But even with the dependency stack accounted for and checked, it's no guarantee against failure.
Sometimes the optimal course is just the fastest one between where you are and where you need to be. Choosing the deliberate and cautious route, dwelling on unnecessary optimizations, may in fact be the slow and steady road to.... failure! In this case, if we'd followed the course of doing every unnecessary system check possible, we'd have run out disk space and crashed these particular databases.
Stop optimizing. Just shut up and get it done already.
( Sep 20 2004, 11:51:27 PM PDT ) Permalink
Sunday September 12, 2004
What does the post-petroleum economy look like? There's whole way of life enjoyed by the military-petroleum industrial complex from which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc have emerged. The clock is ticking down on that way of life and on the Western economy as a whole.
In today's San Francisco Chronicle there's a review of a pair of books I've had my eye on but haven't had time to read (thank goodness for book reviewers who have the time!).
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Blood and Oil
by Michael T. Klare
The world's rapidly growing economy is dependent on oil, the supply is running out and the U.S. and other great powers are engaged in an escalating game of brinkmanship to secure its continued free flow. Such is the premise of Klare's powerful and brilliant new book (following Resource Wars). [Publisher's Weekly] |
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Oil
by Matthew Yeomans
This examination of a slippery subject suffers from schizophrenia: is it straight journalism or an activist's screed? The strength of this book lies in its first half, when freelance journalist Yeomans shows the importance of oil in world history during the last 125 years. [Publisher's Weekly] |
The Chronicle review, THE HIGH PRICE OF OIL: We pay at the pump, we pay with taxes, and some pay with their lives, raises important questions about the future of, well, modern civilization. Are we heading towards a Madmaxian world of armored mobile homes and gasoline pirates? Do we want our foreign policy to be directed by our desire to preserve our freeway traffic jams? It doesn't seem too far fetched that, were Bush re-elected, we'd be pushed further along into an era of aggressive oil supply protection. A future where the military mission of young Americans will be security duty will be on the oil rigs, for the refineries and tankers and the other instruments of the petroleum industry isn't a future I want to our tax dollars underwriting. The future belongs to hydrogen fuel cells, solar energy and other alternative energy sources.
I'll probably pick up the Klare book on my next book shopping episode.
Other reading of interest:
- The End of Oil : On the Edge of a Perilous New World by Paul Roberts
- Out of Gas by David Goodstein
- The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg
In the meantime, I'm envisioning an energy-plentiful post-petroleum world, carpooling, taking BART to get to work and telecommuting when I can get away with it. To hedge my bets, I'll be at the Winnebago dealership today to look for rig that I can harden and equip with rocket propelled grenade launchers.
( Sep 12 2004, 11:59:21 AM PDT ) Permalink
Friday September 10, 2004
Blogging With Ecto I thought I'd give this a whirl!
The web.xml in my roller config wasn't setup for xmlrpc requests but I think it's all good now!
( Sep 10 2004, 01:18:56 AM PDT )
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Tuesday September 07, 2004
Micropayments for Microcontent Think online payments and you think PayPal. But what about micropayments? Is that like "push"/content is king/commerce is king? What ever happened to DigiCash? Beenz? Flooz? Magic-money-button-dot-com-dot-yawn? ....yea, who cares? Well, in an era when anybody and everybody can publish words, music, pictures, movies, three-D models and just about everything else for which the production barrier to entry has fallen, perhaps everyone should care.
C/Net's TechRepublic cracked it open a little today in Digital content spurs micropayments resurgence. Interesting to ponder. Instead of recurrent payment subscription fees, perhaps a little non-commitmental micropayment is a better fit in some cases. It seems like there are "big media lite" blogs (Gizmodo,Gawker, etc) and blog authors' who "hit the big time" by affiliating with a traditional media outlet. But I'm imagining that any highly ranked attention hound could some someday soon be able to draw a nickle-n-dime pay-to-play audience in the same way that iTunes has popularized selling small units of music in small denominations. The article quotes BitPass' CEO Michael O'Donnell
That first wave of payment technologies, the currency companies especially, were too early in the development of e-commerce to succeed, and the content companies weren't ready to handle it either.If you know who Michael is, you know him as the voice of experience when it comes to pay-to-play content.
Are we heading towards a creative utopia where we can all live an iLife, post to our blog, pursue our creative endeavors, stoke our iEgo up and maybe even be paid for it? Probably not. But it might not be so far fetched either.
( Sep 07 2004, 09:33:32 PM PDT ) Permalink
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