Monthly Archives: October 2006

Do Not Push Button

Posted on by
7

Do Not Push Button I walk by this button and the sign above it several times a day. Do you have any idea how tempting it is tap that button every time I go by it?

The button is next to the front door of our office suite. The door has an electronic lock and it was decided that we didn’t want to have the door scheduled to be unlocked all day (we lock the door for lunch hour), so they installed a button to toggle the door between locked and unlocked. Instead of installing it under the receptionist desk (or some other inconspicuous place) it was installed right next to the door (at least it was installed on the correct side).

Being a fairly large red button we had problems with people pushing it (the button does say push after all), which caused the door to be locked or unlocked more or less randomly through out the day. So the sign went up above the button. For the most part people are pretty good about not pushing the button. But if they are anything like me, they think about pushing it most of the time.

How To Tick People Off With One Blog Post, Yours Truly, Google

Posted on by
5

When Merriam-Webster added google/googled/googling to their dictionary Google made some rumblings about how they weren’t happy to see their trademark become a verb. This wasn’t because they weren’t thrilled to be popular, but because they were worried that they’d eventually loose their trademark.

That was all fine and good until yesterday, when Google managed to tick off nearly everyone with a single blog post: Do you “Google?”.

Granted this probably came about because their legal team figured it would be a good way to show that they are trying to protect their trademark. But their specific approach certainly came across as, hmmmm, demanding. And if there is one thing that the world of open source/api/mashup folks don’t care for is being told what they can and can’t do. Sorry Google, I think you blew it on this one. Expect people to do exactly the opposite of what you just told them to do.

No More Java Web Applets

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve had it. No more Java applets in web pages for me. I’m turning off Java in IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. The horrible performance penalty imposed by Java applets isn’t worth it, even on the fastest of systems.

With Flash and JavaScript (AJAX, etc) being readily available for many users, you should seriously consider avoiding (or replacing) Java applets on web pages in the future.

I should have done this a long time ago.

Strong Smell, HazMat Team, Long Morning

Posted on by
Reply

This morning there was a strong, unpleasant smell in the office and around the building. A few people were felling ill and this lead to an evacuation of Modoc Hall at CSU Sacramento this morning. My cube is on the first floor, although reports of the smell came from all over the building.

Everyone from our building was evacuated out to the parking lot. So most of my morning was spent standing around outside watching fireman, police, news crews and a HazMat team check out Modoc Hall. After lunch we were allowed back in, but no information was provided on what the odor was or where it came from.

Not exactly how I expected today to go :-(

Google Buys YouTube

Posted on by
Reply

The official word is out, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Amazing. Many of the rumors mentioned that Google may be going after this, at least in part, to make sure that Yahoo and Microsoft don’t get ahold of YouTube. I wonder if we’ll start seeing that as a trend purchases of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.

It will be interesting to see where Google’s stock goes tomorrow.

Ping Google

Posted on by
2

Google has announced their new ping service. You can find out more details in their ping FAQ, but for people running their own blogs you’ll more likely to interested in the XML-RPC ping API. You can see a list of recent pings to Google at http://blogsearch.google.com/changes.xml, which shows pings received in the last 5 minutes.

I’m rather surprised that it took this long for one of the big three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) to provide a ping service. I guess you could claim that Yahoo already does this via their purchase of Blog.gs, but I haven’t seen them talk that service up since the purchase.

So now for some of the obvious questions. Like, what happens to Ping-O-Matic now? In the short term it is unlikely that anything will change since they’ve been doing this so long. Combined with the fact that WordPress ships with Ping-O-Matic turned on by default makes for sizable user base out the gate. But over the long term will people continue use, or will more people move to Google ping? Then there are all of the other services out there that accept pings (like Technorati), what sort of long term impact will this have?

Like most ping services, Google intends for this to be used for blog updates. There is nothing to stop people from using it for other types of websites though (forums, ecommerce, etc), so they probably will. Then there is the dark side of blog pings: spam. Ping spam is a huge problem. I didn’t see any mention of how they would be dealing with this, but they’ll have to on some level. Expect people to try and game this as much as they do Googlebot.

Perhaps this is a sign that Google is ready to get more involved in the world of blogs. (Yes, I know they own Blogger, but really, what have they done with that since they purchased it?)

Remembering When

Posted on by
Reply

No matter how good your memory is, there are times when you just can’t recall when something happened. I was thinking about a few events in my life and realized I couldn’t always pin down when they were.

Some times there are significant world events that help solidify when something happened. One example of this is when I went to DEF CONF IV. I’ll always remember that was in the summer of 1996 because I remember seeing the news about the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta while I was there.

I started to wonder if I could use this technique on some of my more fuzzy memories. So I tried to remember when I first started using Google as my primary means for searching the web. I started my current job on 1 May 1999, but couldn’t remember if I’d been using Google at my old job, or my current one. One item I could remember that was after I started using Google was Google’s purchase of Deja.com’s Usenet archive, which was on 12 February 2001. So likely before 2001, and maybe after May 1999. Not perfect, but it is better than the fuzzy void that comes up when I request the memory from my brain.

<Side Note> How’s this PR title strike you: Yahoo! Selects Google as its Default Search Engine Provider. Amazing what a difference six years will make. I didn’t realize how entertaining looking at old press releases could be.</Side Note>

How’s this for an old memory, I was able to track down roughly when I started reading JeremY!’s Blog because I remember that while I was searching for something about MySQL I ended up on a post about tooth repair. This puts my timeline around November 2002.

I’m starting to wonder if I can do this on purpose. Are there strong (or odd) events that I can link with new memories that I’m currently making? Certainly “bloging” about a thing or event helps because I can usually at least remember, oh yeah, I blogged that somewhere. To a lesser degree the same things holds true for my del.icio.us bookmarks.

How’s this for an easy thing to remember, my first daughter (Alice) was born on my 6th wedding anniversary (3 Jan 2002). If only every important date was that easy to remember.

Amazon S3 vs DreamHost

Posted on by
51

DreamHost recently increased the disk storage and bandwidth on their shared hosting plans. This got me wondering how it compares to the storage specific service of Amazon S3. To make things easy we’ll use the most expensive month to month costs for DreamHost and ignore the setup fee (there are plenty of coupon codes that will waive that for you). The S3 amounts are constant at $0.15 per GB of storage and $0.20 per GB transferred.

DH: Level 1 (200GB disk, 2TB bandwidth)
DH: $9.95 per month
S3: $30 (0.15 * 200GB) + $400 (0.20 * 2,000GB) = $430 per month

DH: Level 2 (300GB disk, 3TB bandwidth)
DH: $19.95 per month
S3: $45 (0.15 * 300GB) + $600 (0.20 * 3,000GB) = $645 per month

DH: Level 3 (400GB disk, 4TB bandwidth)
DH: $39.95 per month
S3: $60 (0.15 * 400GB) + $800 (0.20 * 4,000GB) = $860 per month

DH: Level 4 (500GB disk, 5TB bandwidth)
DH: $79.95 per month
S3: $75 (0.15 * 500GB) + $1,000 (0.20 * 5,000GB) = $1,075 per month

Please double check my math, because these numbers seem to be a bit on the insane side. It is possible that DreamHost has these huge numbers for each level and hopes that no one ever actually reaches them. If we can assume that both of these companies are able to make money at their respective price points then Amazon is making a killing off of S3.

This isn’t a perfect apples to apples comparison, DreamHost is a general web host, not just a storage provider. You get things like a shell account, MySQL database, etc. Since S3 focuses only on storage they provide a specific API for just that. I know DreamHost uses some sort of network attached storage (NAS) which does hourly snapshots and I’d guess is backed by some sort of RAID array. I’m sure S3 is built on a high availability network and server farm (claims 99.99% availability).

If DreamHost can keep up with performance and availability issues then they appear to be a much better deal than Amazon S3.