Author Archives: Karl

Garret Vreeland: “The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.”

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Emily Gould, formerly of Gawker wrote of her experience sharing her life online in the NYTimes. It’s a weekend must read.

The piece has drawn interesting reaction from here and there, but the response that stood out the most to me was Garret’s:

NY Times, you got snookered. You need editors who’ve had a history on the internet, with experience of the weblogging phenomena going back to the beginning of the revolution.

Why is there such a strong reaction among webloggers to this piece? To us, the lessons gleaned from this article were new eight or nine years ago. Now they’re reflexive, done without thought: Revealing personal information online, is like lending your favorite books. Only lend what you don’t mind losing. Never lend what is valuable to others, without permission. Don’t expect to be forgiven if you do, because you cannot ‘take it back.’

Repeat after me: The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.

Again, louder.

The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.

The sooner you memorize and understand that, the better.

lang:groovy – extend your Spring app with scripting

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The Spring Framework offers many ways to ease application development and maintenance, but one that gets my interest really going is its dynamic language support.

codehaus: Dynamic language beans in Spring

codehaus: Groovy and JMX

raible designs: Using Dynamic Languages with Spring with Rod Johnson and Guillaume LaForge

organic thoughts: Spring Meets Groovy!

“the 110 AC outlet”

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There’s a good piece in the NYTimes on cloud computing for the uninitiated: Cloud Computing: So You Don’t Have to Stand Still

Traditional companies are also beginning to adapt their computing infrastructure to the cloud. Reuven Cohen is founder and chief technologist at Enomaly, a software firm in Etobicoke, Ontario, that helps companies do just that. While most of its clients are technology businesses, Mr. Cohen says Enomaly is working with a New York-based bank that uses cloud computing to develop and test applications. He says that another customer is a large media business that uses the cloud to process video.

He sees this kind of need-driven use as a “fundamental change in how we manage technology.”

In fact, cloud computing is poised to do for technology what the electrical grid did for power, says Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch,” which compares the rise of the cloud to the rise of electric utilities. The electrical grid streamlined operations for companies; when every home had cheap power and outlets, “you had incredible innovation in how to put all that cheap power to use,” Mr. Carr says. He thinks that cloud computing will prompt a similar cycle over the next decade.

There are practical problems that could turn the cloud into a thunderhead. The technology is still emerging: Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) went offline for a couple of hours in February.

Peter O’Kelly, an analyst at the Burton Group, a technology research firm, says he thinks that many established companies will not save money by moving to the cloud. And Alistair Croll, a partner at Bitcurrent, a consulting firm that specializes in Web and cloud technologies, says companies will not be able to put data willy-nilly into the cloud because of security concerns.

At the same time, Mr. Croll says the cloud is here to stay. “The Web has become the interface” for computing, “the 110 AC outlet,” he says. That is a fundamental shift that could power a new cycle of technological innovation.

What’s the impact of time shifting on mass entertainment?

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The NYTimes looks at the effects of DVRs and Web video on mass entertainment. It’s not as clear cut as you think: In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time? – New York Times: “As a result of time-shifting, the biggest shows are getting bigger and some of the smaller shows are getting negatively impacted,” the senior television executive said.

That’s so counter intuitive. In my experience, my TV watching not only increased, but Richelle and me watch a far wider variety of shows.

Celebrating Life

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You can’t help but be inspired by how Randy Pausch is facing his oncoming death – by celebrating his life and sharing it with others.

NYTimes: Keeping Priorities Straight, Even at the End:

The real wisdom of Dr. Pausch is that he tries to enjoy every day he has left with his family, while at the same time trying to prepare them for life without him. To that end, he is videotaping himself spending time with Dylan, Logan and Chloe so they can look back and see how he felt about them.

“I’ve always said I only care about the first three copies of the book,” Dr. Pausch said. “The lessons learned are the lessons I’ve learned and what worked for me. But so many people wrote to me and said, ‘This was a jumping-off point to have conversations with my kids we haven’t had.’ “

Using Disk to Scale

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One of the largest concerns when developing an infrastructure for a site as large as Comcast.net is determining smart ways to scale. By smart, I mean requiring the least amount of effort to launch new channels or services. Each new channel or page can draw thousands, if not millions of page views. You need to plan for it.

When growing Cofax at Knight Ridder, we hit a nasty bump in the road after adding our 17th newspaper to the system. Performance wasn’t what it used to be and there were times when services were unresponsive.

A project was started to resolve the issue, to look for ‘the smoking gun’. The thought being that the database, being as well designed as it was, could not be of issue, even with our classic symptom being rapidly growing numbers of db connections right before a crash. So we concentrated on optimizing the application stack.

I disagreed and waged a number of arguments that it was our database that needed attention. We first needed to tune queries and indexes, and be willing to, if required, pre-calculate data upon writes and avoid joins by developing a set of denormalized tables. It was a hard pill for me to swallow since I was the original database designer. Turned out it was harder for everyone else! Consultants were called in. They declared the db design to be just right – that the problem must have been the application.

After two months of the team pushing numerous releases thought to resolve the issue, to no avail, we came back to my original arguments. The terrific thing was that restructuring the database was a no pain affair – we had a terrific service layer between the main web tier and the db that hid its schema. We were able to deliver a release of the database that did not require any code changes on the web tier.

There is no silver bullet here, for smaller sites you are adding a great degree of complexity taking this route and it is, most likely, not advisable. However, if you have a large site that is thrashing – dealing with the demands of growth – take a hard look.

Related – and supporting of this:

High Scalability: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Using a Lot of Disk Space to Scale”.

High Scalability: Scaling Secret #2: Denormalizing Your Way to Speed and Profit

Dare Obasanjo: When Not to Normalize your SQL Database

Social Software Links for May 20th, 2008

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  • Epicenter: Google Health Goes Live – It will have huge ramifications in how very sensitive data will get shared and managed.
  • Google Friend Connect launches, proving what me and a few others have said in the past – Social Networking isn’t a set of destinations, but a set of features that services that aim to surface online community focus must provide. Forums and Instant Messenging 3.0.
  • Talking about opening conversation in a truely powerful way, ever notice how few talk about mental illness? Well the same holds true online as well. Furious Seasons, a great blog that discusses mental health care from different angles, shares that one of the best blogs about the subject, editor of the Philadelphia Weekly, Liz Spikol, maybe leaving us.
  • Philly.com relaunches. I have a lot to say about the work Mark Potts and team accomplished, but for now – congrats!
  • ReadWriteWeb shares The Ultimate Twitter Revenue Model. Advertisements. Show me a business plan that doesn’t include them. The funny thing is we all claim to have read The Cluetrain Manifesto, yet instead of discouraging advertising as a business model – it appears to have empowered it as one. Maybe reinforced it as one. The irony is thick.

Leg pain returning, but there are some sports stars dealing with this too

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I’ll post an update about the latest injection’s progress (not good), but while researching my condition using Powerset I found out that NBA MVB, the Suns’s Steve Nash, and tennis star Andre Agassi, have my condition, spondylolisthesis.

Sports Illustrated: Point Guard from Another Planet

NBA.com: Steve Nash’s MVP Workout

Charlie Rose Show: A conversation with basketball professional Steve Nash

Tennis Warehouse: Interview with Andre Agassi

theage.com.au: Pain is Agassi’s main foe

webmd.com: Andre Agassi’s Battle With Back Pain

cnn.com: Interview With Andre Agassi