Archive for March, 2006
DIDYOUKNOWTHATYOUCANONLYHAVESIXTY-THREECHARACTERSINADOMAIN-NAME.com
Friday, March 31st, 2006
Here’s an interesting read containing stats on registered domains.
Desktop.com == You.os ? true : true
Friday, March 31st, 2006
Well, except that desktop.com actually looked nice. For a romp down the Web 1.0 bubble trail, check out Desktop.com Secures 29 Million, and Start-up Eyes Microsoft Crown. If you visit Desktop.com today you find the dregs of what’s left, a search toolbar from IdeaLab. Too funny.
Now check out this post by Frank Gruber on You.os, desktop.com 2.0 and enjoy a good laugh.
Amazon CTO
Friday, March 31st, 2006
I like this guy. I like Scoble too but this whole corporate blogging thing seems to me to be somewhat of a fad.
I wanted them abandon their fuzzy group hug approach, and counter me with hard arguments why they were right and I was wrong. Instead they appeared shell-shocked that anyone actually had the guts to challenge the golden wonder boys of blogging and not accept their religion instantly.
He also has some interesting thoughts on systems scalability that ring true.
Is achieving good scalability possible? Absolutely, but only if we architect and engineer our systems to take scalability into account. For the systems we build we must carefully inspect along which axis we expect the system to grow, where redundancy is required, and how one should handle heterogeneity in this system, and make sure that architects are aware of which tools they can use for under which conditions, and what the common pitfalls are.
In essence, think ahead, the design of software shouldn’t be shortsighted. Throwing together prototypes that ultimately become production systems can easily lead to failure. I’ve never sat in the camp of developers who think it’s better to throw something together just to get it working now, without thinking about what your going to want to build into a system later. Good design that takes both short and long term goals into account and is willing to sacrifice some short term agility for long term stability usually results in far fewer headaches down the road and a better user experience overall.
Oh, and, to show I do listen sometimes, Dru you told me this a long long time ago and I’ve never forgotten it. 
And you know what? You were right.
Magnolia
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
Actually it’s ma.gnolia.com, yet another social bookmarking site. I kinda dig it simply because I can spell the domain without having to think, unlike del.ici.ous, er, d.lic.ious? delicio.us? Who the hell knows. Your non-geek friends will no doubt find this easier to remember.
Unlike delicious, the site is actually appealing to look at, and is designed for people, not geeks. Note their excellent FAQ that introduces users to social bookmarking.
Magnolia also has a cool widget for OSX that displays screen grabs from random sites that have been bookmarked. I also kinda like the flower theme.
Magnolia’s based, naturally, in San Francisco. It was founded in 2005 by Larry Halff.
Predicting the Future
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
Dru thinks nobody listens to him. I do, although apparently I screwed up and forgot what he told me about .NET. ( I think I remember him saying something nice about the Visual J++ runtime, but I don’t think I made the connection between that and .NET. My bad.) I’ll say this though, when he speaks of infrastructure, every Web 2.0 startup should be listening-
Side note, I will bet anybody right now that 9 out of 10 people out there who think they understand what it takes to run a big internet service are more wrong than right. In my experience, most internet service people really don’t understand the real patterns about scalability, be it programming, quality, or handling users.
Dru is a Web 1.0 veteran, he helped build four-11, and managed eGroups infrastructure, which supported millions of users and ultimately got bought by Yahoo! for $428 million. So I think it’s safe to say he knows what he’s talking about.
Update - I almost forgot, Dru also helped build RocketMail which later became Yahoo! Mail.
Hey, What’s Your Tat Mean?
Monday, March 27th, 2006
Mine says, “Child Offering God”, how ’bout yours?
It says “ease of gas retention”.
Coool.
RSS Naming Conventions Update
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
I’ve overhauled my naming conventions. I think “feed” is a little too geek, so in Daisy I’ve gone with a convention I think is much more user friendly:
Rule#1 - A ‘weblog’ is the thing that gets published. Like a newspaper.
Rule#2 - A ‘feed’ is the URL endpoint a weblog’s content is available at. Like a newswire, it’s a connection point.
Rule#3 - You subscribe to or unsubscribe from a weblog, not a feed.
Rule#4 - The result of subscribing to a weblog is a ’subscription’.
Rule#5 - It’s ‘article’, not ‘post’.
Rule#6 - Articles have a ‘headline’.
Rule#7 - it’s not ‘tag’ it’s ‘topic’.
Rule#8 - ‘RSS’ never gets mentioned
Interesting Microsoft RSS Platform Problem Found
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
I finally spent some time today tracking down my sporadic file in use exceptions related to feed renaming and moving. Technically I’d consider this a bug, although I’m not sure how the folks in Redmond will solve it. (They probably won’t, so I will have to.) Essentially the problem involves delayed garbage collection of objects which basically hold COM references to unmanaged code (feed handles). The following code produces exception faults in the first feed rename call after the second feed object is created:
IFeedsManager fs = new FeedsManagerClass();
IFeed feed;
feed = fs.GetFeedByUrl("http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/rss.xml") as IFeed;
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt?");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt??");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt???");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt????");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt?????");
feed = fs.GetFeedByUrl("http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/rss.xml") as IFeed;
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt?");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt??");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt???");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt????");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt?????");
The exception is a file in use exception:
System.IO.FileLoadException
{"The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070020)":null}
The only way to solve it, is to force a garbage collection cycle:
IFeedsManager fs = new FeedsManagerClass();
IFeed feed;
feed = fs.GetFeedByUrl("http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/rss.xml") as IFeed;
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt?");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt??");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt???");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt????");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt?????");
feed = null;
GC.Collect();
feed = fs.GetFeedByUrl("http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/rss.xml") as IFeed;
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt?");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt??");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt???");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt????");
feed.Rename("Where the Hell is Matt?????");
So here I am, working with the latest and greatest in language runtimes, and I find that, because Microsoft doesn’t use their own tools when developing code (The feed store is a C++ COM object and is accessed through Interop) I’m forced to “clean up after myself” anyway. Feels like I’m back in ANSI c calling free on malloc’d memory blocks. Joy. Of course this is still beta code, so maybe I’m being too critical at this point. We’ll have to wait and see. But I honestly don’t see how this can be fixed from the unmanaged side of things, so my guess is even after the final release it’s probably going to have to happen on my end. I also think this is going to cause some pretty serious problems down the road, since multiple applications can access the feed store at once, any of which might open and hold a handle on a feed or feed folder.
Hayward Fault Ready to Snap?
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
There’s an interesting article on Newsday about San Francisco’s Hayward fault.
“It is locked and loaded and ready to fire at any time,” said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Tom Brocher.
The Hayward Fault runs through one of the country’s most densely populated areas; experts say 2 million people live close enough to be strongly shaken by a big quake.
It slices the earth’s crust along a 50-mile swath of suburbia east of San Francisco, from exclusive hilltop manors overlooking the bay to Hayward’s humble flatlands. It snakes beneath highway bridges, strip malls, nursing facilities and retirement centers, and it splits the uprights of the football stadium at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Hayward fault is considered to be particularly dangerous due to the poor soil conditions in the alluvial plain that drops from the East Bay Hills to the eastern shoreline of San Francisco Bay. At the lower elevations near the bay the soil is mostly water saturated mud and sand, which tends to amplify the effects of an earthquake and so producing significantly greater ground motion. Additionally, the soil itself can fail, turning into a liquid mud from the agitation, a mud unable to support buildings erected upon once-firm soil. This region is also covered with dense low-rise urban development, most of which was built soon after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but before good earthquake resistant construction practices had been developed. All though many structures have undergone seismic retrofitting there are a large number of dangerous un-reinforced masonry (mostly brick) structures and chimneys, which can be extremely hazardous to occupants in a large earthquake.
In its northern extent the Hayward Fault lies directly beneath the portion of highway 13 that is south of highway 24, extending north directly under Lake Temescal and further under the centerline of the football field of Memorial Stadium at the University of California, Berkeley. There are no plans at this time to replace the stadium, even though its “O” shape may possibly be split into two “C”s. A suitable site for a replacement is available immediately to the east in Wildcat Canyon, although this would require an east-west alignment rather than the traditional north-south orientation. While there is only a small probability of an earthquake on this fault while the stadium is occupied the results could be deadly.
Some of the cities in the eastern bay shore and south bay region near this fault include Richmond, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Kensington, Oakland, San Leandro, San Lorenzo, Castro Valley, Hayward, Fremont, Milpitas, Niles, and portions of San Jose.
Surfing the Net
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006
I was searching around for some stock photography of flowers tonight when I came across a wonderful series of pictures detailing the slow decomposition of two dead pigs named Peggy and Daisy, titled “Expérience Pigs 2002″. Isn’t the Internet a wonderful thing?
