Archive for November, 2007

Why I’m not Twittering

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nesrait
on November 30, 2007
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I’ve been meaning to checkout Twitter for some time now. And today… I’ve decided to delay that action once again! :P

Here’s a post describing Twitter for those who might want to make the leap into this amazing new world. ;)

Why am I not leaping along (lol… RabbitMQ just came to mind) with the crowd you might ask…

Well, picking chunks from Linda Stone’s thoughts on Continuous Partial Attention as my own:

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY.

and

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING.

I’d say Twitter’s picks up where instant messaging stopped sucking.

In traditional IM you could sign out when you wanted.

In Twitter the corresponding action is not checking for new twits, something I think might be simply impossible you’ve been using after some time. :P

In a post waving the twitter flag I found one of the things that drives me away from twitter (her words, my boldness :P):

Do I think Twitter scales? Nope. I don’t think community ’scales’, either. I look at my long list of friends and feel I need to start switching some off (although it’s an insanely difficult decision because I’m actually interested in learning more about the people who update rarely as well). I have found it insanely helpful as well as entertaining. It IS crack. It IS distracting. It has also created an awesome ‘efficiency’ in my life…an emotional efficiency so to speak, where I have 140 characters to vent and get to connect with others that do the same.

Humm… “switching friends off”… Humm…

That kind of reminds me of something else… Something like…

Instant Messaging! :P

Disclaimer: I don’t turn it on anymore. I’ve amassed ~100 “friends” so now it’s plain counterproductive to turn on the bloody thing on. I could call it Social Fatigue 1.0.

Twitter is cool. The bottom line is that while I relate with the “connecting people” idea I don’t agree with it’s implementation. There ARE better ways to do it! But it’s still early to blog about that. ;)

Update: Another way to look at twitter. Comments: Ambient Intimacy = Interesting. No business model yet = wtf? :|

Why Stowe’s blog rocks!

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nesrait
on November 30, 2007
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Stowe’s blog is one of those blogs that actively engage the reader.

Sometimes you get a bit of his expertise, sometimes his rants and when time is short you just get a stop-munching-of-my-brain-and-read-it-yourself link list (the kind I normally put on this blog :P).

But the best part about the man’s blog is that you can genuinely see there’s a human being on the other side. Like in today’s post: Yelp: Leading The Way In The New Rudeness… lol

It seems Yelp over-invited people to a party and when too many people said they were going they did the obvious thing: mass un-invites! :D

Stowe was uninvited and replyed accordingly:

Aw! Blow me. Don’t “invite me” if it’s not really an invite, dickheads.

One word: LOL

CogHead switches to AWS & Flex

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nesrait
on November 30, 2007
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Yet another company making the plunge! :)

CogHead is a company which allows anyone to create useful applications and share (read “sell”) them with everyone. More info on their site… :P

Now for the geek stuff:

The Amazon EC2 and S3 services were appealing for multiple reasons. The cost efficiency was certainly compelling.  Our early analysis showed a significant reduction in projected costs for comparable cpu and storage.  The network infrastructure was also compelling with excellent peering and future prospects of geographic distribution.  Finally, the federated deployment architecture we could deploy on EC2/S3 would allow us to deploy a very robust service that relied much more on automated recovery and management than on data center staff or on hardware reliability.  Our service could be more agile and cost efficient as we adapt to changing needs of customers.  The challenge was that work was required to adapt our deployment architecture to a federated model that took full advantage of the EC2 and S3 services.

In the same announcement they also reported ditching OpenLaszlo for Adobe’s Flex.

Further analysis of EC2/S3

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nesrait
on November 30, 2007
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Ahoy!

Time to close some tabs on Firefox!
Meaning: time to blog about what’s on them. ;)

Hosting alternatives to EC2

In the last few weeks I’ve read a lot of posts about Amazon EC2. Among the comment skirmish I found some pay-as-you-g[r]o[w] companies that might be worth considering when your “killer app” goes out to conquer the world.

  • Flexiscale - has servers in Europe;
  • GoGrid - pay-as-you-use their “RAM/hour” concept…
  • GridLayers - these guys use 3Tera’s AppLogic “platform”;
  • Joyent - with their Accelerators. I don’t like the Set-Up fees though… :|

Other companies that don’t belong to the previous list (LOL!! Don’t ask…):

  • MediaTemple - This one seems perfect for all you Joomlers and Drupalieres out there-> check out GridService or Dedicate Virtual!
  • RedwoodVirtual - Linux Virtual Server offerings, might be nice to play with.
  • Q-layer - a technology similar to 3Tera’s AppLogic. Resellers only? :|

Automatic Scaling on EC2

And now let me introduce RightScale:

RightScale is your easy to use portal to Amazon’s Web Services. It is the only end-to-end management platform for AWS that includes everything you need to get a scalable, reliable, performant web application up and running quickly.

They give away a limited Free Developer Edition to get you hooked up and for the extra goodies (auto scaling for one) they charge $500/$750 month (price for a maximum of 20 managed instances) plus a minimum set-up fee of $2500 (on the paid subscriptions).

WeoCeo offers a similar service is offered:

The WeoCEO application […] maximizes the power of EC2 by providing automatic and instantaneous scaling, load balancing, and fail-safe supports, including a stable IP environment. These critical functions optimize usage and provide true 24/7 operations to make EC2 a powerful, intelligent solution for businesses of any size.

After digging for a bit I found a possible out-of-beta price tag: $0.05 per managed instance/hour ~= $37,2 instance/month. This would amount to $740/month for 20 instances.
I prefer this solution to RightScale in that here you only pay for what you use.

Here’s some pretty images for the geek in you:

It appears that in both solutions the prices are independent of the kind of EC2 node you’re managing, so you can always scale UP to more powerful EC2 nodes at the same cost (in these services). ;) As time passes I think we can expect some kind soul to share similar solutions with the community, but while that doesn’t happen here’s some info on what’s under WeoCeo’s hood.

Hummm… Apparently the guys building these auto-management tools are all friends. :)
I just found out about ElasticLive while reading a blog post on WeoCeo. Didn’t get much info from the site though. :\

MUHAHAHAHA!

<Davide moment!> :D
WeoCe’s proxy servers are deployed on EC2 so why not make your own EC2 servers assume the role of proxy/assistant? :) Erlang node failure detection comes to mind… in fact, Erlang’s message passing… humm… to be continued…
</Davide moment!>

EC2/S3 related links

Some related links that might be of interest:

Well… enough for tonight! :)
Tab count: 70!

Is Soccer a product of Cumulative Advantage?

Published
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nesrait
on November 27, 2007
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As social beings we care about what others think: when facing a decision, knowing the choices of others conditions our own decision. This implicit effect is called Cumulative Advantage and it explains why “success drives success” or the “rich get richer”.

This human “feature” might be a remain from our “out-in-the-wild” past.

Imagine you are one of your ancestors, just hanging around looking for your next meal.

Suddenly, you start hearing lots of people screaming. You look to check where the noise is coming from and see your entire tribe running in your direction. As they come closer, you try to see what they’re running but there’s nothing there…

After a bit you see the terror reflected in their eyes.

Option A - You trust the implicit reasoning that might exist behind your fellow tribe member’s behaviour and start running with them.

Option B - You wait to see what’s up and… surprise! You die. -> Not good from a survival point a view.

If you’re still reading this it’s probably because your ancestor chose Option A (as mine did). So it’s also probable that across time all of us (happy children on Option A ancestors) have inherited the same “trust in others” skill.

Enough intro, for more details read Daniel Goleman’s book: Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. ;)

And now for some free reading material:

That’s all for now! :)

Information Ouroboros

Published
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nesrait
on November 23, 2007
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This post is a representation of the information flow that happens in the blogosphere when the people that participate in the chain add no insight/value to the message being passed along.

Note: Infinite cycles tend to be stubborn and just move on by any means, so you might click your browser STOP button. ;)

Note 2: This used to be a post full of insight on online human consciousness, unleashing the potencial for true human cooperation and stuff :P but this Iframe hackaroo messed up the html editor and now it’s gone.
Farewell beautiful post! Your words might be gone but your message remains within me! :)

Information Foraging Theory

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nesrait
on November 21, 2007
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From the Interaction-Design.org Encyclopedia:

Information foraging theory is derived from a food foraging theory called optimal foraging theory that helps biologists understand the factors determining an animal’s food preference and feeding strategies.

This theory helps explaining how humans search for information (food) across various locations (food patches).

Also, from Our Lord Of UIs:

Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster
The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.

And another related article:

Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy
Information foraging shows how to calculate your content strategy’s costs and benefits. A mixed diet that combines brief overviews and comprehensive coverage is often best.

This one is dated 12 November 2007. I’m soooo there! Now if I could just get someone could just pay me for this edge research… :D

Now move along, nothing to see here! :P

GigaSpaces Startup Program

Published
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nesrait
on November 21, 2007
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Hi! It’s me again! :P

Just wanted to let all you entrepreneurs out there that GigaSpaces as launched their GigaSpaces Startup Program:

GigaSpaces is all about scalability. Starting a company is all about scalability. Now, developers and entrepreneurs can benefit from the scalability, reliability and performance of the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform for a convenient price - FREE!

So… what’s this all about?  Well, from what I’ve read, using GigaSpaces product you get a share-nothing arquitecture where you can just distribute work among a bunch of low-cost servers. I think it’s most useful for those who high-performance data-intensive and transactional processing - MapReduce style. But then again, I only read their “GigaSpaces and Amazon EC2” whitepaper, so don’t take my word for it and check out their product for yourself.

Humm… Apparently there’s another whitepaper called “GigaSpaces for Web Services Applications” (humm… also on EC2). Dammit, I’m getting white hairs going reading through all of this. I kid, I kid… :P I’m learning lots of new stuff every day! Which is nice for a #1 Learner. :)

Screencast: Atomic Coding

Published
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nesrait
on November 20, 2007
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The screencast is available here.

Some details:

  • Small iterations;
  • Build momentum based on sucessive victories;
  • Don’t leave coding middle way when you’re interrupted;
  • “Scale a montain small steps at a time, instead of taking huge leaps.”

links for 16h24 - Tuesday, 20 November 2007 :P

Published
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nesrait
on November 20, 2007
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The “website” must be broken down into its building blocks.

Each building block must be able to flow outwards to be captured in widgets, RSS feeds and any other places it happen to flow to.

Search engines will be used as a navigation tool and SEO will be more important than ever before.

Building a shop on the web? What about just putting each product in a widget and send it off to be discovered by the casual buyer? ;) (Reminder: must do this myself! :)).

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