Understanding Nothing

Ick.

When I write a weblog entry, Radio “knows” what id it’s going to store that post as in its internal database.

If you already have an entry with that ID, it clobbers it.

Well, it sort of merges the two. Any field that is filled in in your ‘new’ post, will overwrite any in the ‘old’ post. But if, for example, you don’t add a link for your new post, but your old one had one, then your new post will keep that link.

I think I’ve repaired it all now…

Now supported: If we can persuade existing weblog authors to insert this one line of code, and then get it into the default templates of Radio, Manila, and Movable Type, and we could make news aggregation an order of magnitude easier.

Out of curiosity, I tried to set up a hotmail account yesterday. They really go out of their way to make it difficult for you to sign up for a free account. Firstly, they told me that “Microsoft® .NET Passport no longer supports the Web browser version you are using. Please upgrade to a current Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later, or Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or later.” (I was using Mozilla 1.0RC1).

I switched to IE, and tried to register, only to be told that my surname wasn’t valid, and to please choose a different one! So, I made up some details, and got through the first part of registration.

After giving them your basic details they take you to a page where they expound at length on the benefits of a £19.99 account, and present a large button to “continue”. As it appears to be the only link on the page I clicked it, but was then expected to give them credit card details. I hit back, and then spent several minutes trying to discover how to get the free account. Eventually, I found a small link at the bottom of the “About MSN Hotmail Accounts”, immediately after dire warnings about how all your e-mail, addresses and folders might be deleted, saying, “Click here to sign up for a 2 MB account.”

[Oh, and having told them that I was in the UK, with a time-zone of Belfast, they then proceeded to tell me that my fees would include Irish tax ...]

As soon as you log in you get a usage bar showing that you’re already using 1% of your total space. I was initially puzzled, but then discovered this was the welcome message. I tried to view it, but every time I clicked on either the inbox button at the top of the page, or the inbox text link in the left hand column, nothing seemed to happen. I eventually had to switch back to Mozilla (with which you can apparently log in just fine – just not register!), and open the message there.

If I was more paranoid, I’d think that the free account is deliberately set-up to be harder to use. But then reality kicks in and I remember that this is Microsoft, and that all versions are probably really difficult.

hfb writes about the driving in Boston. I only had a car when I was in California, so I didn’t encounter the drivers in Boston. I did however encounter the parking. In South Boston everyone double parks. I even saw the occassional triple-parking. But one night a brave cop decided to start ticketing cars that were double parked. This was entertainment at its best. One driver tried explaining that he had parked like this for twenty years without a problem. Most of the others just stood transfixed to the spot, mouths agape, seemingly wondering just what they were doing wrong.

Radio doesn’t seem to mind too much if you change the date of posts. It gets very confused though if they end up being out of order (a post with an earlier ID has a later date). In that case the calendar doesn’t update properly, and entries of individual days go weird. Thankfully you can edit the IDs as well – and they don’t have to be consecutive. I can now gradually go about adding historic posts…

Update: Yick. It seems to keep an internal counter though, so Radio wanted to make this #63, even though I go up to #2320 now (I tried numbering based on date so I could follow what I was doing). I think I’ll have to hack every post I make until I catch up, and can reinstate them all back to a normal consecutive flow.

I rented a car for the ET Conference. This was the first time I’ve ever driven outside the UK and Ireland, and it’s a strange experience. I’m not really sure whether the lanes here are narrower, or that the cars are wider, or that my perspective is confused by being on the wrong side of the car, but I had difficulty keeping to the lanes for a few days. This wasn’t too bad most of the time I would get an aural warning if I hit the edge of the lane, but it made me really uncomfortable in places where they were working on the road, and there was a solid wall at the edge of the lane!

I also found the road signs really confusing. In the UK we get signs fairly regulary on the motorways letting you know the distances to places that you might be going (even if the road you’re currently on doesn’t actually go there). This seems to happen much less in the US. If you’re not totally sure you’re on the correct road (i.e. you’re stupid enough to not have a map), you’ll spend a much longer time being uncertain. Signs tend to only tell you where the next two or three exits go. (And, if you happen miss the exit that you wanted, good luck trying to find your way back.)

Someone should also fire whomever was responsible for the road signs for car rental return at SFO. Going north on 101, as you’re approaching the exit for the airport, there’s a large sign that says something like “Rental Car Return – take San Bruno Avenue”. It’s quite nice of them to provide a separate sign for rental return – but they don’t tell you where this avenue actually is! Do you come off at the normal airport exit, and then find San Bruno Avenue? Or is it the next it? Or what? This is very confusing – and as most people who rent a car at an airport probably aren’t local, I can’t be the only person it confused. Having overshot an exit before, and spent nearly an hour trying to get back to where I wanted, I figured it would be safer to come off at the airport, even if I was meant to go to the next exit. It worked – I had to drive around a maze of twisty turny roads, but I got there. I think I was meant to take the next exit off the freeway – but I’m still not sure.

Basic Premise: Excessive hype hurts technology [Michael Masnick]

Lying With Statistics 101:

• “Killer App” - 96,000 results
• “Happy Customers” – 52,000 results
• “Profitable Company” – 15,000 results

I want:

• a successful product
• that meets a need
• that makes customers happy
• that makes money (somehow) (maybe)

If technology is intrinsically useful, then the Killer App will appear, almost by accident.

The Killer App is

• not just technology, but the application of it
• not the wheel, but the chariot, cart, bicycle, and car
• not the steam engine, but the steamboat and train
• not television, but Milton Berle

Don’t try to invent a killer app

• try to solve a need
• listen to users
• take advice, not dictation
• customers, customers, customers
• deliver what you promise – or more

Avoid:

• using the phrase “Killer App”
• vaporware
• believing what anyone says about you
• thinking that the most money wins
• thinking that the best technology wins
• not watching what customers want

[Michael mentioned a very interesting "Star Trek Comms Badge" device being used in some hospitals - need to find more info on this]

Bob Morris’ keynote started with a call to not only keep in mind history, but also to look at where we’re going. In the last hundred years $1000 worth of computational power has increased by 14 orders of magnitude – and is still accelerating. But, the cost of IT management has reversed – the TCO for storage is now two-thirds for management (your sysadmin) vs. one third for the storage itself (hardware and software). As well as the major costs of technology now being labour, that labour is also a major cause of availability problems. A recent survey of the cause of downtime reported the problem as being hardware 20% of the time, software 40%, and operator error the other 40%. And as eBay, AOL, etrade, Schwab etc have discovered in the last few years, that downtime can be very expensive. Technology needs to get better at managing itself.

The history of computing is a series of massive simplifications to the user experience that drives the technology (timesharing -> PCs -> GUI -> Web -> ???). But complex heterogenous infrastructures are hard: there are thousands of tuning parameters on hundred of components (a web site has to have properly configured firewalls, DNS services, caches, web servers etc.)

So, Morris wants to see autonomic systems that are:

• self-configuring (can adapt to their environment)
• self-optimising (can monitor, and tune)
• self-healing (can discover, diagnose, and react)
• self-protecting (can anticipate, detect, and protect)

Is this a pipe dream? Much of it is already happening – it’s just not holistic yet.

As an example take RDBMS query optimizers. By considering their environment, and considering the data they need to search, good optimizers can get 2 or 3 orders of magnitude performance increase (cf. compilers which are deemed to be good if they can get 20%-30% improvement). And now we’re starting to see learning optimizers, which can keep statistics on how they’re performing (disk space is cheap enough and plentiful enough now to actually keep large log files). Then they can make adjustments if they discover that they’ve gotten their cardinalities wrong.

For Homogenous Components Interacting, he gave the example of adaptive network routing, or high available clustering. He explained how Oceano‘s multiple-customer server farms uses virtualized hardware and virtualized software, to provide clustering for multiple web sites across shared servers. Although this is not a new technique, it’s still not common, as many clients still don’t really trust the security of sharing servers. However, costs are now reaching a point where the difference in price is significant enough to convince many people to swallow their fears!

He also describe recent advances in storage technology with collective intelligent storage bricks. These have much higher redundancy than RAID, and cool performance hotspots by taking proactive copies. With sufficiently improved sparing you can eliminate the need for repare actions for the life of the system. This has the added benefit of no longer needing a 2d packing structure, as you no longer need to be able walk around the machine to pull out drives. If you don’t need to replace the ‘bricks’ you can have a 3d structure, and with better cooling systems you can now get a petabyte of storage in a small cube.

He then proceeded to talk about the costs of managing client machines, used by non techies, which are usually around 50% of total time/cost, and promoted the idea of subscription computing. Many organisations have started to use this for customisation, or personalisation, or protection, or problem detection, or software updates, etc. But again it’s not that widespread, and not very holistic. IBM have recently started to reintroduce the old mainframe “hypervisor” concept to allow your machine to run multiple operating systems on the one machine, which Morris thinks will make this much easier.

Morris maintains that we need to focus on availability, maintainability, scalability, cost and performance. Systems need to be usuable by millions of people, but managed by half a person. This is a hard problem, which won’t be solved overnight, and needs the participation of academia, government and industry. More information on the project is available at http://www.ibm.com/research/autonomic

… it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

This quote from William Gibson was pretty much the text from which revivalist Tim O’Reilly preached his opening keynote for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. His basic thrust, now as always, is that if you want to spot the trends before they become mainstream, you need to watch the “alpha geeks”, where you’ll encounter magic (or at least something “sufficiently indistinguishable“), on a daily basis. Usually the entrepreneurs come after the geeks, and try to make these technologies work, in the wider sense. But there was a massive distortion recently, with too much being led by the focus of making money, and everyone trying to find the control points. Now (thankfully) the hype has died, and everything is percolating from the bottom again. The new internet operating system means that everyone can play, but this time they should learn to play better together. Everyone should figure out simple rules for co-operation, the control points shouldn’t throw their weight around, and everyone should strive to follow The Robustness Principle (aka the Golden Rule of the Internet: “Be rigorous in what your emit, but forgiving in what you accept”).

Marc Andreesen once famously denigrated Microsoft Windows as “Just a bag of drivers”. In Tim’s view this is completely correct, but profoundly wrong. That bag of drivers allows developers to forget about everything but those standards and APIs.

Tim warned that big companies should remember the fate of Lotus, who made a bet against the GUI with 1-2-3, whose market dominance crumbled in the face of Microsoft, who obviously bet very strongly for it. As a current example, he cited MapQuest, a true “killer app” of the traditional internet, but one which risks losing out to an application which allows you to extract the information you require (e.g. distances, for expenses claims, without the map or driving directions). In the future applications should aim to be part of the “bag of drivers” of the new Internet Operating System.

I spent most of the last few series of The Mark Thomas Product wondering just how far he’s going to have to go before someone actually kills him. This book provokes the same reaction.

The cover sums it up better than I can: Is there really a secret room from which a tiny elite rules the world, and if so, can it be found? Them: Adventures with Extremists is a romp into the heart of darkness involving twelve-foot lizard-men, PR-savvy Ku Klux Klansmen, Ian Paisley, Hollywood limousines, kidnapped sex slaves, David Icke, and Nicolae Ceausescu’s shoes. While Jon Ronson attempts to locate the secret room, he is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew at a Jihad training camp, and witnesses CEOs and leading politicians undertake a bizarre owl ritual in the forests of northern California.

I’d read the Ian Paisley section of a few years ago in the Independent magazine, so I had a good idea of what to expect, style-wise: a dark humour, more from letting the subject of his writing speak for themselves, rather than actually satirising them directly – Louis Theroux style. However, I hadn’t realised how connected the entire book would be: I was expecting a series of similar unrelated tales of encounters with other figures. Instead this book is more of a travelogue as Ronson tries to discover whether or not the Bilderberg Group really rule the world. (The Paisley chapter is actually almost out of place). The story is wonderfully told, although surprisingly sympathetic towards many of the characters.

There was apparently an accompanying Channel 4 series that I really need to see now…