Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for June 3rd through June 4th:

• MIT Database Systems (6.830) TA Course Notes – marcua’s blog – Fall 2008 course notes on database systems, spanning history of databases and data structures up through mapreduce style systems.
• Ray Ozzie’s cloud hangs over the Valley | Beyond Binary – CNET News – Notes from Ray Ozzie talk on Microsoft and the cloud at Churchill Club, June 2009. Would be interesting to hear more of his thoughts on Google Wave, given his past work on Notes and Groove.
• Matasano Chargen » Blog Archive » Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong! – An epic discussion of shortcomings in various common encryption implementations for web applications, presented in the form of a somewhat random screenplay.
• Is Twitter A Substitute For Set Top Box Data? – The post describes a little experiment Simulmedia did to analyze TV channel surfers using only Twitter posts as their data source. Simulmedia explains why they turned to Twitter data for this work:
• NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream | Linux Magazine – A log structured (as opposed to journaling) file system with some advantages for write performance and shorter crash recovery times. Good for large working file systems?

These are my links for June 1st through June 2nd:

• jqPlot – Pure Javascript Plotting – jqPlot is a plotting plugin for the jQuery Javascript framework. jqPlot produces beautiful line and bar charts with many features including: Numerous chart style options. Date axes with customizable formatting. Rotated axis text. Automatic trend line computation. Tooltips and data point highlighting. Sensible defaults for ease of use.
• New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets – Conversation Starter – HarvardBusiness.org – "Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This "follower split" suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%."
• Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality – 2003 article on popularity / traffic on blogs, which was then the latest emerging social media format. "Once a power law distribution exists, it can take on a certain amount of homeostasis, the tendency of a system to retain its form even against external pressures. Is the weblog world such a system? Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes. "
• well-formed.eigenfactor.org : Visualizing information flow in science – Some nice visualization ideas using hierarchical clustering to explore patterns in citation networks.
• Bing API, Version 2.0 – Updated API documentation for Microsoft Bing (formerly Live Search) web services.

These are my links for February 26th from 10:39 to 20:05:

• Piano Etudes – Assemble, play, and print scores for do-it-yourself etudes built from short musical snippets. An example GWT application.
• CloudStatus – Dynamically displays the last week of health status for selected remote computing services. For services with recent outages, a health bar is shown. Given no recent outages in a provider's services, key indicator charts are shown.
• Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Getting our house in order – Carol Bartz says "hello world" with first set of reorg and directions as CEO at Yahoo.
• Google App Engine Offers Pricing Plan Beyond Quotas; Grab A Free I/O Ticket To Celebrate – Interesting discussion on app engine in the comments section.
• Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media – Full content of last year's ICWSM 2008 conference papers.

These are my links for February 20th through February 21st:

• xkcd – A Webcomic – Online Communities – A map of online communities (circa 2007?)
• State of OpenSocial – weekend Apps Feb 20 2009 – Google Docs – Kevin Marks overview of OpenSocial as of February 2009.
• Massive Scrape of Twitter’s Friend Graph « blog.infochimps.org – Sample dataset for research on social graphs. "The infochimps have gathered a massive scrape of the Twitter friend graph. Right now it weighs in at about 2.7M users, 10M tweets, 58M edges."
• getting theinfo: data sets (theinfo) – Another list of publicly accessible data collections online
• Some Datasets Available on the Web » Data Wrangling Blog – List of many research datasets and resources related to data analysis available online, last updated February 2009.
• ICWSM 2009 – International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media – May 17 – 20, 2009, San Jose, California. This interdisciplinary conference brings together researchers and industry leaders interested in creating and analyzing social media. Past conferences have included technical papers from areas such as computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies.

These are my links for February 18th through February 19th:

• Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 seconds – Google Fellow Jeff Dean says from 1999-2009, while both search queries and processing power have gone up by a factor of 1000, latency has gone down from around 1000ms to 200ms. Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999. 1000 machines handle a single query, all in memory.
• Government 2.0: Tweeting the Talk, Walking the Walk « Adriel Hampton – List of twitter users in various government organizations.
• The Absurdly Artificial Divide Between Pure and Applied Research – Olivia Judson – NYTimes.com – I used to explain myself as an "applied research" guy, small "r", not big "R" pure research. Love theory and analysis but want to see it get used for something eventually.
• Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Load data into S3 via hard drives? – Amazon asks for feedback regarding the FedEx option for bulk data transfer. "We have heard a number of requests about sending hard drives to AWS to load into S3. If such a service would benefit your business, we’d like to learn more about your use case."
• Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance – On the shifts in supply and demand, buyers and sellers in advertising markets as media moves from 1-to-many to niche-oriented, many-to-many and sellers take control of their own online media and advertising campaigns

These are my links for February 15th through February 16th:

• Berkeley cloud report gets mixed reviews | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News – James Urqhardt commentary on UCB paper, "The paper begins by setting a definition of Cloud Computing that will be considered controversial by many, as it is firmly in the "there is no cloud computing inside enterprise data centers" camp."
• Above the Clouds: Above the Clouds Released – UC Berkeley RAD Lab starts a new blog and publishes their take on the state of cloud computing.
• Forget Dunbar’s Number, Our Future Is in Scoble’s Number « I’m Not Actually a Geek – A look at changing interaction styles enabled by growing use of online social networks and applications. "If Dunbar’s Number is defined at 150 connections, perhaps we can term the looser connection of thousands as Scoble’s Number. "
• What really happened at Ma.gnolia and lessons learned – Video podcast with Larry Halff describing how Ma.gnolia was implemented (Ruby on Rails), its ongoing operation leading up to the failure of the (1/2 TB) MySQL database a few weeks ago.
• Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites « random($foo) – An overview of packages, services, and approaches for building web systems, circa January 2009. With assorted comments.
• Online Mind Mapping – MindMeister – Web-based, embeddable mind mapping software, sort of like MindJet, wiki-style collaborative editing.
• Jean-Lou Dupont’s WEBlog: Cloud Computing Mind Map – A mind map of companies and projects in the cloud computing space.