Bookmarks for January 17th through January 20th

Ho John Lee | January 20th, 2010 | Comments are closed

These are my links for January 17th through January 20th:

  • PG&E Electrical System Outage Map – This map shows the current outages in our 70,000-square-mile service area. To see more details about an outage, including the cause and estimated time of restoration, click on the color-coded icon associated with that outage.
  • Twitter.com vs The Twitter Ecosystem – Fred Wilson comments on some data from John Borthwick indicating Twitter ecosystem use = 3-5x Twitter.com directly.

    "John's chart estimates that Twitter.com is about 20mm uvs a month in the US (comScore has it at 60mm uvs worldwide) and the Twitter ecosystem at about 60mm uvs in the US.

    That says that across all web services, not just AVC, the Twitter ecosystem is about 3x Twitter.com. And on this blog, whose audience is certainly power users, that ratio is 5x."

  • Chris Walshaw :: Research :: Partition Archive – Welcome to the University of Greenwich Graph Partitioning Archive. The archive consists of the best partitions found to date for a range of graphs and its aim is to provide a benchmark, against which partitioning algorithms can be tested, and a resource for experimentation.

    The partition archive has been in operation since the year 2000 and includes results from most of the major graph partitioning software packages. Researchers developing experimental partitioning algorithms regularly submit new partitions for possible inclusion.

    Most of the test graphs arise from typical partitioning applications, although the archive also includes results computed for a graph-colouring test suite [Wal04] contained in a separate annex.

    The archive was originally set up as part of a research project into very high quality partitions and authors wishing to refer to the partitioning archive should cite the paper [SWC04].

  • Twitter’s Crawl « The Product Guy – "A list of incidents that affected the Page Load Time of the Twitter product, distinguishing between total downtime, and partial downtime and information inaccessibility, based upon the public posts on Twitters blog.

    http://status.twitter.com/archive

    I did my best to not double count any problems, but it was difficult since many of the problems occur so frequently, and it is often difficult to distinguish, from these status blog posts alone, between a persisting problem being experienced or fixed, from that of a new emergence of a similar or same problem. Furthermore, I also excluded the impact on Page Load Time arising from scheduled maintenance/downtime – periods of time over which the user expectation would be most aligned with the product’s promise of Page Load Time. "

  • Soundboard.com – Soundboard.com is the web's largest catalog of free sounds and soundboards – in over 20 categories, for mobile or PC. 252,858 free sounds on 17,171 soundboards from movies to sports, sound effects, television, celebrities, history and travel. Or build, customize, embed and manage your own
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Bookmarks for April 20th through April 23rd

site admin | April 23rd, 2009 | Comments are closed

These are my links for April 20th through April 23rd:

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iTunes has video podcasting support

Ho John Lee | September 15th, 2005 | 1 comment

I wrote earlier today about my reluctant late-adopter status for audio podcasting, and now I come across an article about Apple quietly introducing video content to iTunes Music Store.

The quiet, fanfare-less launch of video podcasting (in fact, it’s not even clear when it was launched) is a bit surprising for the company, but there may be a reason: there’s not too many video podcasts out there in the wild. Furthermore, video podcasts are currently only playable on your computer, although it seems clear enough that a video iPod is on the way. If you didn’t believe it before, you should definitely believe it now.

I don’t recall if anyone mentioned video on iTunes at last night’s Search SIG discussion. Ev Williams (from Odeo) commented that a lot of what makes audio podcasting compelling doesn’t apply to video, in that audio can be consumed anywhere, and has an existing use model (drive-time radio), while video is typically consumed while sitting down in front of an increasingly large television at home. Eric Rice did show a live demo of video blogging on Audioblog, illustrating the possibility of large scale user-created video content in the future. I’m not sure who’s going to look at all the video, though. Perhaps the same people who are watching reality TV shows.

Once again, I’m well outside the demographic, since I barely watch any television at all these days. If I could get a commercial video podcast service to replace cable TV with, I’d probably subscribe now, though.

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MP3 encoding sounds terrible!

Ho John Lee | April 21st, 2005 | Leave a comment

I rarely sit down and just listen to my music collection these days. Most of the time, any music I hear is on the radio, computer or CD player while driving, or working, or generally doing something else. My largest weekly block of music listening time is using an MP3 player during treadmill workouts.

So, it was interesting yesterday evening when I started noticing how bad MP3 encoded tracks sound compared with the original CDs.

I’m old enough to have actually purchased physical media (first vinyl, then CD) for nearly all the music I presently own. However, I have rarely gone back and played the actual CDs I’ve purchased for several years, as the first step after removing the wrapper is to encode them and put the bits on the file server. When my daughter was a little younger, duplicate CDs were being replaced weekly after being stepped on, spilled on, turned into art projects, and other mishaps. Other sets have been left behind on airplanes, rental cars, etc. Having everything on the server has allowed us to enjoy the music without worrying about physically destroying or losing the original.

Back when I started doing this several years ago, I remember trying a comparison of original CDs vs 128kbps MP3 and deciding that the encoded recordings would be good enough for general use, more or less replacing cassette tape. 192kbps and 256kbps encoding seemed extravagant — disk storage was much more expensive then, I was planning to encode all of my CDs, and the modest degradation in quality didn’t seem too bad.

I may have to revisit this, now that hard drive capacity has gone up, costs have gone down, and for some reason the “audio haze” added by the MP3 encoding has suddenly become more noticeable to me.

My old turntable and albums have been in storage for years, since our daughter was born. It might be time to set them up and give her a demonstration of what vintage vinyl sounds like. I think I might still have the old Mobile Fidelity pressing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon somewhere…

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