Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for May 24th through May 27th:

• Formulas and game mechanics – WoWWiki – Your guide to the World of Warcraft – Formulas and game mechanics rules and guidelines for developing role playing games
• Manchester United’s Park Has the Endurance to Persevere – NYTimes.com – Korean soccer player Park Ji-Sung – On Wednesday night in Rome, Park is expected to become the first Asian player to participate in the European Champions League final when Manchester United faces Barcelona.
• mloss.org – Machine Learning Open Source Software – Big collection of open source packages for machine learning, data mining, statistical analysis
• The Datacenter as Computer – Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle 2009 (PDF) – 120 pages on large scale computing lessons from Google. "These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers. Large portions of the hardware and software resources in these facilities must work in concert to efficiently deliver good levels of Internet service performance, something that can only be achieved by a holistic approach to their design and deployment. In other words, we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC). We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base."
• Geeking with Greg: The datacenter is the new mainframe – Pointer to a paper by Googlers Luiz Andre Barroso and Urs Holzle on the evolution of warehouse scale computing and the management and use of computing resources in a contemporary datacenter.

These are my links for March 16th through April 2nd:

• Google uncloaks once-secret server | Business Tech – CNET News – Photo and more comments on the Google data center server configuration, 12vdc only, local battery, shown at yesterday's data center power conference.
• Google’s Custom Web Server, Revealed « Data Center Knowledge – 1:30 video of current server configuration, from Google Data Center Energy Summit, April 1, 2009. Open shelf, power supply with built in battery (per-unit UPS) rather than centralized UPS.
• HerHotSpot Uses Facebook Connect to Block Boys Out – Relies on Facebook profile data to limit boys access to site targeting girls only. Uses FBConnect as the exclusive login method.
• SandHill.com | Opinion : Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map v1.0: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – Collection of pointers to maps of the cloud computing ecosystem, and a merged map, as of March 2009
• Penny Arcade! – Le Twittre –

These are my links for March 12th through March 16th:

• Aig Systemic 090309 – AIG memo outlining systemic risks of their various businesses to the global economy.
• FT.com / Companies / Insurance – AIG publishes counterparty list – AIG caved in to political pressure Sunday and released a list of some of the financial counterparties that benefited from its $160bn US government rescue, including some of Europe’s largest banks.
• AIG Counterparties List – FT 3-15-2009 (PDF) – Summary of recipients of US bailout funds given to AIG, which were passed on to CDS counterparties.
• jaikuengine – Google Code – Jaiku source code, following migration onto Google App Engine.
• Doug Lenat – I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha | Semantic Universe – More early comments on how Wolfram Alpha approaches queries and inferencing.

These are my links for March 6th through March 8th:

• Wolfram Blog : Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming! –
• Wolfram Alpha is Coming — and It Could be as Important as Google | Twine –
• Wolfram Alpha — it’s like plugging into an electronic brain » VentureBeat –
• If browsers were women – Sharenator.org – "[Chrome] Extremely skinny, but very cool and friendly. However, when it comes to the bedroom, she is very inexperienced and has little to offer. [IE] For most, she's the first woman they tried. She's really easy but can get you infected." etc etc
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The coming of the megacomputer – Nick Carr commentary on Rick Rashid's statement that 20% of servers were going to major cloud data centers. Also some interesting discussion in comments.
• FT.com | Tech Blog | How many computers does the world need? – According to Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid, around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.
• The New Hot Cuisine: Korean – WSJ.com – Korean food is slowly making its way into mainstream awareness, both high end (French Laundry, Le Bernardin) and everyday (CPK, Kogi BBQ).
• WriteOnIt – Fake pictures – Build fake magazine covers, newspapers, and photos.

These are my links for February 23rd through February 24th:

• Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates: FOWA/Miami (Feb 2009) – Aarrrrr! Some practical notes for web startups.
• Experience with the Skype for Asterisk Beta – Skype for Asterisk is working and includes access to presence data. Open beta apparently coming soon.
• Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street – Felix Salmon writes about David Li, the Gaussian copula function, and its widespread (mis)use in pricing derivatives based on correlation only, leading to parts of today's financial crisis.
• Cloud Personality Types… — Dave Graham’s Weblog – What sort of cloud computing personality are you? A growing list of categories and descriptions.
• Xming – PC X Server – A free X server for Windows platforms.

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.