Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 12th from 17:02 to 19:13:

• Dubai bashing and ‘what-aboutery’ – Joi Ito’s Web – Joi Ito comments on various recent negative articles on Dubai.
• A VR Geek Blog » Diva – Exploring your database in 3D – Visualization tool for looking at relational database structure in 3D, with optional data glove VR interface. Wonder if they ship with the cool techno music that's playing in the demo videos.
• Polar Rose | Naming is sharing! – Face recognition service, currently scans Flickr photo collections for tagging to Facebook names.
• iSerenity – A collection of background / ambient noise, including ocean, rainforest, city street, library, etc
• A Bunch of Great Strategies for Using Memcached and MySQL Better Together | High Scalability – Notes on approaches to data caching in web applications.

These are my links for April 11th through April 12th:

• Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds – Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
• The dark side of Dubai – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent – "Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging."
• Topless Robot – Hot Girls Have Lightsaber Strip-Fight for Your Viewing Pleasure – Star Wars CGI meets fake body spray ad
• Poll Result: Best VPN to leap China’s Great Firewall? – Thomas Crampton – - Witopia – Undisputed winner. Quality of service, speed of surfing, though it is said to be relatively expensive at US$50 to US$60 per year. Hotspot Shield – Bandwidth limits can be painful. Force you to wait until the next month if you use it too much. – Ultrasurf – StrongVPN
• InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph – In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008 (November 2008), Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe.
• The Running Man, Revisited § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM – a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors.

These are my links for April 9th from 08:07 to 17:53:

• IP address geolocation SQL database – IP address geolocation with MySQL by Marc-Andre Caron. He's done all the necessary legwork to solve this problem, putting together a free, monthly-updated MySQL dataset that will allow you to derive country, region, city, zip, latitude, and longitude from an IP address.
• Del.icio.us Finally Gets Some Respect from Yahoo – Probably Too Late – ReadWriteWeb –
• In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson by Michael Rottman – The Morning News – "7. Do you feel protons decaying? Grand Unification may be occurring near your vital organs. "
• FT.com / Companies / UK companies – Dotcom veterans in Twitter ‘brains trust’ – "Mr Read has brought together a “brains trust” of advisers to Twitter Partners, including Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, founders of Lastminute.com; Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures, the London venture capitalists; and Toby Coppel, the former European vice-president at Yahoo."
• byteonic.com » What you cannot do using Java in Google App Engine – List of some restrictions on Java code running on GAE

These are my links for February 28th through March 1st:

• Community Data – Swivel – User contributed datasets, for visualization and graphs with Swivel
• Obamameter – Map visualization of economic stimulus outlays. "Keep tabs on the the US economy, the global economy and the stimulus through our dashboard for the economy."
• recovery.gov.pdf – Slide presentation on data sources and construction of initial Recover.gov site in Jan 2009, from talk at Transparency Camp.
• Virtual Hoff : DoxPara Research – Slides from Dan Kaminsky's talk at CloudCamp Seattle on network and application security issues in cloud and virtualized computing environments.
• Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. – from Paul Graham – "If you could get startups to stick to your town for a million apiece, then for a billion dollars you could bring in a thousand startups. That probably wouldn't push you past Silicon Valley itself, but it might get you second place. For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world."
• Berkshire Hathaway 2008 shareholders letter (PDF) – Warren Buffet reviews the state of the financial markets, his worst year ever, and the outlook for 2009.
• White House 2: Where YOU set the nation’s priorities – Not the actual White House, but an interesting experiment in collaborative input for setting government agenda.
• Python for Lisp Programmers – Peter Norvig examines Python. "(Although it wasn't my intent, Python programers have told me this page has helped them learn Lisp.) Basically, Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with "traditional" syntax (what Lisp people call "infix" or "m-lisp" syntax). One message on comp.lang.python said "I never understood why LISP was a good idea until I started playing with python." Python supports all of Lisp's essential features except macros, and you don't miss macros all that much because it does have eval, and operator overloading, and regular expression parsing, so you can create custom languages that way. "

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 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 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.

I ran into Tom Conrad at Barcamp Block a few weeks ago, which reminded me to go check out Pandora again. I’d been an early adopter when they introduced it to the folks at the very first Barcamp, but accidentally stopped using it a while back when I changed out the computer in my office that I’d been running it on. I recently swapped in another system, and among other things I have it running Pandora again.

I like being able to launch a station with a single suggestion and get a few hours of “more stuff like that”, especially when it turns up something I haven’t heard before.

Here’s a sample “station” that I’m listening to at the moment, constructed starting with a track from Rick Braun, which has turned up selections from Larry Carlton, Jeff Golub, Joyce Cooling, and the Brecker Brothers on its own.