Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for December 31st through January 17th:

• Khan Academy – The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.

  We have 1000+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan.

• StarCraft AI Competition | Expressive Intelligence Studio – AI bot warfare competition using a hacked API to run StarCraft, will be held at AIIDE2010 in October 2010.
  The competition will use StarCraft Brood War 1.16.1. Bots for StarCraft can be developed using the Broodwar API, which provides hooks into StarCraft and enables the development of custom AI for StarCraft. A C++ interface enables developers to query the current state of the game and issue orders to units. An introduction to the Broodwar API is available here. Instructions for building a bot that communicates with a remote process are available here. There is also a Forum. We encourage submission of bots that make use of advanced AI techniques. Some ideas are:
  * Planning
  * Data Mining
  * Machine Learning
  * Case-Based Reasoning
• Measuring Measures: Learning About Statistical Learning – A "quick start guide" for statistical and machine learning systems, good collection of references.
• Berkowitz et al : The use of formal methods to map, analyze and interpret hawala and terrorist-related alternative remittance systems (2006) – Berkowitz, Steven D., Woodward, Lloyd H., & Woodward, Caitlin. (2006). Use of formal methods to map, analyze and interpret hawala and terrorist-related alternative remittance systems. Originally intended for publication in updating the 1988 volume, eds., Wellman and Berkowitz, Social Structures: A Network Approach (Cambridge University Press). Steve died in November, 2003. See Barry Wellman’s “Steve Berkowitz: A Network Pioneer has passed away,” in Connections 25(2), 2003. It has not been possible to add the updating of references or of the quality of graphics that might have been possible if Berkowitz were alive. An early version of the article appeared in the Proceedings of the Session on Combating Terrorist Networks: Current Research in Social Network Analysis for the New War Fighting Environment. 8th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium. National Defense University, Washington, D.C June 17-19, 2003
• SSH Tunneling through web filters | s-anand.net – Step by step tutorial on using Putty and an EC2 instance to set up a private web proxy on demand.
• PyDroid GUI automation toolkit – GitHub – What is Pydroid?

  Pydroid is a simple toolkit for automating and scripting repetitive tasks, especially those involving a GUI, with Python. It includes functions for controlling the mouse and keyboard, finding colors and bitmaps on-screen, as well as displaying cross-platform alerts.
  Why use Pydroid?

  * Testing a GUI application for bugs and edge cases
  o You might think your app is stable, but what happens if you press that button 5000 times?
  * Automating games
  o Writing a script to beat that crappy flash game can be so much more gratifying than spending hours playing it yourself.
  * Freaking out friends and family
  o Well maybe this isn't really a practical use, but…

• Time Series Data Library – More data sets – "This is a collection of about 800 time series drawn from many different fields.Agriculture Chemistry Crime Demography Ecology Finance Health Hydrology Industry Labour Market Macro-Economics Meteorology Micro-Economics Miscellaneous Physics Production Sales Simulated series Sport Transport & Tourism Tree-rings Utilities"
• How informative is Twitter? » SemanticHacker Blog – "We undertook a small study to characterize the different types of messages that can be found on Twitter. We downloaded a sample of tweets over a two-week period using the Twitter streaming API. This resulted in a corpus of 8.9 million messages (”tweets”) posted by 2.6 million unique users. About 2.7 million of these tweets, or 31%, were replies to a tweet posted by another user, while half a million (6%) were retweets. Almost 2 million (22%) of the messages contained a URL."
• Gremlin – a Turing-complete, graph-based programming language – GitHub – Gremlin is a Turing-complete, graph-based programming language developed in Java 1.6+ for key/value-pair multi-relational graphs known as property graphs. Gremlin makes extensive use of the XPath 1.0 language to support complex graph traversals. This language has applications in the areas of graph query, analysis, and manipulation. Connectors exist for the following data management systems:

  * TinkerGraph in-memory graph
  * Neo4j graph database
  * Sesame 2.0 compliant RDF stores
  * MongoDB document database

  The documentation for Gremlin can be found at this location. Finally, please visit TinkerPop for other software products.

• The C Programming Language: 4.10 – by Kernighan & Ritchie & Lovecraft – void Rlyeh
  (int mene[], int wgah, int nagl) {
  int Ia, fhtagn;
  if (wgah>=nagl) return;
  swap (mene,wgah,(wgah+nagl)/2);
  fhtagn = wgah;
  for (Ia=wgah+1; Ia<=nagl; Ia++)
  if (mene[Ia]<mene[wgah])
  swap (mene,++fhtagn,Ia);
  swap (mene,wgah,fhtagn);
  Rlyeh (mene,wgah,fhtagn-1);
  Rlyeh (mene,fhtagn+1,nagl);

  } // PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH CTHULHU!

• How to convert email addresses into name, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation – This is so Meta – "Save your email list as a CSV file (just comma separate those email addresses). Upload this file to your facebook account as if you wanted to add them as friends. Voila, facebook will give you all the profiles of all those users (in my test, about 80% of my email lists have facebook profiles). Now, click through each profile, and because of the new default facebook settings, which makes all information public, about 95% of the user info is available for you to harvest."
• Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL): Tools Repository – A collection of previously internal-only security tools from Microsoft, including anti-xss, fuzz test, fxcop, threat modeling, binscope, now available for free download.
• Analytics X Prize – Home – Forecast the murder rate in Philadelphia – The Analytics X Prize is an ongoing contest to apply analytics, modeling, and statistics to solve the social problems that affect our cities. It combines the fields of statistics, mathematics, and social science to understand the root causes of dysfunction in our neighborhoods. Understanding these relationships and discovering the most highly correlated variables allows us to deploy our limited resources more effectively and target the variables that will have the greatest positive impact on improvement.
• PeteSearch: How to find user information from an email address – FindByEmail code released as open-source. You pass it an email address, and it queries 11 different public APIs to discover what information those services have on the user with that email address.
• Measuring Measures: Beyond PageRank: Learning with Content and Networks – Conclusion: learning based on content and network data is the current state of the art There is a great paper and talk about personalization in Google News they use content for this purpose, and then user click streams to provide personalization, i.e. recommend specific articles within each topical cluster. The issue is content filtering is typically (as we say in research) "way harder." Suppose you have a social graph, a bunch of documents, and you know that some users in the social graph like some documents, and you want to recommend other documents that you think they will like. Using approaches based on Networks, you might consider clustering users based on co-visitaion (they have co-liked some of the documents). This scales great, and it internationalizes great. If you start extracting features from the documents themselves, then what you build for English may not work as well for the Chinese market. In addition, there is far more data in the text than there is in the social graph
• mikemaccana’s python-docx at master – GitHub – MIT-licensed Python library to read/write Microsoft Word docx format files. "The docx module reads and writes Microsoft Office Word 2007 docx files. These are referred to as 'WordML', 'Office Open XML' and 'Open XML' by Microsoft. They can be opened in Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Mac Office 2008, OpenOffice.org 2.2, and Apple iWork 08. The module was created when I was looking for a Python support for MS Word .doc files, but could only find various hacks involving COM automation, calling .net or Java, or automating OpenOffice or MS Office."

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 May 29th from 05:17 to 12:45:

• Some stats from Twitter conference compared to… – Robert Scoble – FriendFeed – Anecdotal data from 140tc this week. 200 tweets/second at peak. Didn't see an estimate of current user account population though, I keep seeing site unique visitor estimates, which aren't useful.
• Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters | Zoho Blogs – "The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement. It is easy to dismiss all this with "Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft," but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google's innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight? It comes down to one word: karma."
• makerfaire.com: Maker Faire – This weekend at San Mateo Expo Center
• Google Wave Federation Protocol‎ –
• Google Wave API Overview – Google Wave API – Google Code – APIs for Google Wave email / bbs / wiki / chat / collaboration / communications mashup platform introduced yesterday.
• What Emacs Commands Do You Use Most and Find Most Useful? : programming – Reddit thread discussing favorite emacs commands

These are my links for May 12th from 10:52 to 21:56:

• An unthinking programmer’s guide to the new C++ • The Register – Must be better for templating or something. Double ampersands and empty curly braces? int&& r2 = foo(); // foo() returns an int ; int i = {}; // i = 0;
• Announcing the Map/Reduce Toolkit – Open Blog – NYTimes.com – Package for making it easier to use mapreduce for batch processing, from NYTimes.
• jQuery-gestures- Image gallery – Demonstration of using jQuery to build a gesture-based user interface (in this case a photo gallery application)
• Dolores Labs Blog » The Programming Language with the Happiest Users – Interesting sentiment analysis based on Twitter messages. Cobol = least happy, Perl = most happy. Some judgement calls here, sentiment was done using 3 people on Mechanical Turk.
• U.S. starting lineup if top American jocks played soccer – Greg Lalas – SI.com – Trying to get my head wrapped around Kobe and Lebron with a ball at their feet.
• Dept. of Science: Don’t!: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker – The ability to wait (delayed gratification) is difficult, but learnable. Stanford study of pre-school kids at Bing Nursery School waiting for 1 marshmallow now or 2 later, the kids who were able to wait often ended up more successful in school then career. But some impatient kids learned to wait, now some proposals to teach self control in school.

These are my links for May 8th through May 12th:

• 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends – List of trend tracking sites, plus more in the comments.
• ToorCamp 2009, A Hacker Conference Inside An Abandoned Titan-1 Missile Silo – This looks like fun!
• neo4j open source graph database – Sounds interesting for social media graph hacking. "Neo4j is a graph database. It is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables. A graph (mathematical lingo for a network) is a flexible data structure that allows a more agile and rapid style of development."
• One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages – A sample – "1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix."
• EJW.COM || SETTING THE EXAMPLE – Thoughts on URL shorteners from Eric James Woodward (tr.im / Nambu). tinyurl.com, bit.ly, tr.im etc know what everyone is shortening right now; is 15 minutes of lead time useful? Click throughs depend on audience size and can be gamed, etc.

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

• Dilbert comic strip for 05/04/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. – Secretary to Pointy Haired Boss: "I live in a rented trailer and all of my money is in my checking account. Your investments are worthless and your mortgage is underwater. My net worth is higher than yours now. I guess promiscuity and a G.E.D. was a pretty good strategy after all." Reminded me of a thought I had earlier this year, that much of Western Civilization is built on valuing delayed gratification, which hasn't worked out so well recently as opposed to immediate consumption in many cases.
• Without Warning, Twitter Kills StatTweets (Businesses Beware) – StatSheet.com ChangeLog – Owner of StatTweets post regarding his network of sports-related Twitter handles being banned. They had several hundred accounts, one for stats for each team. This makes sense for users, given the way Twitter works, but they don't like mass account creation. Interested to see how this sorts out, there seem to be at least a few similar Twitter networks with team/region/topic-specific handles.
• Dooley Online: What URL Shortener Should I Use? – Comparison of features and some usage data for URL shorteners such as tinyurl and bit.ly used on twitter and other services.
• Obesity and Overweight: Trends: U.S. Obesity Trends 1985-2007 | DNPAO | CDC – During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States. This slide set illustrates this trend by mapping the increased prevalence of obesity across each of the states. In 2007, only one state (Colorado) had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; three of these states (Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%. The animated map below shows the United States obesity prevalence from 1985 through 2007.
• Why text messages are limited to 160 characters | Technology | Los Angeles Times – A look back to the beginnings of SMS in 1985 – Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two "convincing arguments," Hillebrand said. For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters. Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.

These are my links for April 30th from 05:57 to 07:10:

• SIGUSR2 > The Power That is GNU Emacs – "If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you."
• How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord – 100 remedies for the fatal flaws exhibited by famous evil overlords of the past. Also some business executives, I think.
• Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early | Wired Science – Google’s search data may have been able to provide an early warning of the swine flu outbreak — if the company had been looking in the right place. Last week, at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, Google took a retroactive look at its search data from Mexico. And there the team found a pre-media bump in telltale flu-related search terms (you know, “influenza + phlegm + coughing”) that was inconsistent with standard, seasonal flu trends.
• What Twitter Looks Like For Twitter Employees (SCREENSHOTS) – Some screen shots of current admin tools at Twitter for managing user accounts, blocks, whitelisting, suspensions, and user stats such as # follow attempts, # updates, #directs, etc
• Twitter Aggregator Sawhorse Media Raises Seed Round, Launches Pets, Celeb Sites | paidContent.org – "Channelized" feeds from curated lists of twitter sources.

These are my links for April 12th through April 13th:

• Google App Engine Blog: Many languages, and in the runtime bind them – Now that AppEngine has a Java environment, there are a lot of possibilities for running other languages on top of the JVM, this is an all-singing, all-dancing shell interpreter demo providing a switchable command line interface to Beanshell, Clojure, Groovy, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, and Scheme.
• High Performance Web Sites :: don’t use @import – Summary – use LINK instead of @import for stylesheet references. "Using @import within a stylesheet adds one more roundtrip to the overall download time of the page. Using @import in IE causes the download order to be altered. This may cause stylesheets to take longer to download, which hinders progress rendering making the page feel slower."
• Learn Korean Language :The Official Korea Tourism Guide Site – Flash-based Korean language lessons, from KBS World Radio.
• Korea rate of obesity ranks lowest among OECD nations – INSIDE JoongAng Daily – Korea has lowest obesity rate among 30 OECD countries, at 3.5%, vs the US (#30) at 34.3%.
• FT.com / Weekend / Reportage – Is a high IQ a burden as much as a blessing? – “High cognitive ability is very often a mixed blessing,” Patrick O’Shea, the president of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE), told me. Too wide a deviation from the mean IQ of 100 brings with it an inherent isolation. “If you have an IQ of 160 or higher,” O’Shea explained, “you’re probably able to connect well with less than 1 per cent of the population.”

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 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 9th through March 12th:

• Google Friend Connect APIs – Google Code –
• Geek And Poke – Mostly twitter and cloud computing themed cartoons.
• Official Google Blog: Here comes Google Voice – GrandCentral makes a comeback, after disappearing into Google a while back. Now with voice transcription, SMS folders, and integration with GMail address book.
• Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances – AWS introduces pricing structure for longer term, reserved capacity. Upfront payment, plus a (lower) incremental hourly charge, net savings for continuous 24×7 clients, and guaranteed availability of instances for backup or surge capacity.
• How To Monetize a Social Network: MySpace and Facebook Should Follow TenCent « abovethecrowd.com – Bill Gurley on the case for virtual goods and casual gaming as revenue vehicles on US-based social networking sites, in a look at China-based QQ / TenCent.
• Too Big Has Failed – Thomas Hoenig, Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, March 6, 2009 (PDF) – Hoenig argues that too-big-to-fail institutions have failed, US banks will require some form of nationalization eventually.

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 March 4th through March 6th:

• Welcome to VIPERdb – Scripps – VIPERdb is a database for icosahedral virus capsid structures . The emphasis of the resource is on providing data from structural and computational analyses on these systems, as well as high quality renderings for visual exploration.
• Virus images at VIPERdb – If you have ever wanted to make beautiful images of viruses, in colors of your choice, then go to VIPERdb, the virus particle explorer.
• Reverse HTTP – IETF draft-lentczner-rhttp-00.txt – Formal description of the reverse HTTP proposal for initiating connections through firewalls then reversing server and client roles.
• Reverse HTTP – Second Life Wiki – Experimental protocol which takes advantage of the HTTP/1.1 Upgrade: header to turn one HTTP socket around. When a client makes a request to a server with the Upgrade: PTTH/0.9 header, the server may respond with an Upgrade: PTTH/1.0 header, after which point the server starts using the socket as a client, and the client starts using the socket as a server.
• WTFs/m – The only valid measurement of code quality, WTFs/min

These are my links for February 16th through February 17th:

• Top 100 Network Security Tools – Many many security testing and hacking tools.
• FRONTLINE: inside the meltdown: watch the full program – "On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, the astonished leadership of the U.S. Congress was told in a private session by the chairman of the Federal Reserve that the American economy was in grave danger of a complete meltdown within a matter of days. "There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left," says Sen. Christopher Dodd"
• The Dark Matter of a Startup – "Every successful startup that I have seen has someone within their ranks that just kinda “does stuff.” No one really knows specifically what they do, but its vital to the success of the startup."
• Why I Hate Frameworks – "A hammer?" he asks. "Nobody really buys hammers anymore. They're kind of old fashioned…we started selling schematic diagrams for hammer factories, enabling our clients to build their own hammer factories, custom engineered to manufacture only the kinds of hammers that they would actually need."
• Mining The Thought Stream – Lots of comments around what is Twitter good for and how will it make money, revolving around real/near-time search, analytics, marketing, etc.
• Understanding Web Operations Culture – the Graph & Data Obsession … – Comparison of traffic at Flickr, Google, Twitter, last.fm during the Obama inauguration. "One of the most interesting parts of running a large website is watching the effects of unrelated events affecting user traffic in aggregate."

BarCamp returns to Palo Alto next weekend, this time as BarCampBlock.

Almost two years ago, a group of 6 San Francisco geeks in 7 days, using blogs, wikis and IRC slapped together a weekend conference with wifi, food and amazing presentations in Palo Alto, California. This was a different kind of conference, though. There were no superstar keynote speakers. There were no pre-programmed agendas. There was a brilliant agenda filled with content by and for the attendees. Everyone, including the sponsors, the organizers, the speakers and the audience were involved in making the event happen equally and were often one and the same. Over the weekend, more than 200 people showed up and people watched remotely from all over the world. This event was BarCamp.

Who should be there? Anyone working on a new startup that wants to get some great feedback. Anyone looking for talent. Anyone talented looking for work. Anyone looking to invest in brilliant new ideas. Anyone looking to find partners for their brilliant new ideas. Anyone who wants to practice a presentation s/he is working on. Anyone who has a passion for blogging, wikis, design, coding and the web in general. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is encouraged to present. It’s totally free and an excellent source of what is hot, new and upcoming.

Highly recommended if you’re in the area and have any interest whatsoever. The price is right, too. (Free, donations welcome.)

See also: Notes from BarCamp (the original one in 2005)

I recently went for my two-year followup to see how my eyes are doing after wavefront LASIK. At the initial exam and each followup visit, they measure the point spread function of your eye. Here’s a before-and-after.

The scale of the two graphs are different, so the improvement is even better than it appears at first glance. The upper plot corresponds to roughly 20/80 vision. The lower plot, two years later, is at 20/15.

It’s been a while since I’ve come across something I haven’t seen before online. Ms. Dewey fits the bill. It is a Flash-based application combining video clips of actress Janina Gavankar with Windows Live search.

As a search application, it’s fat, slow, and the query results aren’t great. However, as John Batelle observes, “clearly, search ain’t the point.” This is search with an flirty attitude, where the speed and quality of the results aren’t at the top of the priority list.

As short-attention-span theater goes, it’s quite entertaining.

If you can’t think of anything to search for, Ms. Dewey will fidget for a while and eventually reach out and tap on the screen. “Helloooo…type something here…”

It’s far more interesting to try some queries and check out the responses. I spent over half an hour typing in keywords to see what would come up, starting with some of the suggestions from Digg and Channel9. The application provides a semi-random set of video responses based on the search keywords, so you won’t always get the same reaction each time.

The whip and riding crop don’t always appear when you’d think, the lab coat seems to be keyed to science and math (try “partial differential equation”), and I’m not sure what brings on the automatic weapons.

“Ms. Dewey” also has a MySpace page with more video clips. The way the application is constructed, they can probably keep updating and adding responses as long as they want to.

I briefly tried using Ms. Dewey in place of Google, as a working search engine, but it takes too long to respond to a series of queries (have to wait for the video to play) and the search results aren’t great (Live is continuing to improve, though). At the moment this is a fun conceptual experiment.

I wonder if we’ll see a new category of search emphasizing style (entertainment, attitude, sex) over substance (relevance, speed, scope). Today’s version might already work for the occasional search user, but imagine Ms. Dewey with faster, non-blocking search results, a better search UI, and Google’s results. It all vaguely reminds me of a William Gibson novel.

“Knights, I bid you welcome to your new home…Camelot!”

An amazing mashup of Monty Python’s “Knights of the Round Table” song, with singing and dancing by the cast of the original Star Trek.

If this doesn’t leave you rolling around on the floor, it probably means you’re completely baffled and/or younger than 30 or so.

Try naming the episodes for extra credit…

via The Big Picture

I was out for dinner at Fukisushi in Palo Alto this evening, enjoying some excellent spider rolls and giant clam sushi. A few minutes after we were served, a young couple came in, perhaps meeting for a date after work. At first I noticed that the man had the same cell phone (a Nokia 6682) as my wife, as he took it out and set it on the table next to him. Then he took out a Motorola Razr, flipped it open, and set it on the table next to the Nokia. I’m thinking that this is somewhat geeky and he should be paying more attention to his attractive blonde companion, but he looks like an engineering or tech operations kind of guy, and this is Silicon Valley, so maybe he has a work phone for being on call and a personal phone. But then he pulls out yet another phone, flips it open and sets it down next to the other two, creating a sort of mini-console of cell phones on the table next to the sushi plates.

Now I’m confused. I can think of lots of reasons why someone might have two cell phones. I can’t think of any good reason to park three cell phones on the table while on a date, though.

I don’t think he actually used any of them, except to take a photo of his companion with the Nokia.

Personally, I’ve been cutting down on the hardware I carry for some time now. At one point a few years ago, I often carried two PDAs, two cell phones, and a pager. That didn’t last long. These days I try to stick with one phone, as small as practical.

This episode makes me laugh, because I’m more puzzled by this guy carting three phones around than him parking them on the table in the middle of his dinner date.