Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for May 21st from 06:07 to 22:34:

• Data.gov Launches to Mixed Reviews | Wired Science | Wired.com – Commentary and initial reactions to data.gov. Good news – government is taking steps to improve access to public data. Bad news – limited catalog of datasets to start (47). But it's going in the right direction.
• IEEE Spectrum: The Million Dollar Programming Prize – Robert M. Bell, Jim Bennett, Yehuda Koren, and Chris Volinsky. A look at collaborative filtering and other predictive clustering systems used by one team competing for the Netflix prize, in which the goal is a 10% improvement over the original Cinematch recommendation system.
• bb: 21may2009 – (opinion) Graphic of the gap between how people (and companies) succeed, and how people think they succeed.
• Seventeen things that people are actually saying when they retweet others – meish dot org: life, unfolding – A look at various reasons why messages are retweeted on Twitter.
• Expanding the Cloud: Moving large data sets into Amazon S3 with AWS Import/Export. – All Things Distributed – More on shipping data to S3 via hard drive from Werner Vogels
• Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS Import/Export: Ship Us That Disk! – Tanenbaum-style bulk transfer for AWS/S3! "Customers with AWS storage requirements at the terabyte and petabyte level often ask us if they can sidestep the internet and simply send us a disk drive, or even a 747 full of such drives. "

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 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. "

I’ve never seen a search result page like this before. The meta text “Conservative think tank claiming to report about events and nations strategically important to the United States” doesn’t appear any where in the referenced page, which doesn’t contain any useful <META> content. Searching for that text, it looks like the text originated from the DMOZ directory listing.

Another entry from the same DMOZ list, the Kensington Review, also returns the DMOZ meta text, this time in place of the <META> text in the actual page. DMOZ says “An e-magazine of political and social commentary. When the left says the glass is half full and the right says it is half empty, Kensington suggests that it might be too big.” Kensington’s own META says “An electronic journal of political, financial and social commentary”.  DMOZ is a more interesting description, but again does not originate from the content itself. 

So it appears that DMOZ editors have greater influence over certain Google search descriptions than the actual sites themselves, which is not necessarily bad, but was certainly unexpected (to me). Overall I’d prefer that Google limit its editorial function to ranking and presenting the search results, and perhaps make the editorial opinions known, but not presented as definitive. 

I’m not particularly familiar with the Jamestown Foundation, which is why I was searching in the first place. The DMOZ editor is clearly skeptical but I’d rather form my own opinion.