Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for May 6th through May 7th:

• Content Syndication with Case-Hardened JavaScript – kentbrewster.com – Handy code for building Javascript widgets with content from various sources such as Twitter, Digg, Yahoo Pipes, etc.
• Mathematical Atlas: A gateway to Mathematics – "The Mathematical Atlas is a collection of articles about aspects of mathematics at and above the university level, but (usually) not at the level of current research. The goal of this collection is to introduce the subject areas of modern mathematics, to describe a few of the milestone results and topics, and to give pointers to some of the key resources where further information is to be found. Like any good atlas, we try to present several ways to look at each area and to show its relationship with neighboring areas and sub-areas. "
• Three Reasons Why Twitter Will NOT Index the Links You Share – ReadWriteWeb – Argues that Twitter will rely on bit.ly through partnership or acquisition to handle sentiment and semantic analysis of twitter search and link contents.
• Tough Love For Microsoft Search – December 2008 post from Danny Sullivan on Microsoft and the search landscape.
• Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker – Malcolm Gladwell, with a reporter at large on Vivek Ranadivé and his NJB girls basketball team, employing asymmetric strategies to overcome conventionally stronger teams, and a broader look at the history of insurgent strategies from David and Goliath, T.E. Lawrence, George Washington, etc.

These are my links for May 5th through May 6th:

• Coding Horror: I Just Logged In As You: How It Happened – On good password management, why forums should mostly not be storing user passwords in general, and how re-use of passwords on multiple sites can lead to vulnerability on other sites.
• Arc Forum | Arc – Arc is a version of Lisp. Among other things it is used to implement Hacker News.
• John Graham-Cumming: Can you trust Paul Graham with your password? – On best practices for storing password hashes to avoid attacks on compromised password files and the use of rainbow files, in a look at Hacker News implementation of passwords
• Deliberate Ambiguity: How *not* to rate a search engine – Search engines have very simple user interfaces, but are used in many different contexts, most of which don't resemble the way people often try out a new search engine.
• The Slow Erosion of Google Search – Bokardo – On changes in internet user behaviors over time, more social media (ask your Twitter friends) vs directed search (send a keyword query) etc.
• Brynn Marie Evans » Why social search won’t topple Google (anytime soon) – On differences between searching through social media such as Twitter, Facebook etc, vs Google etc.
• The Financial Services Club’s Blog: Stock picking with real-time news – Looking at real time social media trends for trading ideas.
• Lisp’s reputation is so bad that many people don’t even take a look at Lisp | International Lisp Conference 2009 – I haven't touched Lisp in years, except maybe for configuring emacs. A list of possible reasons why Lisp is not more widely used, e.g. "Lisp is old and moldy. It must be primitive by today's standards.", "The exciting languages to learn now are Python, Ruby, Groovy, etc."
• Peering into North Korea – The Big Picture – Boston.com – A collection of recent photos of scenes from North Korea.

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 through May 2nd:

• FusionCharts Free – Animated Flash Charts and Graphs for ASP, PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, RoR and other web applications – Flash charting component that can be used to render data-driven & animated charts for your web applications and presentations. It is a cross-browser and cross-platform solution that can be used with PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations to deliver interactive and powerful flash charts. You do NOT need to know anything about Flash to use FusionCharts. All you need to know is the language you're programming in.
• Raphaël—JavaScript Library – Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library. Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
• A Really Gentle Introduction to Data Mining | Regular Geek – List of data mining blogs and related resources.
• BlackBerry SSH Tutorial: Connect to Unix Server using MidpSSH for Mobile Devices – Notes on using MidpSSH on Blackberry for remote access to servers. Seems to work, although big network lag on my BlackBerry Bold / AT&T.
• Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 – U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide Congress, by April 30 of each year, a full and complete report on terrorism with regard to those countries and groups meeting criteria set forth in the legislation. This annual report is entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. Beginning with the report for 2004, it replaced the previously published Patterns of Global Terrorism.
• DIY: How To Find Authoritative Twitter Users Plus 100 To Get You Started | Ignite Social Media – Some comments on recommendation metrics for Twitter, trying to use "favorites" mark as an indicator.
• 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."

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 28th through April 29th:

• With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – Use Yahoo to query and assemble data from around the internet, manipulate resulting XML recordsets with server side Javascript.
• Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool – Articles – MIX Online – "Makes jQuery accessible through a visual tool. The objective for Glimmer is pretty simple: to enable the power of jQuery through an interactive design surface. If jQuery is the "write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool. Glimmer has three core audiences: power users, designers and developers."
• Inside Facebook Reports: Why Hasn’t Facebook Grown More in China? – A look at Chinese consumer internet and social media usage, QQ, 51, Xiaonei, Kaixin, and some reasons why there are only around 300,000 Facebook users in China today.
• Facebook maps the swine flu hysteria | The Web Services Report – CNET News – Visualizing interest in swine flu by mapping percentages of mentions on Facebook wall pages, using data from Lexicon.
• Develop Twitter API application in django and deploy on Google App Engine — The Uswaretech Blog – Django Web Development – Walkthrough of a sample Twitter application on Google App Engine, using Django/Python.

These are my links for April 28th from 05:35 to 14:24:

• Official Google Blog: Adding search power to public data – Interesting. Wonder if the underlying public data sets will eventually become available on Google App Engine as well, sort of like the public data sets available for use with Amazon EC2 applications.
• MySQL And Search At Craigslist – Jeremy Zawodny's slides on MySQL, Sphinx, and free text search implementation at Craigslist, from last week's MySQL conference.
• Skew, The Frontend Engineer’s Misery @ Irrational Exuberance – For mashups and the like, the distinction between a FE engineer and web dev is rather small in terms of technical skills; they are both using the same skillset, they are both interacting with APIs, and so on. However, there are important distinctions between the two: 1. web developers tend to move in small groups or as individuals, whereas fe engineers work in larger groups, 2. web developers tend to design a product on top of an existing backend service (api, etc), while fe engineers are usually working in parallel with the backend being developed.
• Study: Twitter Audience Does Not Have A Return Policy – Over 60 percent of people who sign up to use the popular (and tremendously discussed) micro-blogging platform do not return to using it the following month, according to new data released by Nielsen Online. In other words, Twitter currently has just a 40 percent retention rate, up from just 30 percent in previous months–indicating an “I don’t get it factor” among new users that is reminiscent of the similarly-over hyped Second Life from a few years ago.
• Hey Americans, Appreciate Your Freedom Of Speech : NPR – Firoozeh Dumas on the underappreciated freedoms of speech and expression we have in the US vs journalists and bloggers in Iran.

These are my links for April 15th through April 17th:

• Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step – Compress text files with gzip to reduce file size/bandwidth, the incremental cpu cost is usually low relative to the performance gain from lower network cost. Friendfeed uses nginx in front of main web servers for this.
• Jabbify – Free Comet web service and browser client for simple chat and streaming status applications.
• TinEye Image Search Engine – Idée Inc. – The Visual Search Company – Finds references to images online, starting with an original image. Attempts to use image analysis to be independent of scaling, cropping, and other common manipulations.
• All That Twitters Isn’t Gold: A Popular Web Application in Search of a Business Plan – Knowledge@Wharton – Business school take on Twitter and high growth, non-revenue consumer web startups.
• Almost Viral: A Hybrid Acquisition Strategy – "By being almost viral you can grow very cheaply, control your rate of growth and demographics, and get enough traffic to conduct meaningful experiments. Need to grow more slowly? Just decrease your daily ad spend. Need statistically significant results more quickly? Increase your daily ad spend. With a viral coefficient of 0.9 you’ve dealt with your acquisition risk. Rather than going fully viral and dealing with the operational difficulties, it might be worth your time to deal with other market risks: retention, engagement, and monetization. "

These are my links for April 13th through April 15th:

• On Netflix’s video streaming security framework – A black box look at Netflix video streaming implementation for "Watch Instantly" , built with Microsoft Silverlight for Windows/Mac or various hardware clients, and various authentication and DRM services + HTTPS
• Nati Shalom’s Blog: Designing a Scalable Twitter – A look at using in-memory data grid vs memcached architecture for a simplified Twitter-like service with goals of 10 billion tweets/day, 100 GB stored/day (with 10:1 compression), immutable tweets i.e., there are no updates, only inserts, client applications limited to 70 requests per hour.
• agile approach | World Bank Open API 2.0 Launched – Economic development indicators for 200 countries from World Bank. 1000 API calls/day free for non-commercial use, info at developer.worldbank.org
• "We think you’d also like…" and the Math of Suggestion – Teil 2 | Gründerszene – Simplified overview of recommendation algorithms used for suggesting alternative shopping choices.
• 15 Firefox add-ons for Web developers | Webware – CNET –

These are my links for April 9th through April 10th:

• Coding Horror: Sex, Lies, and Software Development – Are there any programming jobs you wouldn't take? Not because the jobs didn't pay enough, had poor benefits, or limited upside — but because the work itself made you uncomfortable? – A long comment thread about the ethics and social issues around working for porn sites vs other employers.
• Daring Fireball: How to Block the DiggBar – On URL shorteners and blocking DiggBarr from framing target pages.
• How I lost 50 lbs with the new Twitter API – And now it’s all this – On implementation changes required to update a Twitter client app (Dr. Twoot) to the latest API
• 10 papers you need to read | Science for SEO – "This is a list of my top 10 freely available papers on the topic of information retrieval. You will notice that they are rather old, but the techniques used described and the findings are not always dated. Those that dated are important nonetheless because they provide a good foundation to understanding why things are as they are in information retrieval these days."
• jesus blinched (or: why i love maundy thursday) – pistachio’s posterous – "what stays with me to this day is the abject humanity of jesus in the stories of the last supper, the betrayal, the denial and above all, in gethsemane."

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 April 3rd through April 7th:

• Agile Testing: Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 – Practical guidance on using cloud computing at EC2. Expect failures, automate deployment, more.
• joshua’s blog: on url shorteners – Joshua Schachter (founder of del.icio.us) summary on the state of URL shorteners (tinyurl, bit.ly, etc), and issues with 3rd party redirects, link sharing through twitter, etc.
• Control Yourself » status.net coming soon – On status.net, plans for hosting laconi.ca sites, and federating microblogging status networks
• There must be some way out of here (Scripting News) – Comments on the rise of celebrity accounts on Twitter, increasing spam/noise, and alternative models for laconi.ca and status.net
• Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Web Sites – Tad Hogg, Kristina Lerman 31 Mar 2009 Abstract: We describe a general stochastic processes-based approach to modeling user-contributory web sites, where users create, rate and share content. These models describe aggregate measures of activity and how they arise from simple models of individual users. This approach provides a tractable method to understand user activity on the web site and how this activity depends on web site design choices, especially the choice of what information about other users' behaviors is shown to each user. We illustrate this modeling approach in the context of user-created content on the news rating site Digg.

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 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 3rd from 05:48 to 12:10:

• Twitter Fan Wiki / USGovernment – List of twitter handles for elected officials and US government staff.
• Juno: A Lightweight and Simple Web Framework –
• Free Online Course Materials | MIT OpenCourseWare –
• Entrepreneurship Corner: Stanford University’s free podcasts and video clips of entrepreneurial thought leaders and innovators from Silicon Valley. –
• McKinsey: What Matters: Building an innovation nation – A look at innovation clusters, with chart and catchy labels. "heroic bets, irresistible deals, knowledge oases"
• 40 Useful JavaScript Libraries | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine –

These are my links for March 2nd from 10:48 to 21:40:

• Hands-on with the Vue Personal Video Network – Battery powered mesh networked wireless webcam, shown this afternoon at demo09
• Mark Hurd’s moment – Mar. 2, 2009 – A look at Mark Hurd's approach to running Hewlett-Packard
• Detroit’s outlook falls along with home prices — chicagotribune.com – January 29, 2009 – "The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service. … On a positive note, Detroit's homicide rate dropped 14 percent last year. That prompted mayoral candidate Stanley Christmas to tell the Detroit News recently, "I don't mean to be sarcastic, but there just isn't anyone left to kill."
• Make Google Real-Time With Twitter Search Add-on – ReadWriteWeb –
• 40 Web Developers to Follow on Twitter | Think Vitamin –

These are my links for February 27th through February 28th:

• jurriaanpersyn.com — Database Sharding at Netlog, with MySQL and PHP – Discussion and slides from a presentation at FOSDEM 2009 on database sharding and practical considerations implementing high traffic web services at Netlog.
• The New York Times Explains Twitter…to the New York Times | Peter Kafka – An introductory overview to Twitter for the New York Times, from the New York Times. Includes two embedded slide decks.
• Microsoft teams and products on Twitter | Adam Kinney, Continuum Explorer –
• The Big List Of Search Engines & Their Employees On Twitters –
• The size of social networks | Primates on Facebook | The Economist – How many friends can you manage at once? Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

Here are my current informal policies for using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Friendfeed.  Short version – Facebook and LinkedIn I use for people I know personally, Twitter and Friendfeed any interesting input is welcome.

Facebook: This has been rapidly going mainstream lately. I had a mostly unused account for a long time, which has become more interesting/active as people I know sign up.  I presently only link to people I know in real life. Facebook is interesting because there are people I haven’t interacted with for years (high school friends etc) as well as people that live next door (literally) and colleagues from past work projects all mixed together, and they all get to eavesdrop and engage in casual/passive interaction. I currently have my Twitter feed linked to update my Facebook status, which means my messages are probably cryptic to about half the readers at any given time.

LinkedIn: I originally only linked to people I worked with and knew very well. I have broadened out the criteria over the years, and at this point I will link to people that I haven’t worked with but have at least actually met and had a conversation with. I basically don’t link to people I don’t know and haven’t met, though. I’d to at least be able to recognize people I’m linked to, and have a clue about what they’re like. So no “LinkedIn Open Networking” for me.

Twitter: I look for interesting (to me) streams, whether or not I know the author. Most of my twitter feed is people I haven’t met in person.  I follow people I know in real life, and also discover people who have commented on something that turned up in a conversation or a search. I don’t auto follow, although I do try to take a look at who’s on my follower list periodically to see if there is someone I should add.  Twitter has also been the most interesting for making new connections with people in real life, as you can get a sense of topic people are thinking about and what they’re more generally like.  I use Twitter for scanning a range of topics, so I’m a little less interested in people with huge follower counts and more interested in people kicking out uncorrelated but interesting ideas and data.  I’m working on tools for scanning and filtering status and sentiment streams, so in theory a bigger source network is better, if you can make effective use of it.

Friendfeed: Sometimes I feel like Friendfeed is the Robert Scoble/Louis Gray channel, but I have seeded it with my Twitter feed and have gradually added people as they are exposed through the “friend of” feature.  I always have the feeling that I’m not making the best use of Friendfeed. I like the conversations that pop up on posted items, but wish for the range of input that comes from the huge user bases on Twitter and Facebook. Then again, maybe not Facebook inputs here, I also enjoy the relative skew towards content from early adopters that persists for now on Friendfeed.

If I know you in real life, feel free to send me a Facebook or LinkedIn request, there have been a lot of people signing up lately and I’ve been enjoying reconnecting with people I haven’t heard from in a while.  If I don’t know you (yet), you’re welcome to follow on Twitter (@hjl) or Friendfeed (hjl).

These are my links for February 26th through February 27th:

• What to do if your startup is about fail (or “Don’t Stop Believing”) « The Jason Calacanis Weblog – Practical advice for startups facing a slowing market and limited cash.
• 25 Forex-Related Twitter Accounts Worth Following –
• How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data – Bret Taylor’s blog – Implementation notes on how FriendFeed manages very large data sets in which the schema changes relatively frequently.
• The "A Hard Day’s Night" Chord – Rock’s Holy Grail@Everything2.com – Exactly which notes on the guitar. Plus the piano.
• Beatles Unknown "A Hard Day’s Night" Chord Mystery Solved Using Fourier Transform – Four years ago, inspired by reading news coverage about the song’s 40th anniversary, Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle. The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record.