Month: October 2005

Oh say can you key

Hmm… apparently the government is now not only reading everything I post on my blog, but also everything else I type on my keyboard – all in the name of national insecurity [via metafilter].

Ah well, I guess at least it’s not as bad as China yet, where I wouldn’t even be able to post incriminating blog entries to anyone who cares to Google them (even if they aren’t linked anywhere). Yep, Google managed to find an historic entry on my blog that isn’t connected to my home page. I guess their indexing of Blogger is a bit more invasive than one would hope.

Geek Tourism

Thanks to Mobile Monday New York I got to go hang out at Google’s NYC office last night. Good fun, and great to see inside one of the biggest ‘dot coms’ ever. Three floors inside 1440 Broadway with a huge atrium which, though cute, has crappy acoustics if you’re doing a presentation at the bottom. Last time I was at that building we were visiting Diddy’s (previously Puff Daddy) Bad Boy Records company to talk about Vote or Day – fond memories.

The whole thing made me very nostalgic for the old Quidnunc days (RIP), as the place seemed very similar in vibe and the people wandering around, plus the ‘Knowledge Share’ vibe of the presentation. That said the Google playschool colour scheme is a little bit jarring when it’s on top of every notice posted around – made me yearn for some mango orange…

Ps, the Google submarine should be awesome when it comes out in Q2 2006 {;).

Wrong about japan – peter carey. Post 9/11, Peter Carey decided to bond with his son on a trip to Japan to investigate Japanese culture, and specifically the hero worship around comics. Here we have father/son inter-relations, cultural observations and great writing all in one. My only gripe is that the book is way too short – especially when compared with almost every other Carey book.

The Computer is the new Valve

Interesting geek insight today: I was chatting to Cisco about how grid application servers look to be pretty darn interesting these days. For those of you who don’t know the grid application server model is where instead of getting a couple of large, over-powered computers to run your website, you get 10s if not 100s or even 1000s of cheapo, lower powered commodity computers and run then as a bit cluster. Each computer runs its own copy of code and sharing between the machines is kept to a minimum. This is he model used by Google, Amazon and eBay to keep scaling costs down. In fact when I was listening to Peter Yared talk about GASLAMP, his company’s grid enable application stack, he mentioned that at eBay they don’t even get support for computers any more – if one breaks, they just throw it away as it’s cheaper!

This line of conversation led to the stunning realisation that these days there are guys at Google whose only job is to walk around pulling dead computers out of racks and putting in new ones. Compare this to the old days, when some guy’s job at the original Eniac computer was to walk around pulling dead valves out of the system and replacing them. So now computers, made of 10s of silicon chips (for now), each holding millions of ‘transistors’, each of which is equivalent to a old school valve – have become the new valve themselves. Imagine 50 years time…

This is the mass of scooters that was chasing Critical Mass participants round New York last night. The Critical Mass crowd cycled past me chanting “more bikes, less war” then suddenly there were shouts of “Scooters! Go back!” and these guys shot up in the mass of bikes on Bleeker Street. There was a minor road block of police cordening them off and I saw one girl get arrested. As someone said when walking past “This is Bloomberg’s New York”. Makes you wonder why the Critical Mass guys don’t have front runners with phones to navigate safely away from this unwarrented harassment of peaceful protest. America the free. Guess not.