Posts filed under 'The Geek Factor'
Well, throwing exceptions, in Java…
Trying to get into some beginner Java programming with too much of a C-style background makes for nice headaches. I figure that it’s better for me to learn some and be able to commisserate with my colleagues… or at least know when they’re full of it.
After all, as a “systems architect”, some idea of the little picture is good to combine with the big picture I’m responsible for…
Doesn’t make try{} catch{} “rules” any simpler to grok, though.
June 28th, 2007
It’s been quite a while since I heard anything about Google and their dark fiber ambitions. I just got home from an Akamai user forum, and happened to see a link in IRC to one of Joel Spolsky’s posts. From there, I followed a few links, and eventually ended up here.
That links to an article from November of 2005 in which Cringely talks about Google’s ability, with datacenter-in-a-shipping-container, to be a bit of a Walmart on steroids. That, of course, brought to mind both archive.org’s Petabox and Sun’s Project Blackbox. Actually, the Petabox philosophy (aside from the shipping-container form factor) even seems to jive with Google’s storage philosophy.
This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.
Man, this has to get you thinking. I know that the number of Google’s data centers has gone up dramatically… are they just dumping these shipping containers everywhere and wiring them up? When does it end? Is there a need for it to end? Was Google polite with China because they have 600 of these things ready to deploy inside the Great FireWall? Does Google scale up the Google Apps that compete with Office by dropping one in an office park? Or even crazier, in a parking space leased to them by Wal-Mart?
May 8th, 2007
Well, I went out and got the AppleTV yesterday… at the Apple Store in Soho — Best Buy was closer, but they were out of stock. The fact that I’d seen that it does 480i as long as you have component video inputs allowed me to venture forth despite not having an HD TV.
It’s cute. No complaints from Amy about some ugly piece of equipment… though it’s hard to complain about anything that sits above the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8100 DVR that Time Warner gives us the privelege of renting. I haven’t noticed any noise from the unit itself… and I haven’t felt it for heat… so I can’t comment about that.
Use is pretty simple. The bigger of the two pains in the asses for setup was entering the hex string for my wireless network’s WEP key. Tiny, simplistic remote… long string of digits. The smaller of the two pains was in linking it to an iTunes library. I was chillin’ in the living room, and it was a matter of having to get up to enter a code.
I don’t quite see why I should have to do that if browsing someone’s collection, and even playing… since I can play from multiple while only syncing with one…
The 40GB (33GB Free) of HD space is insufficient to sync my entire collection of music and my newly ripped movies (ripped on the Mini I bought last week… MediaFork rocks). Looks like maybe I should have gotten one of these units from PowerMax. Rather than upgrading an aTV that you bought stock, just buy a pre-upgraded one! 120GB probably would be fine for a while.
I wish I could plug in a USB2 external drive into the AppleTV. I have a 500GB Cavalry unit from Buy.com on the way (well, it should have been shipped, but it hasn’t — supplier issues?) which would be fine… though it was for the Mini in my mind.
I still haven’t gotten to using the Mini for my primary workstation for more than an hour or so. Maybe it was the IRC client options… I like mIRC. Whichever… I’ve been keeping the Mini busy with MediaFork ripping movies. That can be its job for now.
April 8th, 2007
Gorilla Mobile
seems to have come up with an interesting way to deal with making international calls from your mobile phone. Personally, I don’t — I have a home phone (VoIP), and a work cell phone that I never see the bill for — but someone like Amy who has a sister in Europe… If you pay for Sprint’s $4/mo International Dialing Plan, the calls to a UK cell phone are 31 cents per minute. With Gorilla, you dial an access number in the US and since the access number sees that you’re calling from the cell phone you registered with, there isn’t a PIN to deal with… and then your calls are 25 cents a minute…
Percentage-wise, it’s an even bigger benefit for people who call the Dominican Republic, which I’m sure is pretty common here in New York. Sprint’s $4/mo plan allows you to pay 18c/25c per minute to a Dominican land-line/mobile phone. Gorilla’s rates are 9c/15c…
Seems like the way to drop your phone bill dramatically without dealing with switching carriers for your regular service.
I’d bet that you could even put pauses in the speed-dial for the numbers on your cell phone to have the whole thing completely transparent to you to use.
March 28th, 2007
Well, Yahoo! Mail has gone and removed users’ e-mail quotas.
As the Yodel Anecdotal post mentions, when Yahoo! Mail was launched, they had a total of 200GB of space for all users of Y!Mail.
One might say that Google really changed the game with their launch of GMail with a 1GB quota (which is ever-expanding over time — kind of like the transfer and disk quotas on Dreamhost web hosting accounts).
I haven’t come close to quota on any of my free webmail accounts in years… I came close with Yahoo! Mail back when it was 4 MB, but I never used it as my daily account. Ever since I started having e-mail go to a personal domain, I couldn’t really imagine switching back… in some ways it requires more maintenance, so it’s somewhat harder, but I have the ultimate in control — I’m not hostage to the whims of a company that may discontinue the product or start charging me all of a sudden.
Plenty of free e-mail services have shut down or imposed a fee, some of them with what seemed at the time to be large companies that would never be forced to charge or shut down. AltaVista Mail went the way of the dodo in 2002. USA.net in 2001. This Email RIP site also mentions some real dick moves like December 2001’s AT&T “kills” 1 million+ addresses by switching users from @home.com to @attbi.com domains - without forwarding mails addressed to @home.com!
Of course, it would be negligent of me to miss mentioning Rediff’s unlimited quota mail, though I can’t imagine forcing myself through a pop-up hell of Bollywood crap to check to see if I got a password reminder e-mail for something.
March 28th, 2007
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