It's just as picturesque as I remembered, but it had changed a bit -a few less trees, the beaver dam is gone and I didn't see any turtles this time. Still a log of red-winged blackbirds though.
Posted via email from Kinetic
May 24, 2009
Walking at Juanita Bay park
We haven't been to Juanita Bay park in a long time and after a nice sushi dinner in Kirkland for Rinneke's birthday we headed down there.
It's just as picturesque as I remembered, but it had changed a bit -a few less trees, the beaver dam is gone and I didn't see any turtles this time. Still a log of red-winged blackbirds though.
It's just as picturesque as I remembered, but it had changed a bit -a few less trees, the beaver dam is gone and I didn't see any turtles this time. Still a log of red-winged blackbirds though.
May 23, 2009
Fostering kittens
We picked up four kittens today that need a foster home for the next few days before they have surgery and then can find a permanent home.
One of our other two cats is very curious (but probably just looking for soft kitten food) and the other cat just hisses as it walks by the room with the kittens.
If you would like to foster kittens - and it's pretty easy - just contact Homeward Pets in Woodinville.
One of our other two cats is very curious (but probably just looking for soft kitten food) and the other cat just hisses as it walks by the room with the kittens.
If you would like to foster kittens - and it's pretty easy - just contact Homeward Pets in Woodinville.
Posted via email from Kinetic
May 22, 2009
Real-time Web just around the corner
The ReadWriteWeb blog has a good post about gathering momentum for a resurgence of interest in real-time search and notifications. I don't think the examples he points to will push it into the mainstream - that functionality has been around in many forms for many years (I even built searchalert.net seven or eight years ago to do that). I do think something will happen, but I'm not sure what application of this technology will make it to the big time.
The Real Time Web is coming so fast we've hardly had any time to think about it yet. So let's do that, shall we? The two hottest technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating real-time delivery of activity streams to their users. Paul Buchheit, the man who built the first versions of both Gmail and Adsense, says the real time web is going to be the next big thing. Buchheit's FriendFeed is a key point of innovation in real time. Social media ping server Gnip promised to turn everything online into Instant Messaging-style XMPP feeds, and though that's been put on hold in favor of more immediately clear value - we've still got our fingers crossed.
May 20, 2009
The end of the road
Out taking the dog-in-law for a walk and liking how everything is that glowing spring green color I love so much. It's like there is this whole new beginning just around the corner
Posted via email from Kinetic
May 18, 2009
Another great weekend at Orkila
We had another great weekend at Camp Orkila on Orcas Island. The weather
couldn't have been better and the sunsets were beautiful as always. The best
part was being able to go out on the water in kayaks - something we've
wanted to do for years. We'll be back next year but that will likely be our
last year with the Y-Westerners program.
May 17, 2009
Having a campfire on the beach
Campfires on the beach are one of my favorite things about our campouts. Our local band of hooligans enjoyed the smores and chased each other til it was too dark to see.
Cliff climbing on Freeman Island
On the way back from our kayak trip we stopped at Freeman Island. There is a geocache at the top of the cliff. But there was a nest of bees too, so I didn't do the climb this year.
Kayaks ready to go in the Sound
After six years of camp on Orcas we finally had the chance to take out some kayaks for a quick afternoon trip.
There were seals sunning on rocks at Doughty Point but no other wildlife.
We were soaked by a freak tsunami caused by a quake that measured 2 on the (Ron) Richter scale).
There were seals sunning on rocks at Doughty Point but no other wildlife.
We were soaked by a freak tsunami caused by a quake that measured 2 on the (Ron) Richter scale).
May 16, 2009
Life and Death in the Forest
A game where some are herbivores, some are omnivores and some are carnivores.
You make your choice then run like crazy.
You make your choice then run like crazy.
May 15, 2009
On our way to Orcas Island
This weekend Stephan and I will be going to Camp Orkila for our annual Y-Guides campout. Hopefully we'll be doing kayaks this time.
April 23, 2009
Above the Clouds whitepaper
Here's a whitepaper on Cloud Computing from the UC Berkeley RAD Lab. - just what everyone has been waiting for, a whitepaper on Cloud Computing.
In part this describes obstacles and opportunities. My personal favorite :
That's right, we finally have the go-ahead to Invent Scalable Store.
The paper gets better the more you read. Another great quote:
In part this describes obstacles and opportunities. My personal favorite :
Obstacle #6 : Scalable Storage Opportunity #6 : Invent Scalable Store
That's right, we finally have the go-ahead to Invent Scalable Store.
The paper gets better the more you read. Another great quote:
Google Search is effectively the dial tone of the Internet: if people went to Google for search and it wasn’t available, they would think the Internet was down
March 26, 2009
When not showing an ad is better
The Mike on Ads blog had an interesting post a while back referencing some research by Yahoo about how not showing ads might be better for you.
Showing something other than ads when there is no money involved is a great idea. Unfortunately, most traditional ad networks have no interest or capability to do this. Even 'behavioral' targeting folks aren't in a position because they have only a few 'behaviors' rather than a full tagcloud of interests.
Our Others Online affinity profiling system has behaviors, interests and a measure of the commercial value of those interests which means we can power ad units that know when its the right time to show an ad, or whether it's better to show relevant news or other content.
Instead of showing crappy CPA offers the publisher should show either nothing at all, or some relevant site content. Show a snippet of the friend-feed, or maybe a list of 'online friends'. Show "interesting related links", or "new photos posted"… it doesn’t really matter. Show something that is of interest to the user. The point of the exercise is to train the user to start looking at this specific space again.
[...]
If this is obviously so good, why is nobody doing it? Well there’s only one small insignificant problem… Publishers have no way of identifying the top 20% of impressions. You see, especially on social networking sites a huge portion of that 20% are impressions that are sold behaviorally via ad-networks and exchanges. Those ad-networks and exchanges need to see the full 100% to be able to cherry-pick the 10% that are valuable to them thereby making it quite difficult for the publisher to “not show ads” on worthless impressions.
Showing something other than ads when there is no money involved is a great idea. Unfortunately, most traditional ad networks have no interest or capability to do this. Even 'behavioral' targeting folks aren't in a position because they have only a few 'behaviors' rather than a full tagcloud of interests.
Our Others Online affinity profiling system has behaviors, interests and a measure of the commercial value of those interests which means we can power ad units that know when its the right time to show an ad, or whether it's better to show relevant news or other content.
March 17, 2009
A clean desktop. The hard way.
My hard drive has been complaining recently and yesterday gave up the ghost. I found a few decent replacement drives online, but needed a new one right now. We had a gift certificate to Staples and what do you know - they had a reasonable 500GB SATA drive for $80. I called them last night just before 9pm - not only were they helpful late at night, but they put one behind the counter for me. Nice people there.
This morning I backed up all my files to my Linux server here at home and swapped in the new drive. I re-installed Win XP Pro and my machine was now a blank, default machine with no drivers for all the hardware plugged into it - like the big monitor, the speakers, power management, etc. I finally figured out Dell's horrible user interface for installing drivers and soon was back to a running machine with a clean desktop (first time in several years).
The only oddity was the clock was off by an hour. The old Win XP install didn't know about Congress changing when Daylight Savings Time started.
After restoring all my files, I needed to update Win XP and install all the old applications again. Not too hard, but time consuming.
Here's the order that I restored things
This morning I backed up all my files to my Linux server here at home and swapped in the new drive. I re-installed Win XP Pro and my machine was now a blank, default machine with no drivers for all the hardware plugged into it - like the big monitor, the speakers, power management, etc. I finally figured out Dell's horrible user interface for installing drivers and soon was back to a running machine with a clean desktop (first time in several years).
The only oddity was the clock was off by an hour. The old Win XP install didn't know about Congress changing when Daylight Savings Time started.
After restoring all my files, I needed to update Win XP and install all the old applications again. Not too hard, but time consuming.
Here's the order that I restored things
- Dell drivers
- Firefox browser
- iTunes (so I could have music while restoring everything else)
- PuTTY
- PasswordSafe
- Windows XP service pack 3
- Microsoft Office 2003
- Java 6 SDK
- Eclipse
- Apache 2.2
- Tomcat 6
- DBVisualizer
- TortoiseSVN shell
- GTalk
March 02, 2009
Yahoo Query Language and Open Tables
I've been looking at the Yahoo Open Data Tables and Query Language documentation. This is truly amazing stuff! It provides a service API that accesses many well known data sources (many are Yahoo) and transforms the data into XML or JSON. The data sources can be external URLs that provide XML and Yahoo does the fetch, parse, extract and transform that you want. You can provide a definition of some other external data source and they will hook it into their unified API fetch/query/transform service.
Some of the data sources are Flickr, local listings, geo location info, web search, image search, news search, weather and so on. One stop shopping for lots of great data.
Their console http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/ is a great way to see what's possible.
This is what I've wanted for many years. A long time ago I wanted to build a service that would provide "XML data sources" (I even registered xmldatasource.com) for everything available on the Web - now it looks like Yahoo has actually done it.
Let's hope they keep this data access service open to all.
Some of the data sources are Flickr, local listings, geo location info, web search, image search, news search, weather and so on. One stop shopping for lots of great data.
Their console http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/ is a great way to see what's possible.
This is what I've wanted for many years. A long time ago I wanted to build a service that would provide "XML data sources" (I even registered xmldatasource.com) for everything available on the Web - now it looks like Yahoo has actually done it.
Let's hope they keep this data access service open to all.
February 19, 2009
Mining the Twitter Stream
From the Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media blog -
The Business of Mining the Twitter Stream
Good post about mining the Twitter stream which hints that existing social media mining companies may already be too established to be replaced by newcomers. This is fast moving area that almost looks like a microcosm of the 'innovators dilemma' - except there is no large, fossilized ecosystem in place.
The Business of Mining the Twitter Stream
Good post about mining the Twitter stream which hints that existing social media mining companies may already be too established to be replaced by newcomers. This is fast moving area that almost looks like a microcosm of the 'innovators dilemma' - except there is no large, fossilized ecosystem in place.
SDB adds aggregate function
Looks like Amazon has added an aggregate function to SDB - basically count(*).
Amazon Web Services Blog: New Count Function
I wonder why there isn't a mass quantity of blogs with performance data for various queries against various types and sizes of data sets.
Amazon Web Services Blog: New Count Function
I wonder why there isn't a mass quantity of blogs with performance data for various queries against various types and sizes of data sets.
February 10, 2009
CouchDB: Jeremy Zawodny's impressions
I haven't done any work with CouchDB other than read through documents, so I hope Jeremy continues to post what he learns.
Playing With CouchDB: First Impressions (by Jeremy Zawodny)
Playing With CouchDB: First Impressions (by Jeremy Zawodny)
January 29, 2009
Scalable, reliable key-value lookup service
Here's a great summary of most of the available key-value storage services from Richard Jones of last.FM - great stuff.
I'm leaning towards Voldemort, but need to look into this more.
From what I can tell, Scalaris is only memory-resident at the moment and doesn’t persist data to disk. This makes it entirely impractical to actually run a service like Wikipedia on Scalaris for real - but it sounds like they tackled the hard problems first, and persisting to disk should be a walk in the park after you rolled your own version of Chord and made Paxos your bitch.
I'm leaning towards Voldemort, but need to look into this more.
January 05, 2009
McSweeney's : Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?
Good gravy, this gave me a great laugh!
Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?
You've got to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt
Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?
You've got to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt
ONE: Hairy One, Maker of Fire. Maker of Fire, the Hairy One.
MAKER: My pleasure, Hairy One. I've followed your work with Ten Men for a long time. It's a remarkable firm.
HAIRY ONE: So you're the one with the fire?
MAKER: Yes.
HAIRY ONE: Is it here?
MAKER: Well, no.
HAIRY ONE: Where is it?
MAKER: Well, in a sense, Hairy One, fire is everywhere. Rather than being an object, say, like your sharp stick, it's really a process, so it can't really be said to exist anywhere. In a sense, fire exists in its own imaginary, virtual space, where we can only talk about what is not fire and what might become fire.
HAIRY ONE: Whoa whoa whoa! English, please!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)