Four Short Links: 20 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 5

Camp, visualization, mistakes, and a wireless power meter hack:

1. Toorcamp -- two day hacker camp in a Titan-1 missile silo. The coolest venue evar? I think so.
2. The Allosphere (TED) -- JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the Allosphere, a planetarium-like sound-and-light visualization environment for scientific data. (via Lorrie Lejeune)
3. The Mistake Bank -- The Mistake Bank is a place to share stories of mistakes people have made in their lives and careers. Reminds me of the fail sessions at Foo Camp that Joshua Schachter leads.
4. Tweet-a-Watt (Lady Ada) -- add an XBee card to a Kill-a-Watt power meter to be able to read the current power load from afar.

Four short links: 3 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 9

The problems of Creative Commons around the world, ebook futures, open source biomed research, and a new open source conference:

1. The Case For and Against Creative Commons -- skip straight to page two, where the article talks about the places around the world where CC isn't working. "More exactly, they fear that if you try to convert artists to CC who had never thought of copyrighting their works before, they may simply fall in love with the concept of making money through full copyright and stick to it." (via Paul Reynolds on a mailing list)
2. Are We Having The Wrong Conversation About eBook Pricing? -- "The first TV shows were basically radio programs on the television — until someone realized that TV was a whole new medium. Ebooks should not just be print books delivered electronically. We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience. I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation...". Yes, but radio shows still persist even though they're delivered through the Internet. Old formats don't have to die in the face of new media, the question is what's best for a particular purpose. I read books on my iPhone as I go to sleep at night ... I don't want hypermedia linked videos and a backchannel. I don't want the future of ebooks to be 1990s Shockwave CD-ROM "interactives". (via Andrew Savikas' delicious feed)
3. Sage -- "a new, not-for-profit medical research organization established in 2009 to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage’s objectives are: to build and support an open access platform and databases for building innovative new dynamic disease models; to interconnect scientists as contributors to evolving, integrated networks of biological data." Apparently they'll be seeded with a pile of high-resolution very expensive data from Merck. (via BoingBoing)
4. Open Source Bridge -- open source conference in Portland, OR, started to fill the void when OSCON moved to San Jose. Very open source: they show you all the proposals, and you can even subscribe to a feed of the proposals as they come in. Many look good, though I'm pretty sure that 1993 called and wants its Tcl back. This conference might be just the excuse I need to visit Portland.

Velocity 2009: Themes, ideas, and call for participation...

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 0

Last year's Velocity conference was an incredible success. We expected around 400 people and we ended up maxing out the facility with over 600. This year we're moving the conference to a bigger space and extending it to 3 days to accommodate workshops and longer sessions. Velocity 2009 will be on June 22-24th, 2009 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

This year's conference will be especially important. I've said many times that Web Performance and Operations is critical to the success of every company that depends on the web. In the current economic situation, it's becoming a matter of survival. The competitive advantage comes from the ability to do two things:

1. Generate more revenue with fewer resources
2. Respond quickly to change

Our Velocity 2009 mantra is "Fast, Scalable, Efficient, Available", a slight change from last year. (We've replaced "Resilient" with "Efficient" to make focus clear.)

I'm excited to announce that joining Steve Souders & I on this year's program committee are John Allspaw, Artur Bergman, Scott Ruthfield, Eric Schurman, and Mandi Walls.  We've already started working on the program, and have just opened the Call for Participation.

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The Last HOPE

by Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill | comments: 8

I made the trek to a steamy hot NYC this weekend to attend one day of the three day Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania. There was too much going to adequately cover it here (or even take it all in), but a few things stood out.

Steve Rambam's eye opening talk on the death of privacy for example. For a solid three hours in front of a standing room only crowd he weaved back and forth between the Orwellian theme of how our privacy is being ripped from us by everyone from Google to Choicepoint and the theme that seemed even creepier to him, self contribution. Over and over he expressed disbelief at how willingly we post our personal details everywhere from Twitter to Facebook while thanking us all the while for making his job as a private investigator that much easier. What the marketers and government don't actively take, we actively give. Naturally I twittered the whole thing.

Cell phone tracking; artificial-intelligence-assisted reality mining; 3000 cameras per square mile in Manhattan; facial, activity, and even gait identification software; government outsourced investigative databases shielded from FOIA requests; UAV-based license plate scanners; beating anonymity by correlating multiple datasets; unanticipated database repurposing; and on and on... Finally I could twitter no more and left the venue hurriedly fashioning a tinfoil hat from a burger wrapper while consigning myself to doubling the dosage on my meds.

I will say this though, there was something deliciously ironic about standing in a room chock full of hackers all listening at rapt attention to a three hour chillingly dystopic harangue on privacy loss while nearly every single one of them was wearing an RFID tag around their necks. Even better, the tag was tracking their every move around the venue and was linked to a comprehensive self-contributed profile.

Moving beyond the privacy nightmare stuff, there was hardware hacking to be found everywhere at Last HOPE. Tables were covered with broken open electronic toys and electronic components and were surrounded by hackers with smoking soldering irons.

Of the completed projects on display, one of my favorites was a something of a hybrid that projected a 3D image onto carefully placed strings.

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Structure and Velocity

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 4

Several people have asked me about the differences between Om Malik's Structure conference and our Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference.  Velocity is on June 23 & 24th at the SFO Mariott, and Structure follows on June 25th in San Francisco. 

The conferences are complementary: Structure discusses what is changing in internet infrastructure, and Velocity teaches how to make that change happen.

I've been recommending that anyone considering Structure make sure their engineering teams are going to Velocity.  For many technical leaders I think there is value in attending both, and I definitely plan on doing so.

The knowledge and skills learned at Velocity can be put to immediate use and will have significant impact on your business.  The reason for this is simple:

Faster, scalable, and highly available websites serve more pages to more customers in the same amount of time.

That's why we've worked hard to make Velocity the best resource for engineers to learn how to build and operate at web scale.  Here are a few examples:

Adam Jacob will give a step-by-step overview of Building an Automated Infrastructure, and then Luke Kanies will follow up with an in-depth session on Puppet.  This is the exact combination I used to explain how effective operations is a huge competitive advantage:

Luiz Barroso will describe Google's approach to energy-efficient datacenter design and management.  Applying these lessons can ultimately save millions of dollars, increase your operational agility, and decrease your environmental footprint.

Mandi Walls will teach how actionable logging can mean the difference between a 20-minute outage and a 2-hour outage while esoteric error codes are deciphered or developers are contacted to investigate.

Eric Lawrence, Program Manager for Internet Explorer, and Mike Connor, lead developer for Mozilla Firefox will explain how to optimize page performance for their respective browsers.  We'll also have demos of leading performance testing tools: HTTPwatch, Fiddler, AOL PageTest, and Firebug.

John Allspaw from Flickr will be be giving a talk about Capacity Management.  John's way of explaining both the problem and the opportunity is wonderfully straightforward:

You can check out the rest of the program and register on the Velocity site.  (Hint: You can use the code "vel08js" for a 20% discount.)  I'll be posting frequently as we add speakers and events.  I hope to see you at Velocity!