Four short links: 22 October 2009

Cognitive Surplus, Scaling, Chinese Blogs, CS Education for Growth

1. Eight Billion Minutes Spent on Facebook Daily -- you weren't using that cognitive surplus, were you?
2. How We Made Github Fast -- high-level summary is that the new "fast, good, cheap--pick any two" is "fast, new, easy--pick any two". (via Simon Willison)
3. Isaac Mao, China, 40M Blogs and Counting -- Today, there are 40 million bloggers in China and around 200 million blogs, according to Mao. Some blogs survive only a few days before being shut down by authorities. More than 80% of people in China don’t know that the internet is censored in their country. When riots broke out in Xinjiang province this year, the authorities shut down internet access for the whole region. No one could get online.
4. Congress Endorses CS Education as Driver of Economic Growth -- compare to Economist's Optimism that tech firms will help kick-start economic recovery is overdone.

Four short links: 10 July 2009

Network File System, Internet Use, Lovelace Comic, Search User Interfaces

1. Ceph -- open source distributed filesystem from UCSC. Ceph is built from the ground up to seamlessly and gracefully scale from gigabytes to petabytes and beyond. Scalability is considered in terms of workload as well as total storage. Ceph is designed to handle workloads in which tens thousands of clients or more simultaneously access the same file, or write to the same directory-usage scenarios that bring typical enterprise storage systems to their knees. (via joshua on delicious)
2. Daily Internet Activities, 2000-2009 -- Pew Charitable Trust's Internet usage survey. We've finally broken 50% of Americans using the Internet daily. Twitter is almost a rounding error. (via dhowell on Twitter)
3. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage -- fantastic comic, with end-notes that explain how Babbage and Lovelace's lives and works are reflected in the action of the comic. (via suw on Twitter)
4. Search User Interfaces -- full text of this book about the different (successful and un-) interfaces to search. (via sebchan on Twitter)

Announcing: Spike Night at Velocity

Guest blogger Scott Ruthfield is a Program Committee member of the O'Reilly Velocity: Web Performance & Operations Conference. 

Four short links: 8 June 2009

3D Geometry, The Printable Web, Government Internet Fail, and Real World Cloud Computing

1. How to Project on 3D Geometry -- the fine art (and math) of distorting an image so that it looks undistorted when projected onto a non-flat 3D surface. Confused? See the images below. (via straup on Delicious)
2. ZinePal -- Create your own printable magazine from any online content. (via warrenellis on Delicious)
3. What The Government Doesn't Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It -- Tom Steinberg from MySociety lays it out. As true for US, NZ, and every other country as it is for the UK (for which it was written). Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.” What I like about Tom vs the US's Gov 2.0 is that Tom puts down philosophy that's hard to argue with, whereas the US is dangerously close to simply focusing on techniques and that's subvertible.
4. Real World Cloud Computing -- summary from a panel of startups who are using EC2. The lock-in is latency. Transfering data within the Amazon services is free. Transfering data to an Amazon competitor: not free.

Velocity 2009 - Big Ideas (early registration deadline)

My favorite interview question to ask candidates is: "What happens when you type www.(amazon|google|yahoo).com in your browser and press return?"

While the actual process of serving and rendering a page takes seconds to complete, describing it in real detail can take an hour. A good answer spans every part of the Internet from the client browser & operating system, DNS, through the network, to load balancers, servers, services, storage, down to the operating system & hardware, and all the way back again to the browser. It requires an understanding of TCP/IP, HTTP, & SSL deep enough to describe how connections are managed, how load-balancers work, and how certificates are exchanged and validated... and that's just the first request!

Web Performance & Operations is an emerging discipline which requires incredible breadth, focusing less on specific technologies and more on how the entire system works together. While people often specialize on particular components, great engineers always think of that component in relation to the whole. The best engineers are able to fly to the 50,000 foot view and see the entire system in motion and then zoom in to microscopic levels and examine the tiny movements of an individual part.

John Allspaw recently described this interconnectedness on his blog:

With websites, the introduction of change (for example, a bad database query) can affect (in a bad way) the entire system, not just the component(s) that saw the change. Adding handfuls of milliseconds to a query that’s made often, and you’re now holding page requests up longer. The same thing applies to optimizations as well. Break that [bad] query into two small fast ones, and watch how usage can change all over the system pretty quickly. Databases respond a bit faster, pages get built quicker, which means users click on more links, etc. This second-order effect of optimization is probably pretty familiar to those of us running sites of decent scale.

Working with these systems requires an understanding not only of the way technology interacts, but the way that people do as well. The structure, operation, and development of a website mirrors the organization that creates it, which is why so many people in WebOps focus on understanding and improving management culture & process.

Organizing a conference like Velocity is a wonderful challenge because it requires the same sort of thinking. We focus on the big concepts that everyone needs to know and then go deep into the technologies that change our understanding of the system. We find ways to share the unique experience that can only be gained by operating at scale. We make it safe to share as much of the "Secret Sauce" as we can.

Please join us at Velocity this year, we have an amazing lineup of speakers & participants. Early registration ends on Monday, May 11th at 11:59 PM Pacific. (Radar readers can use "vel09cmb" for an additional 15% discount.)