Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease

Peter — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:52:10 +0000

If you use gmail, apparently you can change myusername@gmail.com into myusername+spamsite@gmail.com or my.username@gmail.com and it will still go to your email. Didn’t know that.

Map blankets

Peter — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:38:01 +0000

(Anne Galloway) These are awesome: blankets with a map on them, I want one now too. Get to know your neighborhood while getting comfy. You can have them made in Brooklyn, they take about 200 hours to make, pretty expensive I would wager.

Peter — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:02:49 +0000

Cloudvox looks awesome. (via Simon)

Youtube 1 billion views a day

Peter — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:07:52 +0000

Youtube has a new logo.

Peter — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:53:43 +0000

Nathan explaining some Androidy stuff: “CyanogenMod exists because Android is an open-source mobile operating system – in fact, it is the only commercially viable open-source mobile operating system. When the words “open-source” and “commercially viable” exist in close proximity to each other, I usually start talking too fast and wave my arms excitedly.”

Peter — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:27:29 +0000

So this is exactly why Google shouldn’t be in the content business. They’re not even any good at the content business (they are good at algorythms and UI).

New layout for forum results in Google

Peter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:55:52 +0000

I noticed Google is using a new (?) layout for forum results. Google has since long identified certain sites as “forums” and given them a different layout in their search results, but this layout is new I believe.

Practically, this means that forums can get 5 links instead of the usual 1 or 2 in a search results page.

Peter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:36:15 +0000

More quoting of Dave Winer: “I read the article about this Sidebar Wiki thing and their product manager said it was just like blogging. I suppose if you have no soul it’s just like blogging.“

Agree on this one. Google’s Sidebar Wiki thing is a terrible, terrible idea, and will be overrun with SEO spammers just like their other content wiki initiatives were. It’s not just that Google sucks at content, it’s that content is the wrong place for them to be in the internet ecosystem. They point people to content. They shouldn’t manage content sites themselves. Youtube is an edgecase, this wikithing is way over the edge.

Quoteworthy: buying an iPhone is like buying a beautiful coat made of the skins of endagered species

Peter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:27:09 +0000

Back to the good old blogging and linking to other blogs. Dave Winer: “the fact that Apple holds up apps and rejects them often because they compete with their own software is to me like buying a coat made of the skins of endangered species. I won’t use iPhone apps for ecological reasons.”

Error messages in loosely coupled systems

Peter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:32:18 +0000

Loosely coupled systems scale more easily and are easier to maintain, but they can cause some unusual error messages when one of the parts of the system is down. I understood this message, but I imagine most users wouldn’t.

Monitoring in AWS Console

Peter — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:52:44 +0000

The new Amazon Cloudwatch monitoring ($0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance, so that’s about 10 US$/month per server) graphs in the (free) AWS console for ec2 instances are AWESOME:

(Yea, that’s a strange disk read spike there…) Now I just have to learn to interpret these and understand what’s going on there.

Time on site stays the same, regardless of slower pages

Peter — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 05:38:05 +0000

What happens to user behavior when we tweak the site to be slower in various degrees for them? It turns out that over a large gradient of site slowdowns, users in general spend around the same amount of time on Facebook, as measured by session time (user activity up until a certain period of idleness). Logically, page views suffer as a result.

Upload and download speeds with TATA Indicom in India.

Peter — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:02:52 +0000

Typical upload/download speeds at the farm with TATA.

Peter — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:29:39 +0000

Test

Peter — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:05:07 +0000

Installed blogging client on new laptop. Ready to go.Tesssssst.