Socks and Sandals

Bye bye, blog

2008-10-21T20:45:00+00:00

This blog has been basically dead for a while now. I suck at blogging. Therefore, I’m declaring this blog open only for future essays I might write. Don’t expect any kind of timely updates from this space. If you want to keep up to date with me, follow me on Twitter. Thanks!

Chariot TechCast on Hadoop

2008-08-02T14:14:00+00:00

The podcast I did a little while ago just hit the Interwebs: check it out here and listen to us talk about Hadoop, MapReduce and related stuff. Thanks!

Cloud Cover: An Unauthorized Biography on EC2

2008-08-01T14:37:00+00:00

I gave that talk last night to the Philly Lambda group and about 15 people showed up! It seemed like people were into it and enjoyed the presentation and I hope people got a more rounded perspective on what its like to work with EC2 for real, day to day. The slides are listed on my talks page; enjoy!

Mac System Info Script

2008-07-28T23:44:00+00:00

Little script for getting system info on a Mac in one shot:

Single-Bit Errors Caused Massive S3 Failures

2008-07-26T04:49:00+00:00

This description of the recent Amazon S3 failures serves as a cautionary tale to all developers wishing to create “simple” services at scale: its the little things that kill you.

Google Treasure Hunt 2008 Answer

2008-05-18T18:04:00+00:00

In case anyone is interested, the answer to the Google Treasure Hunt 2008 robot path question is as follows:

For a board of size RxC, where R is the number of rows and C is the number of columns and P is the number of distinct paths the robot could take, we find that:

By the way, this particular question has little to do with networking or computer science and nothing at all to do with low-level UNIX trivia. Wonder if the subsequent questions will be more pertinent.

Powerset launches itself directly into the toilet

2008-05-13T01:25:00+00:00

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a “semi-stealth” startup spends 2.5 years, hires ~200 people and gives them all new MacBook Pros, takes untold millions in multiple rounds of VC funding, makes a bunch of noise about being the next generation of search and then launches with a search engine that basically re-indexes Wikipedia and not much else. ROFLOL, right?

Not if you’re Powerset its not. This is exactly what they’ve done.

As far as I can tell, their burn rate can’t be any less than ~$21MM/year. This is counting 200 people at an average $100K/year salary and 1,000 small EC2 instances for a year. I’m pretty sure they are using more EC2 instances and lots of their people are making more than $100K/yr in downtown San Francisco, but I’m being conservative here. This doesn’t seem that bad until you realize that their revenue is $0/forever thus far. Conservatively, they’ve probably burned $40MM already building the product as it currently stands. Geez, that’s a lot. Google got something useful up and running for $100K.

And where is that product? Discussing it on Twitter today, my boy Cliff Moon (a Powerset engineer), sent me a link to show how good the results were. Here is that link:

http://skitch.com/moonpolysoft/mjx5/who-shot-the-man-who-shot-jfk-powerset

That’s a pretty awesome result, I have to admit. Direct and to the point and right with the info you’d need to win that bar bet. However, I replied back with this link, pertinent to some work I’m doing currently (and something that Wikipedia definitely has an article on):

http://www.powerset.com/explore/pset?q=mondrian+database&x=0&y=0

Not so much.

Now, this little exchange proves nothing. The real thing that struck me was that every result I searched for was basically a re-ambiguated list of Wikipedia results. Powerset claims to be using Wikipedia and Freebase as its base data for now so that makes some sense. However, I took a look at Freebase and it appears that most of Freebase is Wikipedia data, too! Thus, one could (semi)facetiously claim that the powerset of Powerset is {Wikipedia}. This is not great for them. I don’t really switch search engines for this little incentive. Why would I want to use Powerset when Wikipedia already has its own search engine? If that fails I can always hit Google and pare down the results to wikipedia.org, which I’m sure is what a lot of power-Wikipedia users already do.

The larger question is whether or not people would switch to Powerset. If it were an order of magnitude better, yeah, I think they would. However, the Powerset I’m seeing is nowhere near as robust or helpful as Google is today and those guys aren’t exactly standing still over there in Mountain View.

As well, I would question whether or not the question-based interface is as useful for everyday searching as the keyword-based interface of the current crop of search engines. Perhaps I’m just ingrained to that method by now, but the question-based interface seems clunkier and is definitely slower and less flexible than the keyword-based interface. There’s just more ways to query an engine based on a set of keywords than there is if you have to formulate a question to do the same job. I can see how a question-based interface would be superior in certain cases, but in general? Doesn’t seem so to me.

On the advertiser side, the question-based interface brings problems there, too. Today’s search engines allow engines to buy keywords in conjunction with the ads they want to display when said keywords are queried. How is Powerset to build a CPC engine on top of a question-based engine? Are advertisers expected to have to guess at the questions Powerset’s searchers are likely to query? That seems to me to be an order of magnitude more difficult than today’s keyword-guessing-game, which is already hard enough for the advertisers as it is.

Most of the “questions” I ask to search engines don’t have one paragraph answers. When I’m researching, I want to quickly skim a bunch of sites that relate to my general query topic and then get down deeper and deeper as I learn more. Only once I’ve done that might I have some “questions” that I could properly formulate for consumption by Powerset. Am I to assume that Powerset would have me use Google or MSN for the first 80% or more of my researching? I hope that’s not their goal or their VCs are taking an acid bath right now.

I can’t remember being this underwhelmed from such an overhyped product before. Powerset really let me down. If this is the next generation of search, I’m sticking with the current generation, thank you very much. As the eminent Internet sage Ted Dziuba would say: FAIL. Google’s probably throwing a victory party in the volleyball courts right now. I really hope that Powerset gets its act together and makes me look like an idiot for posting this, but after today, its looking to me like that will be a very tough proposition, indeed.

37signals and Divergent Reality

2008-04-18T22:17:00+00:00

I was just reading about In/Out, 37signals’ internal Twitter clone over on their blog and it struck me how they sometimes mutilate context in their writings. First of all, DHH knows the Twitter guys well. Second of all, they didn’t even mention that it was inspired by Twitter and even went so far as to refute this in the comments. I guess a place that’s know for its “creativity” has to keep up the appearances of being innovative…

UPDATE: Apparently, as the comments state, I am wrong about this. My bad. Nevermind this post.

Books and books

2008-04-13T16:51:00+00:00

I just cleaned up the back room last night. Looks like its time for bookshelf #3 ;-)

Is AppEngine Python's Rails?

2008-04-11T02:22:00+00:00

I was thinking about AppEngine some more today and it occurred to me that not only could AppEngine be responsible for a lot of people learning/using Python, but it very well might be Python’s answer to Rails. Its so-called “killer app”, if you will.

Up until this point, Python has been plagued with multiple, competing Web frameworks all taking some mindshare and there really hasn’t been a strong rallying point in the Python Web community like Rails. It appears that Django has been winning out in the blogosphere lately, but its nothing like Rails’ devout following in Ruby-land.

However, with AppEngine, Google does Rails one better: instead of just making it easy to code your app, they make it just as easy as Rails to code and dirt simple to deploy and reduce the operation maintenance to near zero. The need for things like ActiveRecord and migrations is pretty reduced in the AppEngine environment, as is all but a tiny knowledge of SQL (called GQL in that realm). That’s really, really attractive if you’re a Web consultancy shop that’s looking to turn over clients as fast as possible or a side project with a mandate for speed, quality and low cost. To me, that seems like it would be worth learning a little Python for.

AppEngine is pretty clearly aimed at Facebook’s F8 platform but it could end up hitting Python with a major boost in popularity as an aside. I bet Guido is smiling all the way to the bank on this one…