This is simply a fantastic quote (and in my mind incredibly on-target):

“This mantra of ‘openness’ is everywhere nowadays. Facebook gets $15 billion valuation after it ‘opens up’ its platform to outside developers. Never mind the fact that Facebook is a one-way data roach motel where users’ metadata remains behind the company’s walled garden.”

Ouch.

http://counternotions.com/2007/10/25/motorola-on-iphone/

Tags: facebook, iphone

Popularity: 8% [?]

I want one of these:

“Think of it as a 45-foot-long bb gun. Only in this case, the BBs are fired at 20,500 mph at spaceships. Sort of. All the gunplay takes place inside a physics lab at the University of Dayton Research Institute. The goal: to test the mettle of the composite fabric or aluminum skins on orbit-bound spacecraft. The materials are designed to protect the vehicles from the tens of millions of undetectably small — but potentially lethal — bits of space junk that constantly zoom around Earth at a hull-piercing 17,900 mph.”

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/15-10/st_bbgun

Tags: bbgun, science, spacecraft

Popularity: 29% [?]

Wow. This is incredibly exciting news -

“Scientists Use Superconducting Cyclotron to Make Super-Heavy Metals”

This opens up the possibility of countless new isotopes that could be used in till-now unthinkable ways. Though it may sound as though I’m counting chickens that haven’t been conceived, let alone hatched, consider what this implies:

With the proper of amount of force [and acceleration, collision, etc.] we may be able to produce elements that previously only occurred naturally. Could mass-production of these elements be possible?

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/10/heavymetalisotopes

Tags: heavymetals, superconductor, science

Popularity: 1% [?]

Though ticket sales resumed Tuesday, it certainly appears that problems remained. Local media was not kind.

A Rockies spokesman on Monday had claimed that the site had been “…the victim of a deliberate attack”. When asked to provide details on this statement Tuesday, that same spokesman declined comment. It was noted that [thus far] no criminal complaint(s) had been filed on behalf of either MLB or the Rockies in relation to the site outage.

While the site seemingly collapsed under the volume of incoming ticket requests, the first explanation offered by the team was that of an attack. My suspicion that the failure was architectural in nature was bolstered when I heard the comments of a customer who was being interviewed by local news media (I’m paraphrasing as I did not transcribe his exact comments):

“[my first attempt failed], so then I created another account and immediately logged in and was able to purchase tickets.”

I think this indicates some issues around session management – the sessions that failed were “stuck” failed (lost in the fulfillment queue or something like that, perhaps because it overran itself). Brand new accounts would require a new login, and thus a new session token… and would work.

Serendipitous good fortune for one guy, but very telling in what probably really occurred.

Tags: worldseries, rockies, tickets

Popularity: 1% [?]

I’m driving this afternoon near the Tech Center in Denver when I hear on the radio that “…online World Series ticket sales have been halted this afternoon after the server blew up. There were approx. 8 million hits to the site & the server couldn’t handle it.”

Nice. Fucking idiots. MLB can afford to do it right, but the contract for this probably went to some executive’s nephew, who “… makes websites”. Morons. MLB went on record earlier this week as stating that “… [it is] not the first time we’ve sold tickets over the Internet.” Riiiiiggggghhht.

Apparently, at least 200 tickets (or aggregated sales, not sure) were made before the server went belly-up. I’m wondering how those orders will be fulfilled if the record of the transaction wasn’t properly recorded… no idea if it was, but since they didn’t plan for handling this amount of traffic, one must wonder about the *entire* transaction process.

Update: MLB’s ticket vendor, Paciolan, is stating that they “…experienced a system-wide outage”. Four hours (or more) after the initial failure, they are still offline.

Translation: the traffic caused a cascading failure that no one coded for, and as a result, they have no idea how to fix it because the issue is architectural in nature, not a simple matter of capacity.

Read here for more details: http://www.9news.com/news/top-article.aspx?storyid=79510

Tags: worldseries tickets, rockies, “major league baseball, mlb, “ticket sales

Popularity: 1% [?]

I was having breakfast at Buck’s Friday with a buddy from Trinity, and near 8am I looked over to see Jerry Yang at the cash register.   If if wasn’t Jerry, it was his twin brother.

At the risk of sounding really snarky, it looked like he hadn’t (yet) combed his hair.  Funny.   For the record, the breakfast burrito was huge & delicious.

Tags: yahoo, jerry yang, bucks

Popularity: 1% [?]

I hate to gloat point it out, but the behavior change I noticed in my own usage & that of my facebook friends may be a trend. But hey, what do I know?

I had an eerily timed comment-based exchange with Dave McClure on this very topic over the past couple days (via Kara Swisher’s column here – I had no knowledge of the Comscore scores, and in fact haven’t actually seen them yet).

Weird, huh?

EDIT: I’ve now seen the Comscore numbers. PageviewsUniques are down 9+% and uniquesPageviews are down 3+% in the US, so this is something to watch closely. I think two dynamics are converging: dumbass apps have wearied users (please don’t throw anything, sheep or otherwise, at me, thank you) and corp IT folks are looking at traffic and saying “Holy Shit. That bandwidth suck is costing us $$$. Block it.”

Kara comes back with a followup post here in which Scoble (Robert Scoble – scobleizer) agrees. This would funny stuf if so much money wasn’t at stake. Facebook absolutely muts get a real business app out there quickly – and it must solve a problem that actually exists, and isn’t already handled better by another app (or two doezen) that are available in the enterprise.

technorati tags:facebook, traffic, kara, swisher

Popularity: 1% [?]

I read the below article in Wired a few days ago and was so struck by it that I had to write about it here.  A friend and I had talked about this very topic the previous Sunday while hiking south of Denver, so this was already on my mind.

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-10/ff_plant_formula

The article stresses that the process itself involved in the production of ethanol is fairly straight-forward:

1. Thermochemical treatment  The raw plant feedstock is treated with chemicals — often diluted sulfuric acid — to break down cell walls and make the cellulose accessible.
2. Enzymes    A mix of cellulase enzymes is then added to convert the cellulose and hemicellulose molecules into the simple sugars glucose and xylose.
3. Fermentation    Yeast or bacteria are added, converting the sugar into a mixture of ethanol and water, what refineries call "the beer."
4. Distillation    The ethanol is refined and purified, producing a fuel that could one day end up in your gas tank.

This echoed what I already knew (at least marginally understood anyway), but I was surprised to hear that the biggest barrier to large-scale production of ethanol is the molecular structure of cellulose, and the difficulties involved in breaking down that structure.   I was under the impression that this particular problem had been solved & was scalable. There are approaches, to be sure, of breaking down cellulose to produce cellulases, but apparently none so far has proven cost-effective (translation: it isn’t profitable).

I was even more surprised – pleasantly so – at the amount of research currently being funded on this & other renewable energy sources.  I had argued with my friend that substantial research wasn’t being conducted into renewable energy sources now, mostly because the political climate didn’t favor it.  I was wrong, and that’s great.  I do feel somewhat vindicated, though, to see the Wired article point out one of my primary assertions:  that when Reagan declared the energy crisis over in the 80s, federal funding of energy research vanished nearly overnight.  And it has taken twenty years to correct that mistake.

Tags: ethanol, energy, cellulose, cellulases

Popularity: 1% [?]