Category: Technology

There’s been a bunch of discussion in the tech world about cloud computing and the new marketing term “private cloud”. I find the term amusing since it’s somewhat of an oxymoron, but the term is taking hold, particularly among people who don’t really understand what cloud computing is.

The best explanation I’ve read came from Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels. His blog is interesting, if a bit too data center centric for my tastes. In his words:

Private Cloud is not the Cloud

I often get asked to define "The Cloud," especially because of the many permutations that different vendors use in trying to make their existing businesses look like a cloud offering. I define the cloud by it benefits, as those are very clear. What are called private clouds have little of these benefits and as such, I don’t think of them as true clouds.

The cloud:

• Eliminates Cost. The cloud changes capital expense to variable expense and lowers operating costs. The utility-based pricing model of the cloud combined with its on-demand access to resources eliminates the needs for capital investments in IT Infrastructure. And because resources can be released when no longer needed, effective utilization rises dramatically and our customers see a significant reduction in operational costs.
• Is Elastic. The ready access to vast cloud resources eliminates the need for complex procurement cycles, improving the time-to-market for its users. Many organizations have deployment cycles that are counted in weeks or months, while cloud resources such as Amazon EC2 only take minutes to deploy. The scalability of the cloud no longer forces designers and architects to think in resource-constrained ways and they can now pursue opportunities without having to worry how to grow their infrastructure if their product becomes successful.
• Removes Undifferentiated "Heavy Lifting."The cloud let its users focus on delivering differentiating business value instead of wasting valuable resources on the undifferentiated heavy lifting that makes up most of IT infrastructure. Over time Amazon has invested over $2B in developing technologies that could deliver security, reliability and performance at tremendous scale and at low cost. Our teams have created a culture of operational excellence that power some of the world’s largest distributed systems. All of this expertise is instantly available to customers through the AWS services.

I’m intrigued by businesses using Twitter to recruit new customers by following you. Not so much the obvious porn stuff, but the businesses that clearly follow you in response to a tweet you made.

It’s happened to me twice in the past few weeks. The most recent followed my tweet about Victoria’s birthday party:

Victoria’s birthday party complete. I’m exhausted. But Otsie Kerplotsie’s magician act was excellent

From this an online Magic store that tweets as @MagicTrickStore started following me. OK, that makes sense. They are keeping an eye on the word magician.

The other one followed my random comment about the France/Ireland soccer match. The tweet was fairly vague:

Another reason to hate the French, but go Slovenia

From that, a Soccer Store that tweets under @u90soccer started following me. What in the world were they searching tweets on, “Slovenia”? (they did have a big upset over Russia). That one surprised me.

I wonder if these techniques work at all. It’s an interesting use of Twitter as a targeted advertising platform.

I’m wondering how many people I know are using Pandora. I’ve been more into it lately. At my regular coffee shop, the music used to depend completely on who was working. They’d pop in their iPod with some playlist. So if I liked what they liked, all was good, otherwise I’d crank up my own iPod.

But the two people who work mornings these days use Pandora instead. It’s usually a station based loosely on Ella Fitzgerald so I like it. If you aren’t familiar with Pandora, in it’s simplest form you pick one artist, album or song that you like and Pandora builds a continuous music channel of similar songs.

I have a pretty full iPod, so I had always thought I didn’t really need this. But it’s nice to hear songs in the genre that you like that you don’t have.

I was in the mood for a Latin jazz groove, so I just put Cubanismo in for Pandora and got a great selection of stuff I had never heard before.

And with iPhone and Android apps, your phone can be a mobile personal radio station. Makes me think back to when I was a kid. Mobile music meant one of those boxy AM/FM pieces of crap with the headphone that only went to one ear. My how times have changed…

This isn’t new so apparently I’ve just been out of it. But if, like me, you missed this, plan to waste 10 minutes.

There’s some mild NSFW stuff. My favorite line would have to be:

you can’t arrange it by penis

I won’t even try to explain, just watch…

Since a new phone is going to be my Christmas present, you guys are stuck with me debating for the next month.

I’ve come down to four basic things that I really care about. There are plenty of “nice to haves” that won’t ultimately influence my decision:

• Camera: I rarely take pictures from my phone. Sure, if it was a better camera I’d take more pictures, but it’s not a big deal to me.
• Video: If I don’t care about the camera…
• Keyboard: The Droid could have gotten a leg up with a kick ass physical keyboard, but short of that, this isn’t a big deal to me.

So what do I really care about?

• Network: This really matters. My wife complains about AT&T all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to check a web page on my Verizon phone because her AT&T iPhone couldn’t get signal.
• Apps: Huge. Both my daughters play games on my wife’s phone. The number of cool apps that can’t run on my Pearl is ridiculous. This is a big part of why I want a new phone.
• Notifications: While my Blackberry is old, this is something it does well and I don’t want to lose it. I can just look at my phone and know if there are new tweets or Facebook postings.
• User Experience: Victoria is a walking iPhone commercial. At 2 1/2, she could completely use my wife’s phone, at least in terms of playing the games she likes. Software should be that easy.

So the Droid wins on network and notifications and the iPhone wins on apps and user experience. Still a tough call. Right now I’d say the iPhone is going to win on apps. Android just has a long way to go on apps. With an iPhone I could unlock my ZipCar…

I’m reading a very good discussion of Darwin and Evolution. This post is not about evolution per se, so stay with me.

The book was discussing some parts of the human (or really any mammal) body where the design is a bit goofy. Things where if you were an engineer building something, you’d never do it that way. One example was a nerve that runs from the brain to the larynx (voicebox). For no useful reason, this nerve runs down from the brain, past the larynx, around the heart and then back up to the larynx. This extraneous detour is taken to the extreme in the giraffe, where the nerve passes within centimeters of its final destination, only to go all the way down the neck and back up again for a total pointless detour of around 15 feet.

This actually makes sense to an biologist. In our ancient ancestors, fish,  this nerve followed a completely sensible path. But over the millennium, as gills disappeared and larynxes appeared among other changes, the nerve’s path got slowly extended. It would have made more sense to “start from scratch” but evolution doesn’t work that way. The slow incremental changes improved the overall organism, but extended the nerve’s path.

To provide an analogy the author said the following:

Imperfections are inevitable when ‘back to the drawing board’ is not an option – when improvements can be achieved only by making ad hoc modifications to what is already there. Imagine what a mess the jet engine would be if Sir Frank Whittle and Dr. Hans von Ohain, its two independent inventors, had been forced to abide by a rule that said: ‘You are not allowed to start with a clean sheet on your drawing board. You have to start with a propeller engine and change it, one piece at a time, screw by screw, rivet by rivet, from the “ancestral” propeller engine into a “descendant jet engine’. Even worse, all the intermediates have got to fly, and each one in the chain has got to be at least a slight improvement on its predecessor. You can see that the resulting jet engine would be burdened with all kinds of historical relics and anomalies and imperfections. And each imperfection would be attended by a cumbersome accretion of compensatory bodges and fixes and kludges, each one making the best of the unfortunate prohibition against going right back to the drawing board.

The author was trying to make the point that the numerous strangely designed things in various animals are clear evidence for evolution. But I couldn’t help read it and think one simple thought.

This is why old software sucks.

Change the jet engine to a piece of software and re-read the quote. That’s exactly what we have to do. We have to start with what we have and change it a piece at a time. And every release both “has to fly” and must be at least a slight improvement on the predecessor.

Think about any old software you have worked on. Was there something analogous to a nerve that goes fifteen feet down the giraffe’s neck when it only had to go an inch or two? Of course there was. And there were genuine historical reasons why it had to be that way. And the reasons slowly compound on top of themselves. Until you have a nerve travelling 15 feet to go two inches.

The jet engine was a huge step forward because they started from scratch. Good software needs to start from scratch sometimes too.