urwhatu

63% of Doctors Believe in Evolution

In other, more disturbing news, 37% of doctors believe intelligent design is a legitimate scientific inquiry. I wonder how many believe the flying spaghetti monster is legitimate scientific inquiry?

Google Gives Up on "MHz"

Wow -- it looks like Google's finally decided that marketing the size of the index is no longer a good use of the 32 words on their homepage:

I wonder why there isn't an obvious SPECmark out there for web relevancy? God knows enough effort is spent on generating internal proprietary benchmarks.

So Wrong I Have No Words

Not for the faint of heart and not safe for work. Via jwz, a site where US soldiers trade pictures of Iraqi gore for porn. How did it ever come to this?

Firefox Beta 1

The good:

• it works mostly as advertised cf. compatibility with existing websites
• the ability to move tabs around is minor, but has been a peeve for a while so that's nice

The bad:

• it disabled FlashGot, the Google Toolbar for Firefox, Scribe, Furl Tools, and the Netcraft Toolbar, literally 80% of my extensions
• SVG coverage is sparse. Try, e.g., these samples
• Update: the beta inserts 2 garbage characters to any files that I upload to TypePad
• Update: it's damn slow on lots of web pages

Technorati Tags: Firefox

Carpool to Kurzweil?

I'm heading down to Palo Alto tomorrow evening for "An Evening with Ray Kurzweil" talk. If you're also heading down from San Francisco, get in touch so that we can do the planet a favor and carpool.

Technorati Tags: Ray Kurzweil

SDForum Panel Pictures

Ho John Lee posted some pictures from the design panel that I moderated on Wednesday at the SDForum's Web Based Architectures event.

The panelists offered good insights and were funny -- e.g., if you look closely at the pic, you'll see that Kevin Burton, the guy sitting to my right has a Mac laptop with him. His heedworthy advice/observation on how startups succeed: lack of resources makes you focus on the essential. His observation on coding for Internet Explorer: it totally sucks and if there's anyone from Microsoft in the audience, you ought to leave the room and start fixing it now. A man who practices what he preaches, Kevin was writing software right up to moment that he started getting questions -- now THAT'S focus. One other good bit of advice from him, that I've heard before, "know what the problem is before you try to solve it".

Alok Bhanot (the "Bh" sounds kind of like a "P") probably got the toughest and most direct questions from the audience because of his position at Ebay. His advice for web architecture: cast the net wide (i.e., don't target any specific platform) and make sure it scales. Truly someone who's been in the public eye, he successfully dodged gave very diplomatic answers to a couple of questions like "What's the most egregious waste of design time you've seen in recent history?" and "If Ebay is taking the role of urban planner (cf. the software as a service model and Ebay's growing community of developers), are you working more towards a planned city like Philadelphia or towards a more bazaar-esque Los Angeles?".

Colin Johnson, CEO of EyeTools, covered the design in the visual sense. If you haven't seen the work they do with heatmaps and individual eyeflows, you need to visit the Eyetools blog immediately.

Any one of the keynotes was worth the drive out to PARC, even when under time pressure at work.

Technorati Tags: Software Architecture

A Zen Approach to Software Robustness

Forwarded internally. Armando Fox and George Candea at Stanford's SWIG propose that the best way to build robust software is to make it crash-only. Looks like the idea's been around for a while, but it's new to me and I find it fascinating...

Technorati Tags: Software Architecture

What Do You Do with Your Logfiles?

Dear Lazyweb,

We've built this Splunk thing, which is essentially a clustered search engine for temporal data, usually logfiles (*). Lots and lots and lots of logfiles. Thing is, everyone manages their technical infrastructure a bit differently and it's hard to figure out what's OK and what's not in terms of how to get at the log contents. Can you clue us in as to how you manage yours at a very high level? E.g.,

• Do you roll your important logfiles to a single location? If so, how are you transporting the logfiles?
• Do you do it in batches or real-time?
• Do you just leave your logfiles on the boxes they were created on?
• How often do you roll them?
• Are there some you care about more than others?
• How many machines do you roll logfiles on?

Thanks...

* - Or other time stamped data...

Update: if you're realizing that your logfile management is more accident than design, some good resources are:

• SAGE has an excellent booklet titled Building a Logging Infrastructure by Abe Singer and Tina Bird that is only available to members.
• Tina Bird's Top Ten syslog Signs that You've Been Hacked
• The Frequently Discussed Topics page at loganalysis.org

Technorati Tags: Splunk

Last Day to Go to Pluto

If you haven't signed up to have your name sent to Pluto yet, you better hurry up and head over to the New Horizons website. Today is the last day.

Technorati Tags: NASA

Writing Software Next to SBC Park

A fun thing about working across the street from SBC Park: sometimes, when you're staying late banging out some code that's tricky but rewarding, if you time it just right, about 30,000 people will cheer just as your code makes it through the full set of test cases :-).

Technorati Tags: Splunk