Alan Kay quote

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Just added another quote to the wall in my office:

“Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.”

– Alan Kay, Apple/Disney/HP

 

So now my wall reads:

“How could we build it to scale to hundreds of millions of users at an unimaginably low cost that would change the game?”

– Ray Ozzie, October 2005 in memo to Microsoft executive staff regarding their new software-as-a-service direction.

 

“If two approaches produce the same result, select the one with the fewest assumptions.”

– Occam’s Razor

 

“A service is said to be scalable if when we increase the resources in a system, it results in increased performance in a manner proportional to resources added. An always-on service is said to be scalable if adding resources to facilitate redundancy does not result in a loss of performance.”

– Werner Vogels, CTO – Amazon.com

 

“New hires tend to want to do complex things, but we know complex things break in complex ways. The veterans want simple designs, with simple interfaces and simple constructs that are easy to understand and debug and easy to put back together after they break.

The best advice is just basically to keep everything as simple as possible—simple processes, simple SKUs, simple engineering. These systems get to be very big very fast. I don’t think there’s really any one particularly hard, gnarly problem, but when you add them all up, there are lots and lots of little problems. As long as you can keep each of those pieces simple, that seems to be the key. It’s more of a philosophy, I think, than anything else.”

– Phil Smoot, Product Manager for Hotmail

 

See any pattern?

This blog is mine

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The 57 posts I that have written on my blog to date (now 58), have for the most part been composed just minutes after I got some random idea in my head that I wanted to share.  As such, the posts have been as random as the times that I write them.  For the most part, the content has been technical or Webmail.us related, with a few non-technical posts about getting married, tailgating or whatever else.  Here is a monthly breakdown:

                      N D J F M A M J J A S  TOTAL
technical/Webmail.us: 4 7 7 4 3 2 3 2 5 5 2   44
non-technical/random: 2 2 0 1 1 1 2 1 0 1 2   13

On Monday I asked my readers, What should I post about next?  My goal was to find out if you want to have any influence over the content that I write or if I should continue to do as I have since November 2005 and post whatever is in my head at the moment I get the urge to write.  Only one person responded.  My friend Ryan Reed asked “How does Google Earth do all that new crazy 3D stuff?”.

I’ll conclude from this brief sociology experiment you deeply enjoy what I write and don’t want to mess with a good thing :).  However feel free to comment from time to time and tell me if a post sucked/rocked.

Reed:
Google purchases 3D building datasets for major US cities from a company called Sanborn.  Google also acquired @Last Software who had been independently creating 3D data for Google Earth.  And the satellite images and original Google Earth technology was developed by a company called Keyhole, which Google acquired in 2004. Google takes all of this data, aggregates it, analyzes it and serves it, using their massively distributed storage system called BigTable.  BigTable is built on top of Google File System.  GoogleFS enables them to store seemingly limitless amounts of data and BigTable enables them to make use of that data in any way that their software engineers think might be interesting.  Somebody over there in Mountain View thought it would be cool to create a 3D interface into our planet, and behold Google Earth.

Enterprise version of Netvibes, please

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+1 for an enterprise version of Netvibes.

We need an intranet-style start page to tie all of our internal business data together.

Quoting Nik Cubrilovic:

> The most ideal solution we could think of was having something like
> Netvibes, but an enterprise edition that allowed you to setup groups,
> views, permissions, secure connections, auth integration etc. etc

Unfortunately even if Netvibes does build it, I have a suspicion that most businesses will be using a custom start page powered by Google in a few years.  Google is attempting to address this much needed space with their yet to be announced Personalized Start Page for your Domain.  Nik says it doesn’t have what his company needs, but I bet by this time next year it will.  Google’s best products are ones that their own employees use every day, and their employees have been using this sort of intranet-style start page for years.  It is nicknamed MOMA.

I want my MOMA!

Lane Stadium Etiquette

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College football officially starts tomorrow with Virginia Tech taking on powerhouse Northeastern, lol.

While in the stadium tomorrow remember that fans alone control the outcome the game.  The players and coaches contribute to the game and have some impact, but it is our cheering that determines whether we win or lose.

Here are the keys to winning our 8 home games this season:

1. Stand. Don’t sit.

You are excluded from this rule if you are elderly (but you better be really really old, not in your 50s), in a wheelchair, or passed out. You may also sit down for short periods to mix another drink. If a person directly behind you has one of these legitimate reasons for sitting, you must show respect and give them a tiny area from which to view the game. However, if the guy behind you does not have a legitimate reason for sitting and yells "down in front", it is your responsibility to simply ignore his request.

2. Yell loud while on defense.

Volume is key. The more important the play, the louder you must yell. You may tone it down a bit on 1st downs in order to catch your breath, but 2nd downs and especially 3rd and 4th downs give it your all. Also start early. Do not let the other team talk freely in their huddle. Make sure they hear you, not the quarterback next to them.

3. Do not yell while on offense.

For the same reasons we yell while on defense, we DO NOT yell while on offense. Our team needs to communicate effectively with one another. Do not holler stupid cheers while on offense, and if others around you do, tell them to shut the hell up.

4. Bring enough to last 4 quarters.

I prefer Crown Royal, you may prefer Beam, but whatever your drink, you must bring enough to last through 4 quarters of football. If you do not, your fan performance will suffer, potentially costing us a win.

5. Do not become complacent.

When the team is not playing well, the crowd may forget that they are solely responsible for the outcome of the game. It is your job to remind the people around you of this fact and encourage them to keep their heads in the game. Similarly, when the team has a huge lead, do not let your guard down (remember Temple 1998). Continue to yell while on defense until the final seconds of the game. If you follow rule #4 this will be easy.

6. Yell "Block – That – Kick" whenever the other team is attempting a punt or a field goal.

This one is self explanatory.

7. If you want, shake your keys on 3rd down (but not required).

These are called "Key Plays". It is recommended that you do this while on offense and while on defense. But more importantly, don’t forget your yelling while shaking your keys while on defense.

8. Enjoy the band.

They are out there playing hard every game and deserve as much credit for a big win as you or I.

9. Respect the opponent.

Unlike TailgateFever.com’s similar article on cheering, I do not agree with booing the opponent. Show some class. Do not boo them or talk shit to them – not even to those arrogant FSU fans. Instead buy them a beer when you see them downtown after the game, tell them their team played well and that we’ll see them in their town next year.

Now go out there and get us a win!

Firefox 2.0 beta 2

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...was released about an hour ago.  Beta 1 was nice because it added inline spell check and things generally felt a little faster.  However it crashed frequently.  Hopefully beta 2 won't crash so often.  They updated the skin between beta 1 and beta 2 as well:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/releases/2.0b2.html

Running it now as I compose this post and it already caught a typo.

This feature is hot:

Client-side session and persistent storage:  New support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.