This month
High Scalability - High Scalability - Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter
Node.js wasn’t selected because it is easier to scale the team with a JVM base. Node.js isn’t developed enough to have standards and best practices, a large volume of well tested code. With Scala you can use all the Java code. There’s not a lot of knowledge of how to use it in a scalable way and they target 5ms response times, 4 9s HA, 40K requests per second and some at 400K requests per second. There’s a lot in the Java ecosystem they can leverage.
"Soul Train" flash mob tribute to Don Cornelius - New York - YouTube
'Soul Train' fans pay tribute to Don Cornelius @ Times Square NYC.
timerange 1.07 : Python Package Index
timerange is a command line script to generate a range of date/times in various formats. It is used to produce list of date/times that can then be passed to other programs or used in shell/batch scripts where operations with date and times are required.
Buy Cilice
January 2012
iPhone 4S is worth buying to look fashionable but not for Siri feature -- Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 -- English Window to China New
One of the most touted features of the iPhone 4S is the web-based voice recognition assistant Siri. It's interesting and sometimes powerful, but not always in China. First, it doesn't support Mandarin and China-based map and location services, which makes it somewhat less appealing than Apple's US-based advertising would have you believe. The good news is that Apple has said it will launch a Chinese-language version of Siri this year. Second, it can't always recognize words spoken in English. I tried it 10 times, and it recognized my words only 5 times. A Canadian native speaker who also tried found it worked seven out of 10 times. Still, it will give you results sometimes if it manages to catch only keywords.
Siri, c'est la personne qui vous répondra toujours au téléphone.
Perfection kills » Profiling CSS for fun and profit. Optimization notes.
Fortunately, just few days before, Opera folks came out with an experimental “style profiler” (followed by WebKit’s ticket+patch shortly after). The profiler was meant to reveal the performance of CSS selector matching, document reflow, repaint, and even document and css parsing times.
In Focus - The Atlantic
December 2011
Pop-Up Magazine
John Lewis launches private accelerator DojoBoost | The Rude Baguette
How To Use WordPress Custom Post Type Query to Sort by Date | DesignHammer Website Design and Development in North Carolina
Moving The Web Forward « Paul Irish
DramaHi, Paul. Actually, I tweeted about "Move the Web Forward" on Blue Beanie Day the moment I saw it, and I linked to it from Facebook and Google+, but carry on with the character assassination. I tweeted about it without knowing who was behind it (doesn't matter), and without being *entirely* clear what it was about (you have some copy problems I would have been glad to help with). I was pleased to discover this blog post as I thought, "Ah, now I can reach out to the people behind that site and help them publicize it more" but then, a few paragraphs in, I saw your shitty little whiney character assassination of me (quoted above) and thought, oh, well. Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you create something nice and then shit on someone else? What kind of behavior is that? You did the same thing when you complained about A List Apart even though we've reached out to you for *three years* asking you for content and input. Calling something on the web crap is always a childish move, particularly when that thing is open and your feedback and content have been solicited for it many times. I gather you have some unexplained grudge against me. Or against the young dude in Ireland who created some web standards buttons for fun. If you think my help of his project is how I earn my living, you need to get out of the cubicle more. I'm usually polite to everyone, even very rude people, but you're being both whiney *and* a dick, which is a hard combo most people to pull off (fortunately most people don't try). Your project looks cool and could benefit from outside help, but I won't be helping because you are an asshole. You are, I think, the only asshole I've met in 20 years of doing web work. Fuck off.
November 2011
Oscillatory Thoughts: A neuroscientist walks into a startup...
DATA PORNOGRAPHERI'm working as their computational scientist (aka, "data pornographer") working on internal tools and analytics as well as writing a public-facing blog. Our goal is to use our historical data to more accurately estimate and reduce pick-up times.
HTML5 - 12 Cool HTML5 Geolocation Ideas
Public transportation sites can list nearby bus stops and metro locations.Late night out? Taxi or car service Web sites can find where you are, even if you don’t know.Shopping sites can immediately provide estimates for shipping costs.Travel agencies can provide better vacation tips for current location and season.Content sites can more accurately determine the language and dialect of search queries.Real estate sites can present average house prices in a particular area, a handy tool when you’re driving around to check out a neighborhood or visit open houses.Movie theater sites can promote films playing nearby.Online games can blend reality into the game play by giving users missions to accomplish in the real world.News sites can include customized local headlines and weather on their front page.Online stores can inform whether products are in stock at local retailers.Sports and entertainment ticket sales sites can promote upcoming games and shows nearby.Job postings can automatically include potential commute times.
Google Page Speed Online
October 2011
High Scalability - High Scalability - StackExchange Architecture Updates - Running Smoothly, Amazon 4x More Expensive
They estimate Amazon would cost them 4 times much.
Page Speed Online — Google Developers
Seth's Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint
September 2011
IM2GPS: estimating geographic information from a single image
Estimating geographic information from an image is an excellent, difficult high-level computer vision problem whose time has come. The emergence of vast amounts of geographically-calibrated image data is a great reason for computer vision to start looking globally — on the scale of the entire planet! In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm for estimating a distribution over geographic locations from a single image using a purely data-driven scene matching approach. For this task, we will leverage a dataset of over 6 million GPS-tagged images from the Internet. We represent the estimated image location as a probability distribution over the Earth's surface. We quantitatively evaluate our approach in several geolocation tasks and demonstrate encouraging performance (up to 30 times better than chance). We show that geolocation estimates can provide the basis for numerous other image understanding tasks such as population density estimation, land cover estimation or urban/rural classification.
Push Pop Press — About Us
HTTP Archive : tracks how the Web is built
August 2011
Android Apps: Death Worm Free
Writing CSS For Others
Devastated towns stuck in limbo | The Japan Times Online
His is one of only 50 boats out of 1,000 that survived intact — and only because he remembered the advice of old-timers and took it out to sea immediately after the tsunami warning sirens wailed. From the bay, he watched the waves hit his town.


