Links for 04-25-2011

• Hard economic lessons for news « BuzzMachine - Agree with a lot here.
• How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse « SmugMug's Don MacAskill
• Ranked: Stanley Kubrick's Films from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - Agree with this about 60%.
• The King's Speech: good movie, very bad history. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine
• What The Scandal Of "Three Cups of Tea" Author Greg Mortenson Is Really About | Fast Company - "And upon visiting 30 of the 141 schools that CAI claims to have built, they found half of them were empty, being used for storage, or hadn't received any outside support for years. But while that's deplorable, it's not simply a function of CAI focusing on Mortenson's publicity instead of development. This happens to many development projects around the world, no matter who is building them."
• A Whole Foods Fight in Boston - Reason Magazine
• Working Best at Coffee Shops - Conor Friedersdorf - Business - The Atlantic
• Open Source Report: Should Oracle be blamed for OpenOffice.org pullout? - "Depending on how Oracle actually handles the community transition, the irony is that Oracle could have been lauded a year ago for handing OpenOffice.org over in full to the community. Now it's just an admission of failure, since real energy for open office suite development has moved over to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. Of course Oracle will now receive a big raspberry over its announcement. It's too little, too late and it didn't have to be that way."

Links for 04-15-2011

• Why customer needs don’t always matter — On Product Management - "Product Management is not about satisfying customer needs and wants. Product Management is about ensuring business goals are met and business success delivered."
• CentOS 5.6 Finally Arrives: Is It Suitable for Business Use? | Linux Magazine - "The other half of “enterprise-class” is that updates arrive in a timely fashion, which is notably false for the 5.x series. If I understand correctly, there have been a handful of updates prior to the release of CentOS 5.6 for the 5.x series — but nothing else. So, if you consider timely updates a requirement for “enterprise-class,” we can count CentOS out now."
• Build Your Own NASA Apollo Landing Computer (no kidding) - Space & Sci-Fi Blog - Galaxiki, the Sci-Fi Galaxy that anyone can edit
• Coté's People Over Process » VMWare Cloud Foundry – Quick Analysis and Press Pass - "The most critical thing for VMWare to do is to let this “open is best” philosophy play out in their application development strategy. VMWare’s current fortunes were built on distinctly not that philosophy and it’d be easy for the kernel geniuses who must hold much of the corporate power to derail the appdev strategy, which is a much different beast than virtualization and other business models closer to the metal than the glass."

Links for 04-12-2011

• Data Center Dialog: Right place, right time, right cloud partners - "One of the things that has been frustrating about the cloud market to date is the ad hoc, shoot-from-the-hip approach. It’s great for testing the waters and there is, indeed, an important role for “good enough” computing, but as enterprises get more serious about cloud, they need to make sure they are thinking about something near and dear to my heart: management."
• The Joy of Not Cooking - Magazine - The Atlantic - "So we have something of a mystery. Just when our labor in the kitchen has fallen, we have seen the rise of the gourmet kitchen: the high-end retailers like Williams-Sonoma … the Sub-Zero refrigerators … the $10,000 Viking stoves … the $250 Breville toaster ovens … the Japanese knives with their own display stands. Why are we spending so much money on a place where we spend so little time?"
• Groundhogs! - "Having groundhog trouble is like living in the Bill Murray movie of the same name. You go to bed and wake up to the same exact thing every morning—in this case, a giant furry butt on legs eating your landscape to the ground. But this picture is NOT a comedy. Although weather-guessing Punxsutawney Phil has made this giant squirrel—yes, that’s what they are—seem cute and cuddly, they are actually a serious menace that people often underestimate until it’s too late."
• ProductCamp Boston’s Presentations on SlideShare - ProductCamp Boston 2011.
• Game Over In The CPU Wars? - Chuck's Blog - "For me, it's the final sign that -- yes -- the era of Big Unix on proprietary RISC processors is finally coming to a close."

Links for 04-06-2011

• Amy Ziari - The Newsroom - PR Case Study: Where Color Went Wrong - "MISTAKE #3: Using hyperbolic, if not misleading, messaging. Everyone wants to say his or her product is the best thing ever. Sometimes it is, but more often than not, it isn't. In working with entrepreneurs, a huge role of the PR team needs to be striking a balance between staying true to the broader vision a founder wants to get across while not making journalists pull out the barf bag. Color's press release has astoundingly bold messaging that also positions the app as something that currently lives up to the larger vision, when all you have to do is download it to see otherwise."
• Rational Survivability - THE Cloud & Virtualization Security Blog - I actually agree with this for the most part. While it's important to maintain portability across environments--and at some future point may want to dynamically arbitrage resource pricing--the use case where you dynamically shift resources associated with a single application from private to public seems a stretch.
• Feature: The Database Revolution - With an IBM slant, but still worth reading.
• postpcmag.com
• Locked in again? Customers must face their responsibility and take action « NinaLytton.com - "Open systems are your insurance policy. Open systems promote competition. Competition among your suppliers gives you business choices. Choices give you fair prices and reasonable business policies. Choices prevent anti-competitive vendor behavior like Oracle’s."
• Bacon Butty - Saveur.com - Yum. Bacon.
• MapIncrease | Apache Hadoop for the Enterprise | Cloudera

MIT Burton House 60th Reunion

I do a brief appearance on a panel.

Links for 03-30-2011

• New Cloud Reference Architecture From NIST | Andi Mann – Übergeek
• The Existential Dread of '3eanuts': Peanuts Minus the 4th Panel - ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews
• COLOR.XXX PITCH DECK!! - This faux pitch deck for color is pretty funny.
• ‘RomneyCare’ Facts and Falsehoods | FactCheck.org - Looks like a pretty good look at where Mass Healthcare stands.
• The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium • The Register - "To me, this is the reality of what Ellison meant when he said that Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s. Oracle wants to have the incredible margins that IBM enjoyed back then. It wants to have that lock-in that IBM had in the days when there were few alternatives and even fewer standards that would allow customers to easily move from vendor to vendor."
• Microsoft points to Target for private cloud but gets it embarassingly wrong - The Troposphere - "But that would be HARD, you see. Any of those options, which would qualify as legit exercises in cloud computing, would require a hell of a lot more work than simply trimming infrastructure. They redecorate the bathrooms every once in a while too, and they aren’t touting “next-gen on-demand potty usability”, are they?"
• HP Supports Customers Despite Oracle’s Anti-customer Actions - Battle by press release. 

Links for 03-23-2011

• Why I Left Rackspace and What About Openstack « Deprecation - "One thing that I think has been wrong from the start of Openstack is the definition of community.  Community is not a list of partners.  In fact, the participation of most of the companies listed on the openstack community webpage started and ended with a press release."
• GSA: Cloud Computing Is Safer Than You Think -- Government Clouds -- InformationWeek - "The Office of Management and Budget has taken "an aggressive stance on the cloud," she wrote. "We're all on the hook to move three systems to the cloud by 2012. I'm here to tell you that it can be done intelligently and securely.""
• Impossible world: Articles: M.C. Escher: More Mathematics Than Meets the Eye
• RIP Digg. - "Startups in Silicon Valley are like old generals. They don’t die anymore, buoyed on life-rafts of lingering venture capital and modest revenues. They just fade away, eventually purchased for assets that are a shadow of their former promise. It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path. The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin it however it wants– the final nail in the coffin is news that founder Kevin Rose– long Digg’s greatest asset– is leaving."
• New Rules for the New Internet Bubble « Steve Blank - "We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can startup do to take advantage of them?"

Links for 03-18-2011

• Consumerization of IT: 95% of Information Workers Use Self-Purchased Technology for Work - Interesting data from IDC.
• Delivering Competitive Advantage through IT - Some potentially useful numbers from Intel here.
• NPR Sting: Edited Video Makes Schiller, O'Keefe Look Bad - TIME - "The full video hardly clears Schiller. His opining about liberals' education and conservatives' anti-intellectualism, for instance, still comes off as smug and would have hurt NPR regardless. (The network was still feeling backlash from firing Juan Williams last fall after he said on Fox that some Muslims on planes made him nervous.) But the full picture shows O'Keefe's partisan hit job — trying to link NPR to liberal elitism and scary Muslims — was manipulative too. And it shows how sadly easy it is to take advantage of the attention span and metabolism of media today."
• True or False? An example of Internet illiteracy – Laziness or just plain stupidity? | Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange
• Steve Jobs in a Box - Has Apple peaked? (from 2007).
• SCM Marchant Cogito 240SR Calculator - The first "computer" that I used.
• WeatherSpark | Interactive Weather Charts - Nice visualization of weather history for a locale.
• The Rolodex Logo Shock | Logo Designer - Wow. I assume that this was an attempt to get away from the company's brand image of being the guys who made the round thing for holding addresses. But the new logo looks like something thrown together in 10 minutes using clip art.
• The Mad Genius of “Modernist Cuisine” : The New Yorker
• Marco.org - Moving on from iPad "office productivity" apps - Sounds about right. A lot of things that you CAN do on an iPad, you don't necessarily want to except in the most limited ways.
• A Chef’s Fine Art, Now Available in Homes Near You - NYTimes.com - Sous vide from the NY Times.
• Huge incoherent failures: A doomed mansion, "The Great Gatsby" and Fitzgerald's America - "As for America, "its greatest promise is that something is going to happen," Fitzgerald wrote in a letter. That essential restlessness, that search for the new, can yield beauty just as readily as a condo subdivision. Often, in our history, it has yielded both."
• Cutting Through the Bother of City Parking - NYTimes.com - Good overview of parking apps for Smartphones.

Links for 03-09-2011

• Introducing Zite, the iPad's Smartest Magazine Yet - "“What’s broken is there’s so much stuff out there, and I don’t know how to get to it,” says Ali Devar, Zite’s founder and CEO. “There’s no automatic system that’s catching the important stuff I miss every day. Search doesn’t solve it. Social doesn’t solve it. A lot of [Zite beta testers] came back to us and said, ‘Thank goodness, here’s something that gives me my content and more, but filters it for me.’ People are feeling the pain, and they need it resolved.”"
• Gambling on the future... | In-Depth Analysis | Marketing Week - "Three-quarters of marketing chiefs plan to restructure their departments this year to keep pace with the demands of digital media, according to research exclusive to Marketing Week. To help marketers keep ahead of the wave of change, there are four key areas of reorganisation."
• InfoQ: IBM’s Reference Architecture for Creating Cloud Environments
• High Scalability - High Scalability - Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing? - Interesting stuff if a bit all over the place. It also seems to lack a discussion of memory used within existing storage paradigms.
• IBM100 - Good Design is Good Business - "IBM’s focus on design has its roots in a stroll down Fifth Avenue in New York that Thomas J. Watson Jr. took in the early 1950s. He stopped at an Olivetti shop where typewriters were set out on sidewalk stands for passersby to try out. The machines had sleek designs and a variety of colors. Inside, the shop was bright and modern looking. In contrast, the display areas in IBM’s offices in those days were dimly lit and its computers were drab and boxy. The lobby of the headquarters on Madison Avenue had been designed to please Thomas Watson Sr.’s early 20th century aesthetic: it looked, his son wrote, like the “first-class saloon on an ocean liner.” A few years later, as Watson Jr. was preparing to take over as IBM’s chief executive, he decided, “I could put my stamp on IBM through modern design.” Later, in a 1973 lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Watson Jr. declared that “good design is good business.”"
• Digital Watches and Pet Rocks  - Technology Review - "So take that as a lesson when you encounter a new technology: the first incarnations might be clunky, but that's no real indicator of its staying power."
• Cinema Redux - "This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment . This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time."
• moviebarcode - Cool way of looking at films' palette.
• Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
• Pictures Of Cats Winning: Pics, Videos, Links, News - Hilarious!
• Shackleton’s Antarctica in colour, 1915 « How to be a Retronaut

Links for 03-04-2011

• Daring Fireball: The Chair - "The biggest difference, though, was this: last year Apple didn’t yet understand the iPad. They knew it was good. They knew it had potential. But they didn’t know what it was. They had a sense that in the conceptual space between an iPhone and a MacBook there was uncharted, fertile territory. And they set for themselves a wise metric: the iPad would only succeed if it could do some of the same things a Mac can do, but do them better. If it wasn’t better in several important ways for several common tasks, it would not succeed. What they didn’t know last year was how people would use it, for real. They know now."
• Shaded Relief Archive
• Charlie Sheen Quotes As New Yorker Cartoons: Pics, Videos, Links, News
• Maps Over Time
• Hacker News | Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video) - Impressive. Fun to read the comments about backward compatibility too.
• The Moral Crusade Against Foodies - Magazine - The Atlantic
• When bad websites happen to good restaurants - The Boston Globe - "Restaurant websites are famously bad. They are easy targets for mockery — often user-unfriendly tools that feature Flash animation, embarrassing techno music, and menus that turn out to be PDF files, as you realize only once they start downloading. Meanwhile, basic information about location and hours is hard to come by, daily specials lists date to 2006, pages are permanently “under construction,’’ and the darn things won’t load on your iPhone."
• The Information by James Gleick: Review by Nicholas Carr - The Daily Beast
• 10 Old Ads That Would Be Banned Today | Business Blogs

Links for 03-02-2011

• CEOs Want Better Sales Forces | Forrester Blogs - "In my recent travels, I have been asking tech CEOs a simple question: "Are you satisfied that your sales force is advancing your strategy?" The answer has been a resounding "No!" They give it a C- grade."
• MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.531 Computational Camera and Photography, Fall 2009 | Home - Computational photography course at OCW.
• The Coffee Table Book of Man Caves by Johanna Schlegel — Kickstarter
• Netflix Switches Over To Convenient New Physical Locations | The Onion - America's Finest News Source - "LOS GATOS, CA—Officials at Netflix announced Thursday that the company has finally reached its long-term goal of constructing a chain of easily accessible stores. "Having actual physical locations was always our ultimate intent, and we are proud to provide our customers with the convenient option of driving to a nearby Netflix store and renting any available movie for just $3.99 per title," said Netflix spokesman Henry Regis, adding that the ease of physically walking through aisles and picking out DVDs will more than make up for the stores' minimized selection of titles. "We will also be implementing late fees to help ensure films are returned on time—that way no one misses a chance to rent the hottest new releases." Regis confirmed that the new physical locations will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and include easy after-hours drop-off boxes."
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Sex, math, code - "I'm going to title my next book "The Code of Sex: Ten Secrets for Using Math to Keep Her Satisfied and Hungry for More." I promise you that it's going to be the most pirated book of all time."
• Zooming in With Computational Photography | CSAIL
• McNealy: Sun could have won out over Linux | The Industry Standard - InfoWorld
• The Colour Clock
• Six Brands That Don't Mean What They Used To - Woot
• Why is IT governance so difficult to implement? - O'Reilly Radar - "What is the core value that ensures IT governance will work? The ability to compromise."
• Ranked: Every Oscar Best Picture Winner from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - As might be expected, I agree with a lot of this while also disagreeing with a fair bit.
• Fashion, Qaddafi-Style | Politics | Vanity Fair
• Books Beyond Borders - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - From the comments: "The bricks-and-mortar retailers that have the best chance of survival are sellers of: 1) perishables, like grocery stores; 2) really cheap stuff (e,g., "dollar store" types of stuff), where the cost of shipping would add too much to the price; 3) really expensive stuff (like jewelry) that can be risky to ship, even if insured; 4) stuff that really does need to be seen and handled and tried out before buying (some, but not all, clothing, and some other things); 5) stuff that may be subject to legal prohibitions against shipping across state lines, or anywhere; 6) stuff that is too bulky to send via mail or UPS, and too expensive to ship by freight (much home improvement stuff, for example); and 7) convenient combinations of many different kinds of stuff, thus sparing consumers some time and shipping costs."
• A Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley « Steve Blank
• Video Of My CSA Presentation: “Commode Computing: Relevant Advances In Toiletry & I.T. – From Squat Pots to Cloud Bots – Waste Management Through Security Automation” | Rational Survivability
• The REAL Death Of The Music Industry - "Digital really does appear to have brought about the era of the single"
• Jeopardy! Champ Ken Jennings - The Washington Post - "When anyone mentions 2001 to them (or Terminator, or Matrix, or Tron, or...) IBM prefers to bring up the helpful question-answering computer on Star Trek.  C'mon IBM!  You just invented SkyNet!  Own it!"
• Reelizer - Some very nicely done alternate movie posters.

Links for 02-18-2011

• No-Knead Bread: A Convert’s Story | Michael Ruhlman
• SF Signal: 10 Literary Novels for Genre Readers
• Kodak Is Apple in Reverse - MarketWatch - "Consider: In 1997, Kodak was worth $28 billion to Apple's $2 billion. Today, a single quarterly profit for Apple is enough to buy all of Kodak's shares--six times over."
• Watson wins it all, humans still can do some other cool things -- Engadget - Tjis is actually a pretty good summation of what Watson is and is not.
• Singularity: Kurzweil on 2045, When Humans, Machines Merge - TIME
• NASA and Census Bureau offer tips for cloud computing success - FierceGovernmentIT
• Links List 2.11.11 | ScienceLogic - Good set of cloud computing-related links.
• Web Ink Now: An open letter to journalists: You have an amazing career opportunity on the Dark Side - I agree with this... up to a point. This seems to suggest however a greater degree of editorial independence than is likely the case most of the time.
• Robert's Reader | Uncategorized | In Which I Take Issue With Felix Salmon - fully agree.
• StatusNet | Your Network - Microblogging software.
• Rest in Peace, Kenneth Harry Olsen - Linux Magazine Online
• Moving to IPv6: Now for the hard part (FAQ) | Deep Tech - CNET News - Good piece on the move to IPv6.
• The Map Room: Daniel Huffman and His River Maps - The Mississippi River system in the style of a transit map.

Links for 02-03-2011

• 'Death by GPS' in desert - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee - "In Death Valley, many roads shown on some GPS systems are no longer passable. Some have been officially closed. Others are simply too rough for most vehicles and pose serious danger. "People are so reliant on their GPS that they fail to look out the windshield and make wise decisions based on what they're seeing," said Alley."
• Data Center Dialog: A cloudy look forward at 2011 - Good trends summary.
• 1948 Mayor to MIT: Use Flamethrowers to Melt Snow? « Slice of MIT by the Alumni Association
• Photo of Cars Abandoned In The Snow on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive
• Quora Backlash Slams Head First Into Quora Backlash Backlash - Seems like a pretty balanced look at the whole thing. Personally, I consider it an open question how effectively Quora will deal with a broader set of users, many of whom will do their best to pervert it for self-promotion or otherwise personal agendas.
• A tale of two qubits: how quantum computers work
• Why Bacon Is A Gateway To Meat For Vegetarians : Shots - Health News Blog : NPR - "Recently, an old friend who's been a vegetarian for more than 15 years shocked us with a story: Last weekend, she ate bacon. Several strips. Straight out of the frying pan where her boyfriend was cooking it. This wasn't the first time she'd encountered it sizzling there, in all its glistening glory. But for some reason, this time it overpowered her. She was guilty yet gleeful when she told us that she'd allowed bacon back into her life."
• LinkedIn to Offer Free Business Card Scanning With CardMunch Acquisition - "CardMunch, the iPhone app that helps import business cards into a digital format, has announced that it has been bought by LinkedIn. While that's good news for CardMunch, its even better news for you, its potential users. "Starting today," writes the company, "the current version of the CardMunch app will be completely free!"
• 25 Years of Digital Vandalism - NYTimes.com - "In short, the road to our present universe teeming with viruses, worms and Trojan horses was paved, a quarter-century ago this month, with the Alvi brothers’ good intentions of securing their intellectual property."
• Review: My Amazon Kindle Single publishing experiment | ZDNet
• Why the Long Lost Google Book Pact Still Matters - Peter Osnos - Technology - The Atlantic - "In certain respects, however, technology and commerce have overtaken the original dispute. Digitized books can be programmed so that they cannot be copied or printed more than once, which limits the notion of a free-for-all in which authors and publishers lose control of the material. Many books in the public domain (the vast majority of works that have been digitized) are increasingly available from a variety of sources, which reduces Google's omnipotence. Given the extraordinary growth in the use of eBook reading devices (which were barely a factor when the lawsuits against Google were originally filed), the interests of authors and publishers have shifted to getting a fair share of revenues rather than the prospect of receiving no revenues at all."

Links for 01-25-2011

• The downward spiral of ownership and value « The Thingology Blog - "Does impaired, devalued digital access encourage piracy? Many ebook pundits dismiss ebook piracy. “New models” will emerge. Piracy is better than obscurity. People will pay once everything is available for a “fair” price. The arguments are familiar, and have an air of ritual now. Hip conferences urge publishers to do a swan dive into an empty swimming pool."
• The Most Emailed 'New York Times' Article Ever | The Awl
• Real World Technologies - Intel's Sandy Bridge Microarchitecture - "The insatiable desire for high frequencies unfortunately could not overcome the underlying physics – Intel’s single minded pursuit of high frequency lead to high power operation, and there is a firm economic limit of 130W for a mass market product."
• The MEI Voyageur Back-Pack - First choice of the seasoned world traveler
• The Feeling of Power
• everyone has a right to their beliefs « Manifest Density - "I love you guys, but you’re crazy. On questions of aesthetic preference there’s no particular reason that normal people should listen to a bunch of geeky obsessives who spend orders of magnitude more time on these issues than average. It’s like how you probably shouldn’t listen to me when I tell you not to use .doc files or that you might want to consider a digital audio player with Ogg Vorbis support. I strongly believe those things, but even I know they’re pointless and arbitrary for everyone who doesn’t consider “Save As…” an opportunity for political action."
• You Can Have My Double Space When You Pry it From My Cold, Dead Hands - Megan McArdle - Culture - The Atlantic - And for the counterpoint...
• Voyeuristic Blogger Portraits Put Faces to URLs | Raw File
• Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising: Pics, Videos, Links, News

Links for 01-14-2010

• What Factors Justify the Use of Apache Hadoop? – tecosystems
• Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine - I'm not sure when I broke myself of the two-space habit. 
• Which game is Bill Belichick talking about? - Boston.com - Cool use of word clouds.
• A gadget’s life: From gee-whiz to junk| The Washington Post - This is very cool.

Links for 01-13-2011

• Steve Jobs Remixed: 5 Creative Takes on the Iconic Apple Keynote [VIDEOS]
• When Booze Was Banned but Pot Was Not - Reason Magazine - "The real puzzle, as the journalist Daniel Okrent argues in his masterful new history of the period, is how a nation that never had a teetotaling majority, let alone one committed to forcibly imposing its lifestyle on others, embarked upon such a doomed experiment to begin with. How did a country consisting mostly of drinkers agree to forbid drinking?"
• Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising
• Dumb as a Blog: 22 Dumbest Things People Do on Facebook Photo Gallery - Automatically post your Twitter updates to Facebook - on truTV.com
• Greatest New York Ever - What Is the Greatest New York Musical? -- New York Magazine
• Google yanking H.264 video out of Chrome | Deep Tech - CNET News - Good dive into all the issues on both sides.
• U.S. Particle Collider Shutting Down - CBS News
• How to make your shopping cart suck less - The Oatmeal - This is hilarious (and so true).

Links for 01-11-2011

• LabSlice: Does Gartner understand cloud computing? - "But even at first glance it seemed a bit strange, with the title "Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting". Hmmmm... So this is a review of IaaS, the very epitome of cloud services, and also of traditional web hosting services?"
  
  Reading through the report you will find similar idiosyncrasies and an obvious bias towards delivering 'enterprise' cloud services
• The cloud/hosting Magic Quadrant audience « CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing - "I think his point is worth addressing, because it’s true that the MQ is written to an audience of such companies and is very explicit in the fact that we are rating enterprise-grade services, but not true that these companies just want to be part of the hype. That seems to be part of the confusion over what cloud IaaS is about, too. At Gartner, we’re excited by the whole consumerization-of-IT trend that intertwines with the cloud computing phenomenon. But we’re not writing for the individual dude, or the garage developers, or the rebels who want IT stuff without IT people. We’re writing for the corporate IT guy."
• NYC - Mindrelic Timelapse on Vimeo
• Netflix Reveals Challenges in the Cloud - Computerworld - "For example, Netflix must cope with hardware failures and slow response times in the cloud, where IT resources are shared with other tenants. "Co-tenancy is hard," Ciancutti said. To address that problem, Netflix developed a software architecture that it calls "Rambo," in which each application can succeed even if related systems fail, he said."
• Disappointed! (the true sad story of client hypervisor meloncholy) - Tim Mangan - BrianMadden.com - Browser-centric application access & app stores seem to be reducing the urgency/relevance of client-side virtualization for a lot of scenarios.
• Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
• New ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Edition Does Disservice to a Classic - NYTimes.com - Looks pretty spot on. There are borderline cases but this isn't one of them.
• The Fallacies of Distributed Computing Reborn: The Cloud Era « New Relic Blog
• The Case Against Chasing Scoops - Tuned In - TIME.com - "Still, it would be great, as news outlets are forced to cut back ever more, for some prominent organizations to publicly and vocally decide that they're going to let the other guy confirm the news Washington already knows first from now on, and conserve their resources for discoveries that will matter for more than an afternoon. That, at least, would be a really newsworthy development."
• INSANELY awesome solar eclipse picture | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine - Transit of ISS in front of sun during solar eclipse.
• How Does the Internet Work?
• Quora will be bigger than Twitter - Telegraph - "Of course, the flipside of Quora's apparently massive inflection is that it will soon face challenges with spam and automated noise, a problem that has essentially crippled Yahoo! Answers (well, that and the breathtaking stupidity of the people who use Yahoo!'s service)."

Links for 01-05-2011

• The Blog of Stickles: Doctorin' the Tardis
• Academic Earth | Online Courses | Academic Video Lectures
• iPad Magazine Sales Drop Steeply As iPad Sales Soar - SVW - IMO, pricing models are a big part of the issue. I'll be interested to see how often I read my new print+digital sub to The Economist online.
• Nikon mirrorless interchangeable lens camera | Nikon Rumors - I've been holding off on buying a camera of this type in part waiting for Nikon and Canon to make their plays. "More professional" sounds expensive though given the prices of the current entrants.
• Bits or pieces?: Review of Mystic Me 3.0 - "There will be no let-up in end user confusion surrounding cloud computing: Whether it's surveys of Canadian Executives or Technology Resellers, confusion over cloud continues unabated. Score: 1"
• How Facebook killed the Christmas card - The Week - "But now, with Facebook so thoroughly insinuated into our lives, we already know where our friends (and our "friends") went on vacation, what they look like right now, and whether they've recently switched jobs.... In 2010, people don't need to wait for December to brag. They've been doing it all year."
• Channel impact of cloud computing - 21 Dec 2010 - CRN UK Opinion - "All of this will simply reduce rather than eradicate the risks, however. So there is a natural limit to the degree of shift to cloud services that will take place in most organisations.Having said that, as we discuss in the aforementioned paper, cloud computing is creating both choice and complexity for customers, so it cannot be ignored by those in the IT channel. Skilling up will be necessary to maintain account control and exploit the spin-off business. There may also be some incremental margin to be gained from hosted service resales or referrals. For small customers in particular, it may be possible to meet needs through hosted services in areas such as messaging, collaboration and CRM that would otherwise not be feasible for commercial or practical reasons on-premise."
• AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com
• Cloud computing: Security fears mean IT stays in-house | Finance | silicon.com - "But IT bosses questioned by Forrester had misgivings about using public cloud services, with 64 per cent expressing concerns about whether corporate data would be secure inside cloud service providers' datacentres."

Links for 12-16-2010

• Why TV Lost - "About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers." Mostly true--although this speaks just to the delivery mechanism rather than the content.
• Marten Mickos Talks Red Hat, OpenStack and M&A: Cloud «
• CloudSwitch: Traitor To the [Public Cloud] Cause… | Rational Survivability
• “What Font Should I Use?”: Five Principles for Choosing and Using Typefaces - Smashing Magazine
• The Value of the Freedom to Leave the Cloud: Salesforce and Heroku – tecosystems
• The PC Industry's Forgotten Market: Grandpa | ZDNet - "The only benefit to him having a Mac is that he could drag the thing into an Apple store and torture some poor bastard in a blue t-shirt at the Genius Bar, and they can charge him some ridiculously expensive surcharge to bring it back from death each time."
• Risk and Reward in the Cloud | Andi Mann – Übergeek - "It is just another risk to evaluate and manage. As I have already published – and it clearly remains exceedingly relevant – downtime is endemic in the public cloud – but it is not unique to public cloud."
• Project Food Blog Entry: Final Reflections - Boston in food.

Links for 12-13-2010

• Richard Thaler’s Rejoinder to the TOTM Free to Choose Symposium « Truth on the Market - "The philosophy of libertarian paternalism that Cass and I advocate in Nudge, could accurately titled Free to Choose, 2.0.  If people would read with care what we have written, they will see that this is accurate.  We do not advocate a larger role for government, just a more efficient, smarter way of achieving a government’s goals, whatever the democratic process determines that they should be."
• Christmas Dinner Recipes from Around the World - Saveur.com
• Heavenly Grease - A Pork Nativity Scene - Slashfood
• Words of the World by The University of Nottingham
• Infinity Blade Raises Standard for iOS Games | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - Some impressive advances on the gaming front.

Links for 12-09-2010

• Beef or Chicken? A Look at U.S. Meat Trends in the Last Century - NYTimes.com - Interesting data but I'm not convinced by the explanations.
• Dartblog: "For a Flexible Drinking Age" - This was of course the norm when I was in school even after Massachusetts increased the drinking age.
• 10 Cloud Predictions for 2011 from Forrester -Bime - SAAS Business Intelligence (BI) by We Are Cloud - Generally agree with these. May do a followup.
• Google's Chrome Web store and the future blurring of Web, app design | ZDNet
• Most Popular Top 10s of 2010
• 250 Free Online Courses from Top Universities | Open Culture
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2010 - Agree about Flipboard; interesting suggestion on how to use it. I'm going to check out some of the other suggestions. I haven't changed my RSS habits in a while.
• SimpleGeo
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Interactive storytelling: an oxymoron - The long-running failure of interactive TV is another (non)-existence proof.
• How the iPad Is Influencing Web Apps

Links for 12-08-2010

• Debating subway map form and function :: Second Ave. Sagas - "The venerable Vingelli took the floor first. While the angular subway schematic that divided the city’s subway riders remains Vingelli’s most iconic New York piece, the subways are replete with the 79-year-old Italian designer’s imprint. The relatively clear signage and the unified use of Helvetica was a part of Vingelli’s Graphics Standard manual that the TA adopted in the late 1960s."
• Someday, Nobody Will Ask “PC or Mac?” - Techland - TIME.com - "But something good has been happening lately: The decision has gotten simpler and less risky. Both Windows PCs and Macs are, on some level, primarily boxes that run the Web browsers we do much of our work in--once you're inside your favorite browser, it doesn't matter all that much which operating system your computer uses. And a high percentage of peripherals--cameras, printers, and many phones--don't care whether you connect them to a Windows computer or a Mac."

Links for 12-07-2010

• Canned Platypus » Blog Archive » Caching vs. Replication II
• Nimbula rips pages from Microsoft's announcement strategy book | ZDNet - "Microsoft is noted for a media relations strategy that persuades otherwise jaded analysts, journalists and consultants to write about products and services long before they’re really available for public consumption. It appears that Nimbula is in the process of executing a similar strategy. That being said, the company has some really interesting ideas about making cloud-based applications transportable that are worthy of consideration."
• Tips to Stop Sucking at PowerPoint
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The cloud press - I'm still not sure that WikiLeaks isn't an extreme enough example that it doesn't say much about the cloud in general. But this piece does shine a little more light on how journalism intersects the cloud.
• Ten Great Movies that Reimagine Shakespeare - The Tempest, 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story | Nerve.com
• a sea of lead, a sky of slate: Abandoned on Everest
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The attack on Do Not Track - "There may be valid arguments to make against a Do Not Track program - some of the technical details remain fuzzy, and government regulation, if done clumsily, can impede innovation - but the suggestion that people shouldn't be allowed to make informed choices about their privacy because some businesses may suffer as a result of those choices is ludicrous and even offensive."
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Hate-spewing “Christians” need to listen up - I should not laugh. (Though Dan should have quit while he was ahead. It gets preachy after a bit.)
• Nelson's Weblog: culture / information-wants-to-be-free - Good, succinct summary.
• WikiLeaks: 6 quirky revelations you may have missed - The Week - Priceless!
• 41Latitude - Google Maps & Label Readability - Really interesting low-level look about legibility of Google maps.
• Public Cloud Computing is NOT For Everyone | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Good counterpoint to the everything-should-migrate-to-public-cloud crowd.
• Understanding the Novell Deal (and when we'll learn more) - ConsortiumInfo.org - Lots of info on the deal mechanics.
• CA Technologies - 7-11: 7 Virtualization Predictions for 2011 : VMblog.com - Virtualization Technology News and Information for Everyone

Links for 12-02-2010

• Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2011 and Beyond - "By 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.
  The Apple iPad is the first of what promises to be a huge wave of media tablets focused largely on content consumption, and to some extent communications, rather than content creation, with fewer features and less processing power than traditional PCs and notebooks or pen-centric tablet PCs. Support requirements for media tablets will vary across and within enterprises depending on usage scenario. At minimum, in cases where employees are bringing their own devices for convenience, enterprises will have to offer appliance-level support with a limited level of network connectivity (which will likely include access to enterprise mail and calendaring) and help desk support for connectivity issues."
• 13 Vintage Computer Ads Show How Far We've Come (PHOTOS)
• Flickr: The Flickr Developer Guide
• Where the Silicon Meets the Road - Interesting discussion. And also highlights how workable AI remains largely compute and data driven.
• Lightroom, Storage Space, and Big Catalogs | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips - I should probably think about deleting more of my photos in Lightroom. Disk is cheap but there are a lot of hidden costs associated with managing photos I'm never going to have the remotest use for. Good workflow suggestions in the comments too.
• Fritinancy: How Prohibition Changed Branding and Language - Lots of fascinating trivia.
• Ovum StraightTalk | Novell is acquired, but its woes continue - Ovum's dour take on the Attachmate buy.
• How IT Execs Consume - Andrew Lark - Interesting data on awareness vehicles by CIO age.
• Food - Cooking and Cookbooks - Recipes - Desserts - Eggnog - Christmas - New York Times

My fave general purpose cookbooks

The past year and a half saw good updates to a couple of old standby cookbooks. These aren't necessarily the sort of cookbooks you buy to read all the way through or to ogle the food porn photography--indeed there aren't many photos in any of the books listed. Nor are they designed to dive deep on a particular cuisine or food style. Rather, they're big tomes intended to give a taste (so to speak) from a wide swatch through relatively traditional American cooking. Here are four cookbooks I put in this category. Two are the aforementioned newcomers.

The publication of Ruth Reichl's new Gourmet cookbook in September of 2009 turned out to be something of a bittersweet event given that it preceded the cancellation of Gourmet magazine by just a couple of weeks. I have quite a few cookbooks from Gourmet in my collection but the two volume 1960s-vintage reference on my shelf stays there mostly for nostalgia reasons; it's not particularly relevant to me in the types of recipes and ingredients on which it focuses. And that's a general problem with older cookbooks. As Reichl puts it:

Back then things were so different that my editor insisted that I call for ground beef instead of lamb in a classic Greek moussaka; she said not many grocers actually sold lamb. She also worried about the recipe for handmade pasta (too esoteric) and a simple Chinese stir-fry of chicken (what on earth was a wok). She worried when I called for freshly grated Parmesan cheese (most people still used the stuff that came in the green can), fresh garlic (frowned upon in many places) and chiles (too hot, too hot, too hot).

I think it's also the case that the recipes in this book tend toward the simpler and the quicker. They're not dumbed down exactly but they do mostly avoid highly complex foods that require all-day preparation. And that aligns with modern lifestyles as well.

Most of the recipes in this book can be found on the Epicurious website, which is also a good place to see how readers may have modified the original recipes. Even though you can look up the recipes for free though, I find it worthwhile to have a curated and packaged version that I can keep in the kitchen (where, to be sure, the Epicurious application also resides on my iPad).


My existing New York Times cookbook wasn't quite so vintage, with a 1990 copyright date. However, this edition--edited by longtime Times food editor Craig Claiborne--seemed to be a largely incremental update of earlier versions. It was one of my more useful references nonetheless but it still dated back to what was in important ways an earlier era of cooking.

Amanda Hesser's The Essential New York Times Cookbook, like Gourmet Today, is explicitly about updating recipes for modern tastes and ingredients (albeit the modern tastes and ingredients associated with locales like Manhattan). However, the book places those updated recipes within the context of the New York Times' recipe files going back to the beginning.

 Thus, while this cookbook certainly contains plenty of "modern" recipes, it also makes a point of reintroducing foods and drinks of the past that may be worth re-examining. And for fans of Craig Claiborne, many of his favorites are still well-represented. (In keeping with the season, his 1958 eggnog concoction is more of a meal than a drink.) This is both a good cookbook and a fun read.


The Cook's Illustrated crew, headed by Chris Kimball, is something of a mini-industry. They have shows on public TV, magazines, a Website that they actually succeed in getting folks like myself to subscribe to (something the New York Times would sincerely love), and a passel of cookbooks that profitably rework and repurpose large swaths of content.

The central conceit of Cook's Illustrated is that everything from recipes to techniques is tested, tested, tested. They're also probably the best-known example of the modern "cooking geek" approach in that they investigate and explain why particular techniques work or don't work. (Alton Brown is another author who focuses on the science of cooking but without the obsessiveness of Cook's Illustrated.)

The Best Recipes is an encyclopedic work and it does a great job of breaking down and illustrating how to do things in the kitchen with something over 1,000 recipes in all. Because it does so much more than just present a bunch of recipes, this has become my go to reference for how to do things in the kitchen and a starting point for how to handle a cut of meat or other ingredient.
If there's a knock on on Cook's Illustrated it's that the whole "we tried 50 different ways of boiling an egg" shtick can get a bit old after a while. More to the point, I find it can result in recipes that are a bit fussy with three types of cheeses grated three different ways and the like. Also be forewarned that large quantities of cream, butter, and the like often seem to play heavily into getting the best tasting result. Still, overall, a great reference and a good bargain given its size.


A lot of people learned cooking from The Joy of Cooking and it's still the standard kitchen reference for many. For my part, I tended to favor modern versions of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook--which traces its origins to the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cookbook.

Now, to tell the truth, I don't use this as much as I used to. If I want to figure out what to do with some leftovers or make some traditional comfort food, the Internet often has a more complete, albeit less vetted answer. And, as I noted above, Cook's Illustrated is a substantial reference work and generally does a more complete job of explaining both whys and hows. So, in short, this is a less essential reference for me than it once was. However, that said, I still use it and it continues to earn its spot on my close-to-hand bookshelf in the kitchen.