Pito’s Blog

Who said “your TSA don’t dance and your USPTO don’t rock and roll?” (One free copy of BlogBridge for all of you who get the reference without using Wikipedia)

Here are two cool examples. First up, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) now has a blog that seems to be much more than a bunch of pre-digested PR drivel, but instead posts from actual people with actual knowledge about TSA and their mission.

From their blurb:

“This blog is sponsored by the Transportation Security Administration to facilitate an ongoing dialogue on innovations in security, technology and the checkpoint screening process.” (from The Evolution of Security)

By the way, a plea: please name your blogs in a way that it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out what it is. How about calling it the TSA Blog? Duh.

But it is quite interesting, for example, from a few days ago:

“Saturday morning, a Transportation Security Officer working the x-ray machine saw two razor blades in what appeared to be a book in someone’s carry-on bag. During the bag check, the razor blades were found inside the pages of a Bible, and bag belonged to… a priest. Can’t make this stuff up.” (from Saturday Morning, Strange But True…”)

This blog and the way it is being written is a Very Good Idea. I just hope that the politicians don’t grab hold of it and turn it into another propaganda portal.

So that was the dance part, here’s the rock and roll.

The USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) has created a very cool site to allow peer input about patents that are being sought. From their blurb:

“Peer-to-Patent opens the patent examination process to public participation for the first time. Become part of this historic pilot program. Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents.”

So this is kind of a social network to assist the patent office in filtering out bad patents more effectively, something that they have failed to do often and have been heavily criticized for.

The cool thing is that they seem to have thought this through quite well. Particularly the way peer input is used or not used as part of the patent review process seems to protect against competitors trying to somehow manipulate the process. And the site is attractive, sensible in its design, incorporates video and tutorials etc. A thoroughly modern effort. And a valuable service. Kudos!

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I’ve written about some of the considerations that go into the choice between physical infrastructure and new SAAS services such as Amazon’s S3 and EC2. I also covered why the fact that you are comfortable relying on a hosting provider for rack mounted servers (so called ping & power) doesn’t mean necessarily that you would come to the same conclusion about SAAS services.

Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say about that tradeoff a little while ago:

“Today was a bad day for a new computing model that could one day be the norm. Amazon’s S3 service –which companies can use to rent data storage on Amazon’s tech gear — crashed this morning, knocking many small businesses offline and highlighting one of the model’s drawbacks: You’re putting your operations in somebody else’s hands.” (from Is Amazon’s Small Crash a Giant Crash for Cloud Computing?)

In researching these three posts, I came across this which reminded me that this wasn’t the first time this happened, I guess not surprisingly:

“Cautionary tale indeed. It’s the other side of the wonderful world of mashups and web 2.0 and web services and all that jazz. If I build my product on the back of your service, then the quality of what I deliver depends on your carrying through on your promises. Not a very strong position to be in.” (from A cautionary utility computing tale - or the dark side of Mashups)

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An analysis of new census figures has shown that Australia is suffering from an unprecedented “man drought”, from BBC.

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From TimesOnline, a good reminder to not forget that we do live in a USA bubble sometimes, and don’t pay enough attention to the rest of the world:

“A little over two decades later, Arkady Volozh is the chief executive and one of the founders of Yandex, Russia’s most popular internet search engine, a company now valued at £2.5 billion. Widely described as Russia’s answer to Google, Yandex was launched only eight years ago but is now visited by 8m people a day. More impressive still, Yandex and Volozh are credited with humbling Google, by denting its global domination.” (from “Russians dent Google’s world domination”)

Hmm, let me try the query that tripped up Cuil:

ipod cradle wireless sync

Whoops. The site is all Russian. But interestingly I typed in the query in english and I seem to have gotten fairly good results. Certainly better than I got from Cuil. And the oddest phenomenon is now when I write that search in google, it takes me to my own post on that very topic.

Can you spell “echo chamber?”

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Take a look at that very weird looking Mac menu. I didn’t (knowingly) do anything to get it and yet every time I launch a new application it’s menus are corrupted that way. All of its menus, and with fancy animated graphics. Anyone know what’s going on? I just told someone today that Mac’s NEVER have viruses!

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On a project I worked on recently, I asked myself whether I should make one or more of Amazon’s awesome web services (AWS - Awesome Web Services) a mission critical part of the infrastructure of the product. I wrote yesterday about the considerations that go into deciding to rely on services like Amazon’s web services as key infrastructure components.

Of the five I mentioned, these two considerations were especially confusing to me:

• What is the comparable reliability?
• If the whole scheme doesn’t work out, how hard is it to switch?

On the one hand, the reliability of running a bunch of servers in a data center is fairly well understood, as well as the contingency plans to deal with hardware and software failures.

On the other hand (using S3, the storage service as an example,) the expected reliability is more or less unknown - although preliminary data is highly positive - and S3 is the only service of it’s kind, so that there is a certain unavoidable amount of lock in.

I expressed that as the rhetorical question,

“Do I really want to entrust a business critical function to another company - if they decide to shut me off, my business is dead in the water.”

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

But wait, I entrust running my servers to a hosting service, don’t I? If they shut me off I am kind of dead in the water too, aren’t I? What’s the difference?

Relying on your hosting provider for ping & power has a different risk profile than relying on a SAAS provider for disk & cpu in the cloud

Here’s why I say that:

1. There are many many hosting providers (ISPs) to providing ping & power. It’s a vibrant and competitive space.
2. We understand them well. We understand their services, their pricing, their terms of service.
3. They generally rely mostly on a well known and understood set of technologies, interfaces, software and hardware.
4. It is feasible to switch from one to another.
5. It is also feasible (and many do) to have parallel relationships with two totally different hosting services so if one shuts down, crashes, goes out of business, or whatever, you can seamlessly switch to the other.

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I wonder about this.

Why is it considered a slur to use Democrat as an adjective? For example, “The Democrat plan is to …” vs. “The Democratic plan is to…”

Oddly enough, do my ear or my mind, Democrat does sound harsh and evil, but I can’t put my finger on why.

Just wondering…

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Jason Calcanis has stopped blogging and instead is doing an email only mailing list (yes, how 1999 of him.) I had heard about it but recently got me a copy of his most recent missive.

Interesting, opinionated, practical and easy to read. I recommend it!

I’ve never met Jason but I’ve been in his presence as he forcefully (and humorously) debated this or that luminary. Feisty guy, experienced and articulate. Most recently he founded Mahalo.com, which was well covered when it first launched but now I don’t hear that much about it.

Here’s where you sign up for Jason’s mailing list.

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I don’t know why it don’t.

I don’t know why the error message doesn’t just say: “Hey dope, Ruby has no ++ operator”

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Apple always, or almost always, thinks through the user interface carefully and includes all kinds of deft and elegant touches that delight and amaze users.

Not always though. Sometimes there’s a crazy quilt of magic and cleverness that is totally baffling.

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