Tag: Computing

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Studly Matters

Brooklyn College officials like to put their full titles into the from field of the email. For instance, I used to get emails from “Alice Newcomb-Doyle, Public Relations” [..@brooklyn.cuny.edu] because I am on some email list. Well, now the name has changed into something funny – “Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Stud,” [..@brooklyn.cuny.edu]. I guess there is a character limit.

This is doubly funny, because before checking email I was playing with a stud finder device that I recently purchased from Radio Shack.

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What’s wrong with PigeonRankTM?

Is it just me, or did Google start sucking?
The relevance of search results is not nearly what it used to be..

My grievances:

a) Google does not crawl livejournal and I think other blogs as well. And robots.txt does not have anything to do with it. I made sure that my robots.txt permits crawlers and even submitted the url to Google, but I am not in there (except for the about page). I guess this is because of “google bombing”, but I think that it does more harm than good. Livejournal contains a lot of useful information, but is unsearchable!

b)That stupid javascript that “focuses” on Google’s search bar when the page loads. This makes me want to remove Google from my start page. It just sucks.

c) Google does not respect quotes and has weird ideas about commonly used short words and punctuation. For instance if you search for “to-do”, resulting pages won’t even have “to-do” in them. Even if you use advanced search “with the exact phrase”.

Hrrrmpf. Stupid pigeons. I think it’s all because of those PHDs. Come on, 50 PHDs working in a company? That can’t be good.

I wonder, if I write Sergey, will he answer?

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Microsoft Tabula Rasa.

Chairman Bill is launching Tablet PC right now.
He got fatter since the last time I have seen him.
Looks like they’ve learned everything the could from the failures of Grid, Pen Windows, Newton, Palm, Softbook and Nuvomedia. Maybe this is it, the tablet is here.. I am getting one.

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Gender Bending Frame

I want a good digital photo frame. Not the stupid Ceiva, which requires you to buy into their crappy service and works through an analog modem (ie, even if I wanted to, I could not use it at work because we have VoIP phone system or something like that).

From reviews at Amazon:

“I knew this frame was cool when my teenage daughter was admiring a picture of herself and it suddenly changed to one of her brother. She let out a scream, and uttered a few unauthorized words.”

Now I know too. I hope she did not wet herself from excitement.

Well, I’ll probably end up making a frame out of an old iOpener or something. I also want a that 3COM net appliance for my bathroom, but that’s a different story.

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Stroking the Genius

Right now am pretty much obsessed with books about rise and fall of tech companies.

These are the most memorable books I’ve read this past year:
“Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”
“Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything”
“Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age”
“Show-Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows Nt and the Next Generation at Microsoft”
“The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison”
“High Stakes, No Prisoners : A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars”
“The Soul of a New Machine”
“The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer”

Awesome, awesome stuff. I should find time to write some reviews.

I purchased all of these books used (except “Soul of a New Machine” which I just _had_ to have at the time). Some were cheap, others surprisingly expensive. For instance my copy of “Hackers” set me back $30 or $40 because it was out of print at the time. A new edition came out very soon thereafter. Interestingly enough the same thing happened with “Alan Turing: The Enigma“. “The Supermen” was the most expensive at $50. I am still hunting for acceptably priced “The Legend of Amdahl“.

I just finished reading “Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton“. It was very good.

Right now I am reading “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed“, which is orgasmically [spellchecker suggested “orgasmic ally” heh heh] good.

I really want to buy one of those highlighter scanners made by C-Pen so that I can keep notes for my livejournal as I read.

C-Pen’s slogan is “Stroke of Genius”. Beavis and Butthead would have a field day with them :)

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The Mystery of Obidos

Whoa, caught amazon.com while it was down.
They are showing a page with Rufus, the Amazon dog.

By the way, I was meaning to write about that for some time now. Did you ever notice enigmatic word “obidos” in Amazon url?

Some theories from usenet:

  • Castle near Lisbon
  • OBI (Wan Kenobi) + DOS (Disk Operating System)
  • ‘OBI’ = Object Broker Interface

    This seems to be the correct answer though: Obidos is is a major port on the Amazon river.

    [update]
    Livejournal user hallerlake had this to add:

    “I worked at Amazon for a couple of years, and can mostly answer that.

    Obidos is the area where the Amazon is “concentrated” – it narrows to a point about a mile wide and a couple hundred feet deep. It’s the chokepoint of the Amazon. A wry sense of humor turned that to the naming scheme.

    The Amazon Marketplace (auctions+zshops+third party) code was called Varzea for similar reasons – it’s the delta point of the amazon river, where the river fans out.

    Amazon wrote their own web serving environment because the selection of scripting/webcontrol languages when they got started was so lousy. They had to call it something, so obidos it was. :) ”

    ”
    Obidos is huge, it might be over a gig by now. I don’t think it’s that bad, though. I haven’t been at Amazon for a few years. For a long time Amazon ran on the Netscape web server environment, then eventually moved to a specially tuned Apache. But yeah, the webservers had a lot of RAM in them so that we could fork a bunch of different processes… and a garbage collector got added to take care of some of the memory leaks. Even still we had a service that killed and restarted processes every hundred accesses or so. It wasn’t pretty.

    I don’t know who came up with the name… I’d bet on Shel Kaphan or possibly Joel Spiegel. Shel set the direction for the company’s software development and architecture, including standardization on C (instead of C++) due to easier debugging. Certainly for the first few years he was The Guy for software architecture; these days I would imagine Al Vermeulen has that task.
    ”