Vlado Handziski

"Smart people generally get very educated, and higher education (in the US at least) teaches only critical thinking. Smart people spend all their formative years getting rewarded for finding problems, for focusing on the negative. They leave school thinking that the way to be useful and show your smarts is to point out why things won’t work, rather than using some of those smart to find a way forward" - Adewale Oshineye

"So here's my first piece of advice: if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized. Architecture trumps licensing any time." -Tim O'Reilly. Just one snippet of wisdom included in what may be remembered as one of the most important pieces about the future of the web. Read this post twice. - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet

"The changeable British weather may stop us from being outside as often as we might like, but it has been a spur to turning our homes into lightfilled spaces that capture a sense of outdoors inside." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

Very cool approach to modern architecture...I love natural light!! - Susan Beebe

I like this a lot. Our kitchen opens out on to a back deck which extends our living space into the backyard. - Mel "de Silentio" McB

When we looked closely at the dumps, we saw that not only were all the updates on the queue from IMP 50, but they all had one of three sequence numbers (either 8, 40, or 44), and were ordered in the queue as follows: 8, 40, 44, 8, 40, 44, 8, 40, 44, ... Note that by the definition of LATER, 44 is LATER than 40 (44 > 40 and 44 - 40 <= 32), 40 is LATER than 8 (40 > 8 and 40 - 8 <= 32), and 8 is LATER than 44 (8 < 44 and 44 - 8 > 32). Given the presence of three updates from the same IMP with these three sequence numbers, this is what would be expected. Since each update is LATER than one of the others, a cycle is formed which keeps the three updates floating around the network indefinitely. Thus the IMPs spend most of their CPU time and buffer space in processing these updates. - Paul Buchheit

I think you all missed the pun I throw in - "“On Sunday, we saw a large number of servers that were spending almost all of their time gossiping and a disproportionate amount of servers that had failed while gossiping. With a large number of servers gossiping and failing while gossiping, Amazon S3 wasn't able to successfully process many customer " - yeah while every1 keeps "gossipping" when does anything really get done eh ?? :)- - Peter Dawson

Gabe: I'm suffering runaway processes on my new MacBook Pro (usually the Window Server). Used to be sometimes 2-3X day I would have to reboot (with 156% CPU usage and such nonsense - dual-core Intel maybe?). It's much less stable & thrashes more than my 14" iBook (thinking of switching back). The process-takes-over-machine problem is still around today. - Mitchell Tsai

The September cover of Esquire is going to be pretty cool. An electronic ink diplay, built on the same technology that E Ink used in the Amazon Kindle, will flash the words "the 21st Century Begins." The logistics of pulling of this feat are a story in globalization: First Esquire had to make a six-figure investment to hire an engineer in China to develop a battery small enough to be inserted in the magazine cover. The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine's distributor in Glazer, Ky. - Cee Bee via Bookmarklet

Cool! I'm gonna get myself one of these issues just so I can hack out the e-ink panel and experiment. - Dread Pirate PJ via NoiseRiver

that's awesome - definitely a collector's item. - Bruce Williams

"This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment." - Robert Seidman via Bookmarklet

If this smartphone idea comes out the SF's Municipal Transportation Agency & their Department of Parking and Traffic, it will probably be an efficient system. Their intensely organized group has been very quick with getting me my unpaid parking ticket notifications to my doorstep in a timely manner. - Pete Delucchi

For the geeks here on FF, here is some more info on the TSMP protocol from Dust Inc. (provider of the nodes and the low-level networking infrastructure) that makes all this possible: http://tinyurl.com/68to5a - Vlado Handziski

What does an elite school mean? What does it produce? Read this editorial for a sobering, thoughtful, and comprehensive look at elite schools; I guarantee you'll think of them differently afterwards! - Adam Lasnik

JPL has switched from ADA to C on their spacecraft: "ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

Right! Great point about loose coupling. Protocol buffers, or other explicitly modeled binary serialization formats are really only supposed to be used when you control both endpoints. They are most certainly not a replacement for introspectable formats like XML or even JSON, for uncontrolled clients such as are found over the web. And beyond that, protobufs are simply the serialization mechanism, not an RPC framework. Of course we do use them internally for RPC, but that's not all their good for. Serializing data to bigtable is a very common use case for protobufs, for example. - DeWitt Clinton

I think we should be very careful not to confuse the "portability" (i.e. the API or the interaction pattern that decouples the application code from the protocol stack) with the "interoperability" aspect. RPC is an interaction pattern used to build a distributed service. In almost 90% of the cases it is built on top of the common BSD socket as the application/comm interface. - Vlado Handziski

But just as the defacto standardization on the BSD socket (the API) does not preclude the need to standardize TCP (the protocol) the usage of an higher-level interaction pattern like RPC (portability) is independent from the fact whether one uses a closed binary protocol or not (interoperability). Of course in some cases these two are intertwined but keeping them conceptually separate helps in understanding the influences of the different parts of the puzzle - Vlado Handziski

Robert, I just posted this and you Liked it within 9 minutes. It's almost midnight -- get some sleep, my man. :) - Matt Cutts

Now this is the type of stuff I like to read at 1:30 in the morning :) - Devlin Dunsmore via twhirl

Google's documentation claims that Protocol Buffers are 3 to 10 times smaller than comparable XML files and can be parsed 20 to 100 times faster. - Jigar Mehta

Awesome new security features for Gmail. I can't tell you how many times I'd find a machine in a computer lab with Gmail open and logged in. I'd always log the user out and email them to be let them know it was open...now they can do it on their own. - Benjamin Golub via Bookmarklet

"I barely ever read these, and here's why. They only tell me things about the big boys, mostly when money is involved. It hardly matters to me who VCs are investing in, what advertising strategy Facebook is pursuing, or the fact yet another social network for cats has been launched. That's not what I'm in technology for: I want to hear about genuine advance, discovery, code I can read, services I can use, new applications of research. And I want to share with and learn from others in the same ecosphere. Unfortunately, the gatekeepers can have a stifling, negative effect on the industry and community. Our thinking has become dull, and our attitude one of sniping." - Adewale Oshineye

I don't know if it's the best movie ever but it is severely underappreciated. - Jason Toney

Agreed, Jason. Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law are all really good in this. - Mark Trapp

agree, definitely underappreciated. - Parth Awasthi

One of my favorite movies. Certainly ranks as one of the most under-appreciated sci-fi movie of all time. - AJ Kohn