Archive for November, 2005

Professional Communicator

Published by Peter on November 29, 2005 in Society. 3 Comments

Just received a sweet little email from self-proclaimed “professional communicator” Jody Robb, about a free RGB-2-CMYK converter tool of mine:

From: Jody Robb [mailto:jr@***]
Subject: Poxy program

I wasted ten minutes on your poxy program. If you�re gonna put stuff up on the net, make sure it works, arsehole.

People like you who waste other people�s time and resources to show off are the slime in the gutter of the internet.

Jody Robb
Digital Media Producer/Consultant
(…) Australia

followed by an email 5 minutes later: “It does work but you’re still a fuckwit”.

You make us non-professional communicators blush, Jody!

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Google Toppers: pick your title carefully

Published by Peter on November 24, 2005 in Google. 0 Comments

Everyone with a bit of SEO (Search Engine Optimalisation) experience knows that the title of your HTML pages is crucial. But just how strong is that tiny part of your HTML? When I noticed I had become #1 for the Google query “media technology belgium” in Google (3 words I put in my blog title), I started investigating a bit further. I was first in a total of 18 million pages (according to the “of about” part in the top right of each Google results page). Could I do better than that? I could -as can be seen lower- but there are much stronger examples from other blogs.

Some remarks up front:

  • Keep in mind that Google has indexed something like 15 billion pages so the theoretical walhalla of search results would be: #1 of about 15.000.000.000 pages. Impossible to reach of course (expect if Google would allow to search for the character “.” in an URL, e.g.) - but let’s see how close we get.
  • Search term combinations with e.g. the word “blog” will always be smaller than 512,000,000 since that is the # of pages in Google for “blog“.
  • Sometimes the # of results for a query with 2 words returns less results that a query with the same 2 and 1 extra word. Does not make sense, but there results might come from 2 different servers/stat versions/indexes.
  • All results below are subject to change. You might do the same query now and get another #1 or another total. It’s normal, Google is a huge beast that is always on the move.

Google Toppers Game

Try to guess the blogs that can claim these word combinations in Google:

EASY

MEDIUM

HARD

Do you know of any other impressive search queries that can be claimed by a blog? Is there a #1 of about 1,000,000,000? Add them to the comments!

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Filling a terabyte iPod

Published by Peter on November 23, 2005 in Apple, bandwidth, hardware and podcast. 2 Comments

Muster said that within five years, Apple could release an iPod with one terabyte of storage — that’s almost 17 times the maximum amount of iPod storage Apple currently offers.
Munster envisions a one terabyte iPod as a portable, “coffee table” media center that would allow users to store hundreds of movies and thousands of photos and songs.
cnn.com

A 1000 GB iPod, that is

  • 200 movies or 370 hours of full quality DVD
  • up to 2000 hours (almost 3 months non-stop) at DivX/Xvid/MPEG-4 quality
  • using the H.264 video compression: 120 days or 4 months of video!
  • 1500 music albums of full quality CD (which means, no Sony XCP)
  • 15.000 albums if your rip/compress them to MP3 first, maybe 20.000 if you use WMA/AAC (that is over 2 years of audio to listen to!)
  • 2500 episodes or 100 seasons of TV series like Lost, L-Word, Desperate Housewives, Sopranos, … in compressed format (hey, it’s a 2,5″ screen, who cares about HD?)
  • If your terabyte iPod breaks down and you buy a new one, it will take you between 3 hours (FireWire 800 Mbps) to 2 days (Wifi 802.11g) to fill it up again (from the backup you of course had put on your snug little home 10GB RAID-5 storage cluster thingy).
    If by then all portable devices have 10-Gbit Ethernet built in: 15 minutes will be enough to fill ‘er up.
  • Our then-standard 48 megapixel camera would create 72MB RAW images, of which the iPod could store 14.000, or if you would compress them to 5MB JPEG: 200.000 pictures.

Other predictions: the iPhone (or Apple as mobile virtual network operator) and the iTIVO, a media-center/time-shifting/TV/video/DVD hub , all in the next 12-24 months. Let’s hope this inspires some people to seriously vamp up their design/user interface teams (Nokia, Microsoft, I’m looking at you!).

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Google: turning cash into cache

Published by Peter on November 18, 2005 in Google. 0 Comments

Google and dark fiber

Interesting theory on why Google is buying up miles and miles of ‘dark fiber’ hi-speed optical network (they have been doing this since at least 2002).

The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn’t just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.
from “Google-Mart” (Cringely)

King of cache

Having a datacenter close to any customer is of course the best way to do swift and reliable caching. Presumably not for its primary activity web search, since caching responses for search makes not much sense (see Pareto doesn’t do search). That kind of local storage/network capacity can nevertheless be used to cache other stuff:

  • web pages for Google Accelerator
  • email messages for Gmail
  • images for Google Images
  • video for Google Video
  • audio for Google Audio (doesn’t exist yet, but is bound to be created at some point)
  • voicemail for Google Phone (not yet, but …)
  • peer-2-peer caching: BitTorrent, P2P telephony…
  • And of course also hosting of users’ content. Google makes money by indexing it, making it searchable and putting contextual ads next to them, so they can host people’s audio/video/images for free.

And all that processing power (with some simple extrapolation: 17 Teraflops per datacenter block) could be used to index, filter and convert data or just rent out for distributed computing.

Orders of magnitude

How big is a petabyte? A thousand terabyte, but that doesn’t say much. “If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information.” (Berkeley 2003) So a datacenter of 3.5 petabytes, that’s about 25 libraries of Congress. At the fastest network speed we know, 10 Gbit Ethernet or 108 TB/day, it would take 32 days to fill one of such datacenters. And it demands something between 5 and 10 Megawatt of power.

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Wiki markup languages: syntax confusion

Published by Peter on November 17, 2005 in Web2.0. 0 Comments


In the last couple of months I have been working with Twiki, PhpWiki, MediaWiki, WordPress and PBwiki (oh, the joys of being a freelancer). They all have their own pros and cons, but unfortunately also almost all have their own markup dialect. With markup I mean: the way you should indicate in regular text which parts should be bold/ italic/ heading/ code/ links/ …

The original C2 Wiki (1995) started with CamelCase keywords and ”’bold”’ (that’s three single quotes) for bold, but quite some variants (sometimes improvements) have been created. The problem is that for each wiki system you use (admitted, I might be a heavier user than the average Joe) you have to reprogram your habits: how do I put a link, an image, a bullet list, a piece of code? It’s like switching between VBScript, VB.Net and C#, or QWERTY and AZERTY all the time.

Standard markup dialects

My suggestion:

  • create a limited number of standard wiki markup syntaxes (let’s say 4),
  • let every wiki system offer their users a choice between them.

I’m used to working on Wikipedia? I use the WikiText syntax everywhere. Or Textile, or Markdown. That way I just have to get used to one way of doing things.

Lightweight Markup languages

Wikimedia syntax
As used by Wikipedia: also called WikiText

Internal link [[keyword]] or [[keyword][text to show]]
External link [http://www.example.com text to show]
Image [[Image:example.jpg|Text to show]]
Bold/Italic '''bold'''/''italic''
Heading 1 =HEADING1=
Heading 2 ==HEADING==

Twiki syntax

Internal link CamelCase or [[keyword][text to show]]
External link http://www.example.com or [[http://xml.org XML]]
Image http://www.example.com/image.jpg
Bold/Italic *bold*/_italic_
Heading 1 ---+HEADING1
Heading 2 ---++HEADING

PBWiki syntax
Used on pbwiki hosted wikis.

Internal link CamelCase
External link http://www.example.com or [http://www.example.com|text to show]
Image http://www.example.com/image.jpg
Bold/Italic **bold**/''italic''
Heading 1 !HEADING1
Heading 2 !!HEADING

Textile syntax
Available as a plug-in for WordPress and some wiki systems

Internal link -
External link "This is a link ":http://www.example.com
Image !http://www.example.com/image.jpg!
Bold/Italic *bold*/_italic_
Heading 1 h1. HEADING1
Heading 2 h2. HEADING

Markdown syntax

Internal link [text to show][id]
External link [This link](http://example.net/)
Image ![text to show](http://www.example.com/image.jpg)
Bold/Italic **bold**/_italic_
Heading 1 # HEADING1
Heading 2 ## HEADING

BBCode syntax
Used on lots of forums

Internal link -
External link [URL=http://example.net/]Text to show[/URL]
Image [IMG]http://www.example.com/image.jpg[/IMG]
Bold/Italic [b]bold[/b]/[i]italic[/i]
Heading 1 -
Heading 2 -

And some more examples on List of lightweight markup languages.

Add yourself to the Belgian Bloggers map!

Published by Peter on November 15, 2005 in Belgium and NL. 0 Comments

(Post in Dutch)
Een leuk initiatief van Gaetano Palermo: een kaart waar elke Belgische blogger zijn coordinaten kan op mappen. Misschien een leuke vervanging van de kaart op blogium.be.

Beste collega-bloggers, chèrs co-bloggeurs, ajoutez-vous aan de kaart en ajouttant uw naam, stad en blog URL op frappr.com!


via expressions.be

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Consumers digital rights

Published by Peter on November 15, 2005 in copyright. 0 Comments

Consumer Digital Rights
The BEUC (”Bureau Européen des Unions de consommateurs” or European Consumers Organisation) has set up a web site to inform consumers on which rights they still DO have on their digital content:
www.consumersdigitalrights.org

Consumers are not pirates!
“P2P is like stealing a CD in a shop!“, “We have to protect artists who are being robbed by consumers on the Internet!“.
We are being fed this type of “truth” thanks to the efforts of certain major music and film industry interests.
For this reason, we are launching today with a press conference in the European Parliament and with the support of Mrs Zuzana Roithová MEP, a Campaign supported by a “Declaration of Consumers’ Digital Rights“.
from consumersdigitalrights.org

They put the following 6 basic consumer rights forward:

The BEUC tries to give a voice to a large group of consumers and individuals that have a hard time to counter the lobbying power of record and movie companies. If you want to support the action, put a logo on your own page!

  • 240 x 61 pixels:
    <a href="http://www.consumersdigitalrights.org" target="_blank"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/32/63355147_3827f27158_m.jpg" title="BEUC Consumer Digital Rights" border="0" /></a>
  • 500 x 127 pixels:
    <a href="http://www.consumersdigitalrights.org" target="_blank"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/32/63355147_3827f27158.jpg" title="BEUC Consumer Digital Rights" border="0" /></a>

And, yes, that’s me on the interview page.

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It’s so cool to be anti-Web 2.0

Published by Peter on November 12, 2005 in Web2.0. 3 Comments

Not only that, the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless “Web 1.0″ idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade’s mantra, “They just don’t get it!”
I’ll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term “Web 2.0″ on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You’re welcome.
(from joelonsoftware.com)

I was really bothered by this statement for 2 reasons:

  • Why does something have to be either the answer to all questions or completely irrelevant? Isn’t there like a really interesting grey zone in the middle? Web 2.0 is not gonna make everyone rich, it is not gonna change every aspect of our lives, but that’s doesn’t mean it is to be dismissed and never talked about. Because it is a collection of technologies and principles and ways-of-working, and as such not trivial to grasp, it might not be clear from the first instant if it might have implications on the way you do business or not (see Dvorak quotes below).
  • It’s so easy to be completely negative about something. If you’re positive, it might come over as kissing *ss, but dissing something really makes you look cool (sometimes “teenager cool” with rude language like Go Flock Yourself). If you’re wrong, no one bothers coming back to say “told you so”. I even feel Joel is doing the exact thing he claims to hate: distancing himself from the rest, so they feel silly. “Web 2.0? Oh, that is só summer of 2005!”


Why do I like Web 2.0? I see people enthusiastic again. I see brains working, creativity being appreciated and people setting up new initiatives. These are not people walking round with $$ in their eyes and an “I ♥ I.P.O.” tattoo on their shoulder. But I can tell you it’s more fun to work in IT now than it was 5 years ago.

I predict that people like Joel, who intentionally distance themselves from a bottom-up movement like Web 2.0 because it is fuzzy and incomplete, are in fact labeling themselves as out of touch with the new segment for whom such terms make sense, if only as a means of self-identity. The fact that they don’t make sense to other, older people and outsiders is part of the appeal. It worries me that Joel sounds like a troll here, like PC Magazine’s Dvorak, howling at whatever newfangled stuff is coming down the pike. The message from curmudgeons like that is that everything important has already been invented, catalogued, and understood.
(from corante.com)

Me too, I was reminded of the difference between two posts of John Dvorak in PCMag:

This is followed by a manic period where the new idea is extolled as the next big thing, and nutjobs run around like dogs released from the kennel yapping about how great it is. In this fashion, we have been introduced to podcasting-the next big thing. Too bad it’s a kludge that doesn’t work as advertised unless you have a Macintosh and an iPod.
from Podcasting: Not Ready for Prime Time (Oct 2004)

and

There is no doubt in my mind that podcasting is not only here to stay but will also shortly threaten established media broadcast systems. It’s not so much that they will all be destroyed by homebrew networks, but podcasts will be taking away just enough listeners to be a major concern
from Podcasting: The Next Big Thing (Jun 2005)

That sounds a lot like: “I dont get it, so it’s crap” and “Oh, now I get it, it’s brilliant!”.

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