Friends

krow

05:39 pm - Dear Lazy Web, Mucho Disks

Dear LazyWeb,

Guess what?

I've run out of disk space yet again :(

I'm looking at the 6 Bay ReadyNas, but... I am wondering if I could also just pick up a USB case that can house half a dozen or more hot swappable drives.

Anyone have any favorite solutions right now? (please note... I hate putting together Linux based systems so I am for plug/play or appliance). The Drobo used to look nice but the last time I looked they were charging for bug fixes and that just pisses me off :(

Thanks!
-Brian

lj_spotlight

ljspotlight

09:38 am - 12/21/09 Homepage Spotlight

i_hope_that
For many of us, the holidays can be kind of rough. If you're searching for a network of understanding friends, this ultra-nurturing community encourages you to express your heartfelt wishes and offer other members encouragement and acceptance. Not for the terminally snarky or emotionally-challenged, this is a good-spirited place to lend comfort and support.

lj_spotlight

ljspotlight

09:37 am - 12/21/09 Homepage Spotlight

diygifts
Feeling crafty? If you've got a few last folks on your holiday gift list, this is a great place to seed your creativity and generosity. You'll also discover wonderful DIY tips to decorate your home and entertain guests. Offering a no-frills-no-skills attitude that welcomes the cash-challenged and arts-phobic, you're sure to get ideas and make friends in the process.

lj_spotlight

ljspotlight

09:36 am - 12/21/09 Homepage Spotlight

cooking_club
A fun and friendly community dedicated to those who love to cook, whether you're a meat-and-potatoes type, an aspiring gourmand, and/or a vegan. In search of a brilliant dish to use up those weekly leftovers? Post your ingredients and you'll be whipping up a feast by dinner. You can also share favorite recipes. For Type A chefs, you can spice up your culinary repertoire with exciting cooking challenges.

fallenpegasus

11:25 am - I predicted the new AWS EC2 "Spot Instance" pricing model a year and a half ago

Way back in 2008-05-30, in this post, I said the following:

But then I realized that the better way would be to do it as a continuous dutch auction. I would specify the most per instance-hour I was willing to pay, and EC2 works out the lowest price across the entire universe of currently outstanding bids that will completely fill the capacity available for these things. As more people come into the system and bid for capacity, my instance-hour price I am paying can rise or fall based on everyone else's bids, and I could have my instances shut down if the current market clearing price rises higher than my set max bid.

There is competition to EC2 coming online soon. Eventually, someone is going to try this charging model.

If I was to build an EC2-like system, it's the charging model I would use. It would most perfectly capture and monetize my value to my users, giving me the largest possible income for the value I am providing, which I can use to build more capacity. It would also give me a much better and smoother signal to how much my users like my system, other than "there is more capacity than is being used, I overbuilt" or "I'm oversubscribed, and at 100% utilization, I need to build out more".

As long as *anyone* bids into the auction, for more than the equipment capital and power cost of running their jobs, and yet doesn't get any cycles, because someone richer has outbid them, that signals to me, the grid operator, that it will be worth investing in more grid.

rezendi

01:44 pm - Meme

Via autopope via nwhyte,

"List the towns or cities where you spent at least a night away from home during 2009. Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays:"

*Toronto
*New York City
Rio de Janeiro
São Paulo
Curitiba
Morretes
Foz do Iguaçu
Puerto Iguazú
Posadas
*Buenos Aires
El Calafate
El Chaltén
Longboat Key
*Kitchener-Waterloo
*Paris
Calais
*London (UK)
Gravenhurst
*Syracuse
*Montreal
Boston
Chicago
Cambridge (UK)
Reykjavik
Akranes
San Francisco
Monterey

I think that's it. A relatively short list, for me. (2007 would have been smaller, but 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008 probably longer.)

fallenpegasus

11:50 pm - Playing with QR Codes

lawgon

09:39 am - certification launched

I have launched my long dreamed-of certification. Lets see what happens now. http://certificate.nrcfoss.au-kbc.org.in

lawgon

09:03 am - no more windoze bashing

it is axiomatic that one should not talk about things one does not know of. I have suddenly realised that the last time I seriously used windoze was in around 98. After that, I have used windows to browse in net cafes on a couple of occasions and in a friends house once or twice. So I know nothing about windoze - so am not competent to talk about it.

swanhart

05:24 pm - When is MySQL going to get a global transaction ID in the binary log?

MySQL 5.5 includes a number of features first implemented by the "Google patch", but in a different way. One feature in the patch that is still missing from 5.5 appears to be a monotonically increasing transaction identifier in the binary log.

I'm wondering where this feature is on the roadmap, and if we are likely to see it in one of the upcoming milestones?

lj_spotlight

ljspotlight

05:33 pm - 12/14/09 Homepage Spotlight

stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.

rezendi

12:47 am - Photo credits

Well, that's nice: the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia in in Mexico City is apparently going to use this picture of mine of Rwanda as part of their permanent exhibition:


I took that with a disposable camera on a creaky-even-by-African-standards-but-mercifully-half-empty bus from Kigali to Ruhengeri. The other passengers around me watched carefully as I waited for the right moment, and applauded when I pushed the button, which presumably means I timed it right. I hope the museum cleans up (or crops) that lens artifact to the right. And that they don't try to blow it up large: the scan didn't have that many DPI, and Lord only knows where the negative is now.

While I'm at it, other shots of mine that have appeared somewhere or other:


St. Petersburg canal. enRoute magazine paid me a hunnert bucks and ran it a couple of years ago.


Habitat '67. Appeared in the Westport Arts Centre in Westport, CT, and on the back page of Multi-Family Executive magazine, and in Ambiente y Color Magazine in Puerto Rico. (Plus its 30 kviews on Flickr.)


The Qingzang Railway across Tibet. Appeared in the newsletter of the company that built the train, which was kinda gratifying.


Durres, Albania. Used by the Global Heritage Fund, which tries to save endangered world heritage sites.


San Francisco Bay near Oakland. Shot of the day at the Nature Conservancy's web site sometime this year.


Lake Kivu, Rwanda/Congo. Used (without any permission request or attribution other than "Flickr", I might add) by Global Envision, some kind of free-market NGO or something.


Windsor Station, Montreal. Used in Schmap Montreal.


Used in some NowPublic article or other.


Qingzang Railway, again. Used in some NowPublic article or other.


...I think that's pretty much it.

fallenpegasus

10:48 am - On our way to Santarchy

Santas, originally uploaded by FallenPegasus.

rezendi

11:12 am - Things I didn't realize

You can't make a book available on a Kindle¹ for free. Minimum price is $0.99. Amazon occasionally makes books free for awhile at a publisher's request, but only they can do so.

Also, if you self-publish to Amazon, your royalty rate is a whopping² 35%, compared to the 50% that publishers get for non-exclusive ebook deals, and 70% for exclusive.

I am not appalled by either of these things, but I am somewhat surprised by both. As in, I think both are bad business decisions by Amazon; they should be trying to establish/cement the Kindle's status as the ebook platform of choice, not nickel-and-diming, or at least not yet.

(What brought this up? Well, I've finished the rewrite of Beasts of New York, which made me wonder about making the CC-released version 1.0 available for Kindle, especially as somebody else has produced a rather nice PDF version of it, with a cover and a decent layout. (But they probably didn't fix the typos, alas.) Also, the US and UK electronic rights to Dark Places have reverted back to me, and I'm planning to CC-release it as well sometime next year, although I'd be more enthusiastic about that if I could find a name online publication willing to serialize it.)

¹By which I mean publishing via Amazon's Digital Publishing interface and thus making a book searchable on Amazon and instantly downloadable via Whispernet; obviously Kindles can read PDFs etc, but it's far less convenient.

²Sarcasm.

manish_chaks

10:27 am - A glimpse of life inside thoughtworks studios

Thanks Vivek, Jayanth and Thrivikram for you..

For all the pics, go here

lj_spotlight

ljspotlight

10:14 am - 12/14/09 Homepage Spotlight

taste_buds
Holidays provide a built-in excuse for indulgent entertaining. This all-purpose foodie community covers everything from homemade hangover cures to dinner party menus. Need quick advice? Get five-minute snack suggestions, low-fat ingredient substitutes, and even measurement conversions. Delicious recipes garnished with humorous advice. Yum.

lj_spotlight

ljspotlight

10:09 am - 12/14/09 Homepage Spotlight

naturesbeauty
Always on the lookout for compelling images, we were delighted to discover this flourishing community of artists who share a love of nature. Honoring the subject with photographs, paintings, sketches, prose, poetry, and other creative works, you'll be simultaneously riveted to your monitor and inspired to run helter skelter towards the nearest wooded dale.

rezendi

12:27 pm - The Watts Event

It is safe to say that the Watts Event has not gone unnoticed by media both traditional and non-. And I am gladdened by this.

But I would particularly like to point people to papersky's take on it all:

One of the things that's making me angry about the Peter Watts thing, beyond the fact that it's happened at all, is the way so many people in comments at BoingBoing and at Whatever and all over are saying that it must be his fault, that he must have done something to provoke it, that it wouldn't have happened if he'd been polite and done what he was told and if he had, in effect, cringed more.

This may well be the case.

But is that the world you want to live in?

When I was growing up, in the Cold War, we talked about the Free World. In the Free World you didn't have to present papers endlessly, you didn't have to cringe before authority, everyone was equal before the law, people didn't disappear. The Free World was better than the Soviet world that was the enemy in those days. Not fearing the police and the army and the border guards is part of that freedom. They are public servants, they are people doing a potentially dangerous job and they deserve respect, and so do we deserve respectful treatment from them. There might be circumstances in which they have to kill people, in which that's appropriate behaviour, but it should never be appropriate for them to behave as if they have arbitrary power and expect reactions of fear and cringing.

More here: Is this the kind of world you want?