Are we in a bubble

I don't think we are in another bubble. The only people who would lose are the VCs, rather than last time when joe-public bought IPO stock.

Here's an amusing video from techcrunch. :-)

Motivation for startups

Quite a few of my mates have been talking about trying to start something. I've offered my services.. but I'm fairly sure nothing will come of it.

I think a lot of people love the idea of doing their own thing, being their own boss, taking over the world. The reality is that it's a LOT of hard work and there's an 85% rate of failure.

Me? I'm working for my second startup. (I'm not the founder of either of them). I fully intend to start something, but just can't find any ideas to do.

They say that you should fix something that you find broken. Others would probably have the same problem and you start getting users.

The truth is, I don't I have any problems or irratations. I'm fairly resourceful and if I need to do something, I can usually find some app on the net.

I'm fed up talking to people who want to create another niche social network targeted at people who have turtles as pets (for example). The idea is stale.

The other train of thought which I'm starting to subscribe to, is that you should just build something and target an area with some coverage. The idea is that it will morph into something useful. Well.. I can only hope.. ;-)

Anyway.. what more motivation do you need to go do something?

Evolution of Apple

Saw this interesting picture of Apple's evolution of products.

Google and Facebook

Although I'm on the facebook platform, I'm starting to like it less and less.

I just read on forbes how Zuckerberg was in NY pimping his advertising platforms. I'm not entirely clear, but it doesn't look good for independent developers that create applications on facebook.

It sounds like a "Facebook Advertiser" is going to have their branded applications all over the place, while indie developers are left in the cold.

If a small application developer is under the illusion that he can win a fight with a big-brand widget, that’s a bad plan, says Gerd Leonhard, chief executive of Sonific, which recently launched a music widget on Facebook.

“Facebook is the place where you cut your teeth and see if you have value on lots of networks and platforms,” he says. “If you want to be number one you’ll be hurt by this development. Facebook is cool and everything, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

Yikes!

I've started to look at OpenSocial, the timebomb Google hopes will knock Facebook of their pedestal.

My initial impression wasn't that great. Mostly.. meh. It wasn't the whizz-bang, socket-to-me punch I have come to expect from MountainView. It may grow on me, but I'll reserve my excitement till it bears fruit.

Tim O'Reilly wrote a nice piece called 'It's the data, stupid'.

He has a great example:

Imagine what would have happened to Google maps if instead of supporting mashups, they had built a framework that allowed developers to create mapping applications across Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google as a way of competing with MapQuest. Boring! That's the equivalent of what they've announced here.

I have to agree with him that data mobility is key. It's great for developers that their applications can now run on platform-x and platform-y, but it doesn't look like they will have access to the same data. Not that great for users.

It's made me contemplate creating a microformat based social network, that goes against the trend of creating closely guarded silo's of data. Hmmm..

Earthquake!

Wow.. just felt my first earthquake in the SF Bay area! Magnitude 5.6 and lasted about 10 seconds!

Click the photo below for a better picture.


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Time to move on.

I've decided that it's time to move on from my current work place onto something different. Being employee #6, it's been great to see how the company has grown... but it's time to try something different.

I've always been fascinated by the mobile space. Think 5-10 years to the future. Will desktop computers still be the main access point for connection to the internet? Compare the number of cellphones in the world verses the number of computers.

My bet is that mobile phones/fit-in-your-pocket internet devices will become more powerful and be *the* preferred way to access our content. With the iPhone and the potentials that it brings, we are starting to see a light out of the stagnation that has been the cell phone industry. I lay the blame mostly on the carriers who want to protect their revenue streams, rather than the exceeding slow technology innovation in the US mobile space. Do you see the phones they have in Europe?

I'm very excited to have accepted a position at mywaves.com. They stream video content onto mobile phones and are very good at doing it. 2M users and 10-15K sign up every day! A very exciting and hot space.

I will also be leaving Java behind and moving full time to Ruby-Rails. When I was doing C/C++, I fought so hard to convince people that the future was Java. I have the same feeling now with Ruby. Java has lots of life and be useful for some time, but I feel its use will become more and more diminished going forward. eg. What technologies are startups using? is it Java? its mostly PHP/Ruby-Rails/Python.

I've been doing more and more development (on the side) in Ruby-Rails and its just easier to get results. It's still a little rough at the moment, but do you remember Java 1.0beta ? :) Look how far things have come. My predications is that the trend will go more towards dynamically typed languages and Java will be regarded as C++ is now.

Anyways.. wish me luck.

Botnets top world's top supercomputers!

I chucked when I read this.

It says that the number of comprised Windows computers that are under Storm Worm control, has more raw distributed computing power than the top supercomputers!

It's really a shame that they are being used to send continuous spam.. think of the things that could be solved if used more constructively.

Dynamo, Highly Available Key-value Store from Amazon

This week I went to the geekSessions meetup which was titled 'Designing Beyond the Database'. It was fairly interesting to hear from real companies about the limitations of Relational Databases (for them) and how they've all moved to implementing their own hash to disk mechanisms. Hadoop was mentioned regularly.

I've had a rough idea on how Amazons S3 works, but Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon.. very cool guy imho) talks about a paper they will be releasing about Amazon Dynamo:

.."Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience....

"..Amazon has developed a number of storage technologies, of which the Amazon Simple Storage Service (also available outside of Amazon and known as Amazon S3), is probably the best known. This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, another highly available and scalable distributed data store built for Amazon’s platform. Dynamo is used to manage the state of services that have very high reliability requirements and need tight control over the tradeoffs between availability, consistency, cost-effectiveness and performance."

Some nice reading if your into this stuff! :)

Rainbow table attacks

There's a lot of chat on the ether about Rainbow table cracking.

What is this? Essentially it's a huge text file of precomputed hashes for every (or a LOT) combination of characters.

eg Fgpyyih804423 can be cracked in 160 seconds! :)

Of course, this takes space. From 400MB to 8.7G. That doesn't sound a lot nowadays does it? that why people are starting to get concerned.

It takes a lot of time to generate these, but once they are out there... and you can download them and not to take the compute hit... hmmm..

Now is the time to start thinking about how you are storing your passwords. Your an idiot (yes you are) if it's plaintext in the dbase. Using a salt is very important and can minize the effectiveness of these type of attack. Using MD5 as a hashing algorithm isn't that great as its fast. Fast helps the cracker.. Blowfish is preferable.

Anyways.. heres a link explaining the attack and another very interesting one from a security bloke.

Equity Maths

Trying to understand how VC funding changes your percentage of a company can be confusing. Fortunately Paul Buchheit comes to the rescue.

BarCamp 2007

Last weekend I attended BarCamp and it was fun to mix with my own kind.. i.e developers in the web2.0 space.

Some highlights for me was the session on DataGrids which was about using a large number of servers to solve problems (open source version of google) and Microformats, which was about trying to create a more semantic web.

There were a few people trying to pimp their companies which was a little annoying.. but what can you do?

There are pictures in Wired as well as flickr. Here I am..

Amazons EC2 and S3

I'm looking into using EC2 and S3 for my side projects and for the price they seem like good value.

The setup I'm thinking is a RoR server talking to MySQL. I am concerned about the lack of persistence for EC2.

What happens is your disk gets wiped if your EC2 instance ever crashes. There doesn't seem to be an easy solution for this. There's lots of articles about replicating the database between two instances and taking regular backups and dumping them on S3, but in trying to keep up with my philosophy of KISS.. this is a pain.

I found this article if your interested about it. Heres the main amazon site.

MacOSX applications for web development

If you're just starting out web development on the Mac, heres a link with the top applications that you might want to consider.

Facebook creating their own search engine

Interesting post by Aditya Agarwal about how facebook created their own search engine. Facebook is a closed system and not spidered by google with 30 millions users wanting search.

What they did was spider their own site and created a reverse-index.

Heres some staggering facts:

- Over 600 million searches per month.
- Approximately 1 terabyte of in-memory data.
- Average search query time of less than 100ms.

The results are more relevant because its based on your social graph distance. ie People you know are more relevant.

Nicely done.

Fast-Flux Service Networks

Here's a link to a very interesting explanation of fast-flux services networks. This is the next level beyond spam bots.

They use revolving dns entries and nameservers (to avoid detection) and hit proxy zombie machine for content. These zombies in turn pull their content from some other machine!

Ted vids

Although I was familiar with TED, I didn't realize they post their videos.

Go check them out. Lots of good stuff.

Web frameworks compared.

Nice video from Nasa comparing the J2EE, Rails, Zope, Turbo Gears and DJango web frameworks.

Conclusion? Java sucks for webapps because it doesn't allow for quick turnarounds for the UI. If you really want to create webapps your going to have to learn a new language.

I have to agree here. Using Java/Hibernate and XML for configuration starts to get tiring after a while.

All my home projects are now in Rails and ruby isn't exactly rocket science.

iPhone - The Second coming

Well the iPhone has finally arrived. I went to my local Apple store just before midnight to check it out and it was surprisingly busy. I was fortunate that I didn't have to wait to get my mitts on it. :)

Of course I loved it to bits. You can really see how things will change in the future. Google maps was cool. Safari and web browsing was pleasant. (Not sure if I was on Edge or Wifi). The pinch zoom effect was intuitive.. but the virtual keyboard will take some time to get the hang of.

I've always been less than impressed by the mobile phones currently out there. They all seem to have mostly the same functionality but somehow haphazardly bolted together. They mostly have web browsers, music players and applications, but how many of these features are actually used?

I remember playing with my wifes Samsung i730. It had bluetooth, wifi and the so-called fast EV-DO network. Firstly it had windows mobile (or whatever they call it now) running on it, which was clunky as always. The phone had buttons *ALL* over the side. Just the act of picking it up, caused you to press several buttons which changed the volume and turned things on and off. I refused to use it because of this.

Apple again has found that people want advanced features but in a simplistic innovative way. Kudos.

First kiss

My first computer I used was the TRS 80 MODEL III. I was 11 years old and knew immediately how I wanted to spend my life. We used to go after school to the special room which had computers, to play video games. Mostly a space invaders clone and a multi-user tron game.

I got board relatively quickly and wanted to know how it all worked and so started trying to make my own. I started in BASIC but found it too slow for games and progressed to Z80 machine code. Since I didn't have an assembler, I had to type the hex codes by hand. *sigh*

Looking at the specs it was ridiculous underpowered (compared to today). 16K of RAM 2MHz CPU (Zilog Z80 to those that are interested).

That was 26 years ago. I have no doubt that I will look back in 26 years time and smirk of what I had to do in 2007..

Let me know in the comments what you started on.

SteveJ answers questions

SJ answers questions at the recent shareholders meeting. I find it interesting that he said that selling Tiger as a low cost option to 3rd World countries (while everyone else would be on Leopard) was an option.  

I found it disturbing about the reports that MSFT is trying to install windows on the OLPC.  SJ wanted to give OSX away for that platform but they declined. 

Anything that gets OSX out-there is a good thing.