Technology

One of the promises of the internet has always been the collapsing of the pipeline between content creators and content consumers. We have already witnessed this phenomonen in the newspaper industry as the cost of distributing news fell from over $100 per subscriber per year to fractions of a penny.

As internet technology improves the same will happen to movies and television. Vuze, formerly Azureus, is a Silicon Valley startup that is at the forefront of this trend. By utilitizing peer-to-peer Bittorrent technology, Vuze has inverted the usual relationship in video streaming between scale and performance. Most internet streaming video degrades less than gracefully as more users watch a given stream. With peer-to-peer technology, the more people who watch the same show as you, the better your quality will be. Not only that, as more viewers join the network, the cost of delivering a high definition video stream to your TV, iPod or laptop declines to zero. With millions of concurrent users at any one time on the Vuze HD network (as of July 2009), you can be sure that someone will be watching what you are.

Just as the newspaper empires took over a decade to crumble, it’s likely that the large production studios will defend their fortresses for as long as possible. But in the long run, creative producers and quality content will gravitate to the cheapest distribution network. Consumers will pay less for their television shows, and the people who create the shows we watch will keep more of the profit.

It’s a pity that Yahoo is still maintaining the 5000 query limit per IP address. 5000 stock quotes is the equivalent of 10 years of daily data for two companies only.

One of the major issue with large data centers is power. This is applicable to both large data centers like Microsoft / Google and also to large Enterprise Data Centers which are very energy inefficient.

Definition of Power Effectiveness: Data Center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is defined as the ration of data center power to IT (server) power draw. Thus a PUE of 2.0 means that the data center must draw 2 Watts for every 1 Watt of power consumed by IT (server) equipment. The ideal number would be 1.0, which means there is zero overhead. The overhead power is used by lightning, power delivery, UPS, chillers, fans, air-conditioning etc. Google claims to have achieved a PUE of 1.3 to 1.7. Microsoft runs somewhere close to 1.8. Most of Corporate America runs between 2.0 and 2.5.

A typical large data center these days costs in the range of $150 Million to $300 Million depending upon the size and location. A 15 MW data center facility is approximately $200 million. This is the capital cost so it is depreciated over time.

Most of the facility cost is power related. Anywhere  from 75% to 80% of the cost is power (pdu, chiller, ups, etc).

A typical 15MW datacenter with 50,000 servers costs about  $6.0 million per month for operating expense (excluding people cost) and the share of power infrastructure (pdu, chiller, ups, etc) is between 20% to 24% and actual power for the servers is 18% to 20%. Thus total power cost is between 38% to 44%. These numbers reflect what Microsoft / Google would do. EPA has done a study and they believe these numbers are close to 50% for inefficient data centers.

If you use Google Analytics’ Site Overlay functionality, it occasionally results in a white or gray haze over your website which prevents you from clicking on any of the links.

The good news is that your browser is the only one affected (none of your customers will see the same effect). All you have to do to fix the problem on your end is clear your cookies (specifically a cookie called GASO).

I’ve been playing around with Wolfram Alpha’s new computational knowledge engine and it seems to need a lot of work before it becomes more than an exotic curiosity. I entered the following query:

US Debt / US GDP

and it returns the following answer:

0.585 years (2007 estimate)

I’m not sure how to interpret that but it seems ominous!

The thought of managing accounts with 450 different ad networks made my head hurt so I signed up with Rubicon Project .  They claim to optimize the ads on your blog and show better performing ads more frequently. It’s been running for over a week on my blog and (as you can probably see on the sidebar to the right), I’m still running public service ads for the Red Cross. The dashboard on Rubicon Project’s website says that it’s still activating, though.

Update: The reason no ads were running is that I had forgotten to add baseline ad tags from Google and Rubicon Project has limited inventory in the 200×200 size that I had chosen (since it fits nicely in my sidebar). Their customer service is very helpful, though, and they were excellent at clarifying what I’d done wrong.

If you want to share video and visual information from your desktop you should check out Dyyno. They have combined some pretty cool video compression technology with a peer-to-peer networking layer and the result is very slick.

Their technology provides the plumbing for Xfire’s live video service. It’s still in beta but if you need a WoW fix, that’s the site to visit.

About two years ago I began to dabble in web development and I finally understand why the cognoscenti loathe Internet Explorer. On both of my websites, things just seem to work consistently across Firefox, Safari and Chrome (my browser of choice for its blazing speed). On IE, though, there are invariably a whole slew of layout problems and different interpretations of what I’m trying to achieve. Things seem marginally better in IE8 but many of the problems persist.

Hopefully, as IE’s market share declines, Microsoft will be forced to conform to the standards.

On local machine:

Enter at command prompt: ’ssh-keygen -t dsa’. Use the default locations and don’t enter a passphrase.

Then ssh to server using:

ssh username@yourdomain.com ‘test -d .ssh || mkdir -m 0700 .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 0600 .ssh/*’ < ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub

After you enter your password the first time you will no longer have to enter it.

The following gems and plugins are the most popular as of Nov 12th, 2008:

• Javascript Framework: jQuery (56%), Prototype (43%)
• Skeleton: Bort
• Mocking: Mocha
• Exception Notification: Hoptoad
• Full text search: Thinking Sphinx
• Uploading: Paperclip
• User authentication: Restful_authentication (keep an eye on Authlogic)
• HTML/XML Parsing: Hpricot
• View Templates: Haml

NewRelic has a good article on the state of the Rails stack.