Friday, January 30, 2009

Fractal Zoom video with Ellipsis

Here is a collaboration between Eric Bigas, who makes Fractal Zoom videos and the band Fractal who have provided Ellipsis as the soundtrack to this video.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Fractal Performing Monkey's Paw at Hotel Utah

All the songs in Fractal's set in SF are now up on YouTube, I also recorded the Seattle and Portland gigs but had problems getting a good quality soundtrack to the video. The short and intense finale to their set is Monkey's Paw. Fractal and Headshear will be back at the Hotel Utah in SF on Saturday April 18th, put it in your calendar now!

Thursday, January 22, 2009

What's on my iPhone: i.Wund.com

My favorite weather app is actually a lauchpad bookmarked web site rather than an appstore download. http://i.wund.com/ is an iPhone optimized version of the Weather Underground site www.wunderground.com that I upload to from the personal weather station at my house. The best features are a zoomable local weather radar view, and the option to show the detailed technical weather forecast in the form that meterologists use to talk to each other, rather than the dumbed down version everyone else sees.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

What's on my iPhone: apps I don't use

Last.fm, VNC, Remote, Weatherbug. I installed these but never use them. I tend to listen to Pandora, don't need a remote console, find the Apple remote inconvenient to start up and prefer other weather apps.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Netflix: I'm hiring a very senior engineer / application architect

Here's the details and links to apply via http://jobs.netflix.com.

Netflix really is one of the best places to work and we are hiring strongly, there are several other openings for engineers and managers in Web Engineering. We are very picky, only hire the best people and the best fit for the job...

Good luck!

The Position:
As a leading member of the Merchandising Systems development team, you will re-define the website architecture into components and services, enhancing the agility and pace of development at Netflix as we scale up and leverage cloud computing technologies to support our personalized movie selection algorithms. As an exceptionally talented and experienced architect you will hold your own among a very demanding peer group, you will learn a lot and so will we.

Netflix is scaling the company by increasing talent density in high performance, experienced and motivated teams. There is a flat organization, minimal process, and an emphasis on inter-personal over-communication to stay coordinated while keeping everything extremely agile.

Responsibilities will include:
• Architectural leadership, broad knowledge of cloud/web services and object oriented technologies and designs
• You will need to clearly articulate your design choices, mentoring and educating our engineering community
• Hands on coding of the key objects and interfaces that define the architectural boundaries of components and services
• Untangling existing subsystems using tools such as Structure 101, re-organizing build systems to create re-usable component jars
• Migration of existing SQL based persistence models to distributed forms that efficiently scale to hold billions of data items for tens of millions of customers

Qualifications:
• 10+ years of application development experience, agile methods and architectural responsibility
• Mastery of object oriented architecture and design in Java
• Experience with high-traffic, highly scaling, multi-threaded distributed software design patterns
• Deep conceptual understanding of scalability, performance, queuing, availability, coherency, caching, synchronization
• Fluency in SQL and an expert in the evolution of persistent storage: Sharding, Hadoop, Eventual Consistency, SimpleDB, Dynamo
• Demonstrated ability to publish and present your ideas via conference presentations, technical blog postings, or published books or papers
• A Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science or equivalent engineering discipline

Characteristics of Success at Netflix:
• Freedom with responsibility. A focus on effective execution
• Strong customer orientation, both internally and externally
• Strategic thinking both technically and business-wise
• Self motivated / self starter
• Personal drive to achieve world class software development
• Desire to work in a fast-paced, evolving, growing, dynamic environment
• Love of technical challenges and a sense of pride in solving them
• Ability to work well in a cross functional environment

Friday, January 16, 2009

What's on my iPhone: Currency and Light

Currency makes it easy to keep track of how far the pound has fallen so far (which makes me happy because I get more for my dollars) and Light is trivial but very useful. It just turns on a full brightness white screen that makes a good flashlight.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Fractal Gig - Saturday Jan 17th - Hotel Utah San Francisco

I'm inflicting some new music by Fractal on people who visit my blog... They have just released their new CD Sequitur, which contains a varied mix of quite unique and hard to categorize music. I hope to see people at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco on Saturday, and for those of you in Seattle, they are playing Thursday 22nd, and Portland OR on Friday 23rd. Please connect to Fractal via Myspace or Facebook or Bebo.

Capacity Planning for Cloud Computing - circa 2003

Here is a link to a slideshare upload, of a talk I gave publicly in 2003, on Capacity Planning for Virtualized Datacenters (known as N1 at the time, which can be seen as a nascent approach to cloud computing).

I think it contains some interesting ideas, and dates reasonably well. I'm going to revisit some of these concepts as I think more about how to do capacity planning in the cloud.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

what's on my iPhone: Bloomberg

The built in stock market app just gives prices but I use the Bloomberg app to get news and more detailed information on stocks.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Solid State Disks - 1 TB in a 2.5 inch announced

Like I said... the next thing for SSD's is to have higher storage capacity in each of the form factors than spinning rust. Here's another step in that direction. http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/10/puresilicon-introduces-worlds-first-1tb-2-5-inch-ssd/. SSD's already have disks beaten on all the performance metrics. This one maxes out the SATA interface and does 300MBytes/s transfer rates.

I've also been seeing prices dropping as volumes increase for laptops with SSDs. I think the end of the line for rust will be 2010, as SSD's will no longer have a worse cost/GB and they already have higher capacity and performance.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

What's on my iPhone: Easy Wi-Fi

You can get free AT&T Wifi at Starbucks, and this app streamlines the process of getting online.

Friday, January 09, 2009

What's on my iPhone: Facebook

Works better than the web site... its also my main mechanism for photo-blogging, sharing something I've seen.

Sunday, January 04, 2009

What's on my iPhone: my Pandora station

Pandora is one of my favorite apps. You can listen to Adrian's Prog Radio station too.

What's on my iPhone: Night Camera

Its very simple but it works amazingly well. When its dark, most non-flash digital pictures suffer from a lot of motion blur due to camera shake. The night camera app uses the accelerometer to wait until the camera has been still for long enough to get a clear picture.

Twitter fodder

I just used twitterfeed.com to tweet when I blog (infrequently).