Author: 1

insomnia – the movies

daily life media

A while back I watched Insomnia, I think I found it by some lateral IMDB connection of its director Chris Nolan. It was not bad for most parts. Watching the DVD extras I found out ,that this was actually a remake of a swedish movie with the same title. Since that was the only choice I got the stupidly overpriced criterion disc.

Watching the US remake and original revealed some american movie codes that -looking at them in the light of these films- are just plain stupid. Essential story points got bent. It was not that horrible to watch Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank act in the 2002 version. The original rarely reveals the thesping. People, surroundings and the issues suggested simply feel more reel. All the style, sound design, fog, acting and writing in serpentines to avoid a dog being shot make the US version feel dense, crafted and inept compared to the original.

The swedish film is certainly not without its flaws. But Insomnia is a remake that makes you wonder why there is such as thing a remake.

5.6

M$

five point six appears to be a good guess for the number of Cheops pyramids that could have been built in the time that people spent trying to work around Internet Explorer.

list of people with more servers than INTERDUBS

interdubs internet technology

An interesting collection of more or less vague ‘cloud sizes’. My guess is that most of these machines are no longer specialized hardware or workstations. Explains why Sun -for instance- is having such a hard time. Once you scale well in software and do handle hardware failures in that layer too there is really no need for expensive irons. I wonder how many of those large footprint installs run Windows like operating systems.

the beauty of the API

interdubs technology

The main purpose of the API for INTERDUBS was to let my clients use it programmatically. Their system control INTERDUBS in a way that fits best into their workflow. That is what the API was made for, and it works. Every day.

Interestingly there are other, somewhat more surprisingly, benefits to having an Application Programmable Interface to a system too. This week I had a discussion with a client where they outlined specific needs in respect to their data that they have in INTERDUBS. They could have updated things manually, but that would have taken a very long time. By using the API myself it actually took me not that long to implement their needs. I spent only slightly more time on it than the actual discussion took that we had about their needs. This was very nice to see. And actually quiet unexpected. If the next client needs something similar I will be able to solve this in five minutes.

everybody has the tools

history internet media

Tools for people to create content of any kind are widely available since a long time. Still it feels rare when there is something like this.

billions never hurt

misc

the new new new thing

mother of all bubbles

misc

I found this to be interesting with a great list of sources that illustrate the history of bubbles. Bubble History by Caslon Analytics

twitter for INTERDUBS

interdubs technology

Let’s see if people are interested in getting updates about INTERDUBS via twitter:


http://twitter.com/interdubs

Having seen meme’s come and go together with their tools I am extremely neutral on any new technology that comes up. Does not stop me from seeing if it could be useful.

As usual I try and then see what happens. Easier to ‘do’ and then see instead of having endless evaluations and discussions about something.

Four days of work for 0.8% improvement

interdubs technology

Four days of intense work for less than a percent of improvement sounds not like a great use of my time. But I am actually very happy about the outcome: I was able to increase the success rate of clip meta data detection in INTERDUBS by 0.8%. This is great since it went up from 98.8% to 99.6%. Or looking at it from the other end: two third of all flawed detections were and will be corrected with the improved code. One of the benefits of having 100,000s of clips online is to be able run simulations and stats while improving the code. There is a wide variety in what people like to use as their encoding and file format. I’d rather do some more -invsible- work on the backend than to lecture my clients on how exactly they should encode their files. There are recommendations. Sure. But why fail if you don’t have to?

Even though this application of Grubers Broken Windows is seemingly invisible, in the end it certainly is not: A well running system just needs less support per client. Actually so far I was able to decrease the total time spent on support. Despite the fact that the client based tripled last year.

keyboard illumination control

Apple

Couldn’t read the keyboard under the current lighting conditions. And manual controls for changing it did not work. Enter: Lab Tick.

45 seconds later it’s all good again. Very nice when stuff just works.