ProjectX Blog

Here are the slides from our talks at Bar camp.

John & Paul on “Why your website is SLOW and how you can make it fast!” – John’s slides in PDF (2.2Mb) and Paul’s slides in PDF (87K )

Tom on “Space, Place and the meaning of Where” – (Powerpoint 7.5Mb and Openoffice 7Mb)

We had a great time talking to everyone and putting faces to some famous bloggers.

Kudos to both Mike’s, Nat and Fronde staff for putting on a fantastic event!

Here a svg image of the time line of the various web browsers.

I wonder if someone is game enough to make a timeline for mobile browsers

Mike sent me this link of a Google Tech talk on “Scalability at Youtube”.

Its a interesting read for a number of reasons:

• You Tube had a tiny technical team that built and ran the site.
• They show why the used various webserver configurations – apache vs squid vs lighttpd
• It explains why development of lighttpd 1.5 has stalled. (they developed the code to integrate libaio into lighttpd 1.5 and once they were brought by google they moved to google big table)
• Introduces the concept of database partitioning or shards

Enjoy!

(From Slashdot)

Here’s a presentation from this year’s Sig-graph about techniques for content aware image resizing. There’s a youtube video of the presentation and pdf of their research.

Using the techniques you can resize image and remove non-important components of the image. These techniques will pay dividends in developing content for mobile devices. Especially as images take up a high percentage of the total page size.

Just found a link to highscalability.com, the site is an aggregation of links, articles and blog posts about scalability. They have a lot of good overviews of various techniques and some good advice.

Here’s my pick of interesting articles:

• Denormalising your way to Speed and Profit
• Running Hadoop MapReduce on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3
• Try Squid as a Reverse Proxy
• An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard
• Product: Hbase

<rant>

I’ve just trying to figure out why my windows XP is running like a dog. I have discovered two alarming things.

1. Windows Divx codec and player installs a toolbar that seems to appear every 2-3 minutes  in the system tray. After some googling I found that I have to download ToggleToolbar.exe to turn it off. What the f**k ??? Why do I have to download a program to turn off a system tray icon.
2. Google Desktop. I’ve had a love / hate relationship with google desktop. I love that I can search my machine for emails, documents etc. There are a couple of things that I hate. First, its steals my window focus all the time. I tried uninstalling some widgets but it still does it. And Second it has serious memory leaks. This morning the Desktop grew to 1.7Gb of Virtual Memory. ARRRGGGHHH. So I did as little experiment I close all the widgets and left it running from the toolbar. It grew to 700Mb within about an hour. So, bye bye Google desktop.

</rant>

A mac is looking more and more inviting everyday…

As spotted on Digg…

Here’s a Microsoft error message:

Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password that meets these requirements in both text boxes.

As they say you’re only as good as your password….

With all the recent discussions on Rod’s blog about Mobile pricing, some respite may soon be on the way. Telstra Clear have publically announced that they are launching soon. Hooray, hopefully we’ll get some competition.

Here’s what I’d like to see.

• Hygiene factors: Good Coverage, good quality sound and sim card compatibility, good customer service, and a good website so that I can customise what I need.
• Flat SMS rates 5c max for both Domestic and International ($10 txt has been out for years – Stop bundling and just set a lower cost.)
• Realistic pricing structure for SMS services – 5-7% royalty based on volume
• Data bundles $25 for 1Gb or $1 per 10 Mb adhoc
• Release Cell Tower ID’s so that we can unlock the world of location based services

What do you want to have from your Mobile provider?

Forgot running a webserver on your computer, phone or pda. We have reached the epitome of low-fi webservers – SpudServer: a “12 core” potato webserver. (Brings new meaning to the webserver farm!)

Frederic White built a stripped down webserver powered by potatoes. He has written a full account of his experiment on his site. The server was capable of a whopping 0.2 requests per second!

Only a couple of drawbacks, potatoe power lasts about 14 days and then there’s what to do with all the rotting potatoes.

Just think Trade Me could place their server farm with 20,000 pototoes. No more sys-admin, just hire some farmers. That keep the costs down!

Alex Iskold at the ReadWriteWeb has cast another look at Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”. The concept has been at the cornerstone of a lot of technology thinking. Even John O’Hara’s book “Commercialising Innovation” is heavily based on it. Alex has hit the nail on the head by highlighting the following problem …

The problem is that compared to a few years ago, the speed with which new technologies are coming to the market has increased dramatically. All these technologies are aimed at the early adopters. And they love it and they try it. But the question is what happens when your early adopters run off to play with a new great thing before you have a chance to take your technology mainstream?

Yesterday’s Friendster is today’s MySpace and tomorrow’s Facebook.



This is actually nothing new, Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” has a case study of the disk drive industry and shows how the disruptive innovations in the disk technology often left the current market leaders in the dust.

What is an entrepreneur to do ????