Simple is Beautiful

My brother provided me with a theme for my blog. Its pretty clean and simple - yet not a simple or clean as I would have wanted it to be, but that's entirely my fault. Its a matter of modifying the structure of the various elements and using font families and colors that make sense.

I purchased two iPhones from Las Vegas ( Thank you for the invitation Patrick ). I used to dislike cell phones with a passion. Especially those engineered by Nokia. Complicated for no reason, cumbersome to use, fancy for the sake of being fancy and loaded with a gazillion crappy applications and 'services'. The only cell phone I actually liked was the original Nokia phone ( short-lived moment of glory for them ) used in the Matrix 1 movie. So, naturally, my expectations were rather low when it came to putting the iPhone to the test.

"The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile phone". It actually is. Everything just works, supported by an ultra sleek UI, robust facilities and solid design decisions. It is by far the best mobile device I ever used, far surpassing any expectations I may have had.

Amazon kick-started the cloud computing era by introducing an ever expanding array of facilities and services, from S3 to EC2, to SimpleDB. Microsoft is entering the game with SSDS. Google made available a dozen APIs and WebService as a means to interfacing with their core services but everyone knew Google would come after Amazon and co, big time. It did. What is perhaps the most important benefit and side-effect of the availability of such a platform is that the everyone can build any web application without having to shelling out for the kind of resources that would have made this application possible. The AppEngine service is going to provide everyone with free access to resources and documentation - all one would need to do is signup with them, build the application on his computer using the provided SDK and then push it back to the cloud. Once the application gets successful (say, 4-5 million page views / month ) that said developer would pay Google for access to more resources. Everyone wins.

I am looking forward to similar offerings from IBM and Sun. For those who are into buzzwords, Web3.0 is here.

We are seriously considering offloading some of our data storage and hosting needs to Amazon Web Services, and if that works out - it most certainly will - we 'll offload some more and take it from there.

Amazon has quietly been building a google-grade, highly scalable, reliable and distributed in nature infrastructure, while most folks would disregarding it as an e-tailer. The largest e-tailer, but 'just' an e-tailer nevertheless. They were wrong. Bezos is not to be taken lightly.

Secure Storage Service(S3) is the AWS's flagship service. In short, it allows for 'unlimited' data storage and access of arbitrary data objects ( AKA files ) consolidated into buckets ( psudo-directories ). Its trivial to access the service via its XML (REST and SOAP ) based API. Its super-cheap ( especially if you happen to be dealing with the kind of price tags ISPs in Greece attach to their related offerings ) and, how about that, it works.

It's been suggested before and it gets more obvious by the day. With a very little sum of money, lots of will and dedication and, preferably, with a good idea to ago along, a bunch of guys can build the next Youtube. Delegate the storage and hosting to AWS, setup a few servers ( you can 'hire' virtual servers on AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud for 10 cents / hour ) to do your bidding, use blogs for free ( and highly effective ) PR, and hey-presto, money and fame are pouring in.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and an ever increasing companies are offering similar services ( software as a service, where did I here that before ) which you can bring in together, mash-them-up and you are set. Scalability, distribution and reliability is implicitly guaranteed by the service providers. We are entering this business sooner or later. All our services ( we love modules and components here ) have been designed to be accessible via XML (XML-RPC, REST, SOAP, JSON etc) . Also, we are big on clusters and fault tolerant systems so just about everything is already in place. In fact, everything has been in place for over 5 or so years, since we switched to the new architecture model.

We live in interesting times. Interesting things happen all the time. Go ahead, build the next big thing and contribute to that interest factor. Trust me, you are going to have a whole lot of fun doing it.

Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL. Highly recommended.

I wish I could be able to attend this conference on scalability. Its one of the aspects of computer 'science' that interests me the most. Alas, it takes place in Seattle, some gatrillion miles away from here

I have been looking into Google's GData protocol lately, mainly out of frustration which is rooted to the peculiarities and conflicts between the various RSS versions and revisions ( needed for a tiny project we are working on ).

Google is driven forward by some extremely smart folks. Some of those folks decided to adopt open standards and protocols ( HTTP, ATOM, etc ) for providing the sort of functionality that allows developers to request(GET) and update/insert (PUT) objects and properties of those objects. Because both requests and responses are encapsulated in ATOM entries, and because the parsing and assembling ATOM feeds is straight forward, simple and standardized, it makes it extremely easy for Google and outside developers alike to fully utilize this architecture.

Hopefully, we 'll begin exporting at least some of the functionality of Pathfinder Services sooner or later - it will be more than interesting to see what our users can come up with.

Python at Google : Use replication for capacity and fault tolerance. Application servers save the day.

Introducing "Testing on the Toilet".

So the great folks at Google decided to use the combined 'wisdom' of the crowd in order to tag their images and to get that done ( because people would never really do it if there wasn't something in for them, too ), they licensed the concept of a game, invited in the people ( word of mouth, such a great thing ) and now they are harvesting their fruits of their work. The idea is that you go to the image labeler website whereas you are invited to 'play' against another, randomly selected person, whereas play is defined as an effort to pickup the best ( the ones you consider more relevant, that is ) tags for an image within a finite amount of time units. Same goes for your opponent. For every tag that you selected and your opponent has also selected, you earn points. And you go on and on selecting points, going up the score ladder and all that.

In effect, this gives Google so much valuable and mostly accurate information on all those images they have retrieved, in the form of tags. Because players need to really figure out the tags that most accurately would describe each image ( because the opponent will do the same thing ), those tags will 'always' reflect the real nature of the image. Google can pickup the best X tags per image ( from all unique tags selected for an image, pickup a subset containing the ones that occur more often, additionaly adusted based on which of those were selected first -- because the ones selected first are the more accurate ones ) [ This is just an idea btw ] and so when the user searches for something, those tags from this subset will also be used for selecting the ones to display in the results set. Also, they could train some sort of a system, by feeding it with those tags. Who knows?

All in all, cool stuff!

Its the small things at google that impress : Mr.Scoble visited the Google folks. He had a good time there.

We are 'all' waiting for the next scheduled Apple event, due on Sept.12th. Chances are its about the unveiling of the Apple iTunes MOVIE Store as well as the wide-screen iPod ( I hope its the one with the e-reader functionality ). Rumor has it that a new iMac 23" is also coming out really soon, even perhaps this month. Great news.

The wonderful ('mad')scientists/folks at Google released a paper on their BigTable system -- something I have been waiting for quite a long time. BigTable, for those who who don't know what it is "a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers." Sweet!

Google Platypus Mass Storage : Apparently, some guy unearthed what was not meant to be revealed yet ( or, maybe it was ). Information on the (initially called) Google GDrive. It seems its going to offer a centralized location for all your files. You can sync back and forth with your computer(s), through clients to be available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Very neat. Looking forward to it. Google's GFS makes things easy, doesn't?

I barely managed to climb the stairs and let myself in our apartment, today. It seems all those nights with little to no sleep triggered the most strict of all my body and mind defenses in an effort to understand that I need to rest. Something's telling me that I must somehow follow those orders or risk another breakdown..

I wrote a tiny Ajax (client + gateway) framework last night, just to see how this all Ajax concept works. It is, indeed, really cool. It's so cool I may even sit down and build (God forbidden) an AJAX based web-app for some projects I have in mind. Cool stuff, when one has free time. I don't.

PES, short for Pro Evolution Soccer, or Winning Eleven in Japan is perhaps the most addictive and well designed game, ever (hm, along with some great ones from the past..). I am not into football at all, yet, when our buddy Jim lured us into playing a few matches with him, we got stuck. Once or twice a week, we gather at our place and play for a 2 or 3 hours, and, let me tell you, we are having a blast. If you want to have some fun with your friends, consider this game.

Speaking of games, I got my Nintendo DS Lite Black edition from Amazon.co.uk today, along with a few books I have ordered. Alas, Mario Kart DS and another book didn't make it with this shipment, they should be here on Monday. So nothing to play on this slick sexy little game machine for now. This is interesting, by the way. Why the DS Needs to be Nintendo’s iPod.

Microsoft, as you probably have read by now, is preparing an 'iPod killer', due this Christmas. As far as I am concerned, competition is a great thing, regardless the very possible failure Microsoft is facing with such an idea.

Stephen Hawking Makes a Cameo on Yahoo! answers, asking about possible ways to deal with the imminent extinction of the human kind. Yup, that's the very Stephen Hawking you have in mind.

Do you want to know how Google really works?. I bet you do.

Google workplace design : All you ever wanted to know about the design of Google workplace. And then some.

A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor : Gus forwarded me this URL. To say its an interesting read, is an understatement.

My two favorite companies occupy the top two places on Wired's top 40 wired companies list. That is, Google and Apple. Amazon.com (another favorite, along with IBM ) is also made it to the top 10.

Googling Peter Parker: "

In the latest issue of The Amazing Spider-man, #533, it looks like the identity of Spider-man is revealed. From the comic page that Jeff G. sent in:

didn’t learn about the first side effect until well after the fact ... Once the news hit the television networks ... thirty million people went online and did simulatenous Google searches on Peter Parker ... and crashed the entire internet.

(Via Google Blogoscoped.)

I remember listening to Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO) describing his audience the concept of URL. Uusers first, Rrevenue Later. This should pretty much describe the core idea behind Google's operation. Google's 95% of revenue comes from Advertising (AdWords, AdSense), The rest is accounted for Google video and Google Earth Pro sales and so on. Most of their services are completely free, not even ads are included in those pages. However, once they get all the users they want and they feel its time to exploit them, they will. They have no immediate need for milking their users in order to get more cash; they are rich enough as it is. Did I say resistance is futile?

Check out Spairu's review of Google Spreadsheets. He did manage to get access to it and he seem to like it, too. Resistance is futile, my friends.

I uploaded some pictures on flickr, in order to capture my latest attempts at rearranging my desk. Unfortunately, the pictures don't convey 1,000 words in this occasion, for it really feels better than it looks ( my desk, that is ).

As you may know, Google's spreadsheets has lunched, albet in limited beta, a few days ago. Google aims to organize the world's data and make it available to us all, one way or another. This involves private/personal data (such as our email, our files, our money transactions(?), ..) and data available to the public domain ( accessible through Google search, Google groups, etc ). They are coming up with new products every few months, most of them being innovative in terms of design and features, power and ideas. They are combining them together ( which is of course the right thing to do ), so you can use Gmail through Google calendar and Google spreadsheets, your Google contacts through picassa web albums and so on, so forth.

So now they have this nifty Spreadsheets application. Its not Excel, it certainly doesn't come with all that featuresbloat, but then again who needs all that? maybe 0.5% of all excel users do. The rest of us, do not. Plus, its free, available from anywhere as long as you have a browser and access to the Internet ( ubiquitous nowadays ). Next thing you know, they 'll put the Writely buyout into some use and deliver an equally good word editor. Then, perhaps, some nice Photoshop like little application, that works well enough, exports to flash, interoperates with all other Google 'office' services and even with the non 'office' ones..

It doesn't take much thinking to see where this is going. Google is unbeatable. There is noway anything is going to stop them, unless they stop themselves by screwing up big, big, BIG time - which is not likely to happen. Meanwhile, Microsoft will be having a really hard time trying to deal with the Google guys. Given Microsoft's track record in the online services field, I would say that unless they do something radically better they will only help growing the distance from Google.

Google will own the world. That is not to say its a bad thing. As far as I am concerned, they deliver amazingly good services, they do things right [more or less], they are advancing based on their technological skills and not on tactics usually deployed by the likes of Microsoft, and, above all, everything is free for the consumers.

An inside view from a google employee : very interesting read, if you care about that sort of information.