Sapere Aude
Month: July 2007
The FCC has competing goals of maximizing revenue from the auction (suggesting less regulation) and protecting the public (suggesting more rules to force competition). Having open access requirements like those suggested by Google will spur competition and grow an economy around this spectrum. It will also put commercial pressure on mobile operators and broadband companies to reduce the restrictions they have on current broadband and mobile services.
the astroturfers are cute.
Lighttpd turned out to be poor for serving the thumbnails, because its main loop is a bottleneck to load files from disk; they addressed this by modifying Lighttpd to add worker threads to read from disk. This was good but still not good enough, with one thumbnail per file, because the enormous number of files was terribly slow to work with (imagine tarring up many million files).
Their new solution for thumbnails is to use Google’s BigTable, which provides high performance for a large number of rows, fault tolerance, caching, etc. This is a nice (and rare?) example of actual synergy in an acquisition.
memcached, lighthttpd, python, the usual mysql problems, sharding etc
what the film does – and it does this very successfully, in my opinion – is set up an increasingly melancholy sense of psychological isolation as an international crew of scientists, aboard a ship called the Icarus 2, flies toward the Sun. The Sun, we learn, is dying – and so it needs to be restarted with a “stellar bomb” the size of Manhattan. In fact, we learn, the bomb is so big that it contains literally all of the Earth’s fissile material.
stunning. must see?
This is an excellent place for vegetarians. Although much of the more familiar Aegean style Turkish cuisine and mezze’s are also vegetarian, the dazzling variety of unusual dishes at Ciya is unique, and the service is exceptional.
Google’s Ed Parson’s showed off this map detailing where the most user-generated content was posted on Google’s geodatabase
behold our coverage
highly recommended. unlikely concept, VERY well animated, funny.
Ratatouille
Today, the US is one of the most dangerous places to drive in the industrialized world.
SUVs, debunked.
VisualSize will be launching shortly with a service that will give accurate 3D measurements of things inside of 2D photos. To measure things accurately they need 2 photos of the same thing, but from different angles. The VisualSize algorithm automatically detects feature points in the 2 pictures and finds the matching pairs. It then uses the matching pairs to calculate coordinates of the 2 camera positions (x, y, z axes and origin in a 3D coordinate frame), and uses triangulation from the image to plane to the 3D coordinate frame to reconstruct the 3D scene. VisualSize can then measure length, angle, area and volume with a high degree of accuracy.
cool that this is becoming more mainstream. it is, of course, a mainstay for topographic maps.
It’s quite clear, given what native iPhone apps can do, that the platform has quite a lot of CPU and graphics leeway. It’s therefore unfortunate just how constrained the MobileSafari browser is, since just a few additional hooks would allow much richer interactions with the user.
webkit event handling–
Gregor J. Rothfuss 