Jeremy Zawodny's blog

Random thoughts on technology, aviation, and life in general...

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  • Herding Cats: Funniest Video Ever

    It's hard to believe that this video has been on YouTube since 2006 and I hadn't seen it until yesterday, but the Internet has a lot of tubes. It's hard to watch 'em all.

    Anyway, I suspect that most readers are familiar with expressions built around the phrase herding cats:

    The phrase herding cats comes from the common saying that something involving coordination of many different groups or people is as difficult as herding cats. One of the commonly encountered uses of the term in technical fields is the phrase "Managing programmers is like herding cats" or "Managing engineers is like herding cats". In education it would be "Managing students is like herding cats". In reality, it would be "Managing cats is like herding cats." It refers to the individualism common in the stereotypical examples of programmers and domesticated cats. A similar phrase, allegedly of Irish origins, is "Minding mice at a crossroads".

    Needless to say, it gets used all the time in software engineering groups. That's why this video is so damned funny.

    Not only is it very well produced and conceived, it's incredibly funny in the way it takes an otherwise silly phrase and brings it to life in exactly the way you'd expect. Given that International Day of Awesomeness is just around the corder, I feel justified in saying... AWESOME!

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  • Yahoo! FireEagle: Personal Location Service Platform for Developers

    Today FireEagle launched as an invitation-only beta for developers to start testing. I think of it as a personal location service platform, but the more formal description comes from the announcement on the YDN blog:

    Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user's location? Or, maybe you've found a way to capture someone's location and you want to find cool apps to plug it into? By doing the heavy lifting and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

    Tom Coates was the ring leader for FireEagle and talks about it in this video shot earlier today at ETech 2008.

    Don't be put off by the downer of a headline that TechCruch used ("Yahoo’s “Twitter For Location” Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality"). I think that Mike Arrington either got the wrong message from someone or misunderstood what FireEagle really is today.

    It's a location platform for developers to build on. It has an API that, among other things, lets you worry less about handling geo data and easily build in support for your web, desktop, or mobile application.

    It's currently not aimed at end users or "consumers" (oh, how I hate that term). I'm sure the analogy to Twitter was intended to be a loose one.

    Congrats to Tom and team for getting FireEagle out the door. :-)

    VentureBeat has good coverage here: Yahoo’s FireEagle location service to launch publicly today

    Oh, BTW... FireEagle uses OAuth for authentication!

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  • Scary Airbus A320 Crosswind Landing Video

    Thanks to Thomas Kruse, I present you with the video of an Airbus A320 making a difficult crosswind landing in Hamburg, Germany.

    What I wonder is when the pilot made the go-around decision. Everything I've read tells me that the jet engines in use on modern airliners take a few seconds to produce full thrust from and idle (landing) power setting.

    I suspect there were a few moments of doubt about whether or not he'd be able to salvage it. Then again, I'm sure the passengers were pretty skeptical at one point too! :-)

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  • Chicken Tortilla Soup Crock Pot Recipe

    If you have a slow cooker (or "crock pot") and enjoy tortilla soup, here's a good recipe to try out.

    Ingredients:

    4 chicken breast halves
    2 14.5 oz. cans of chicken broth
    1 garlic clove, minced
    2 tbsp. margarine
    2 12 1/2 oz. cans of chopped stewed tomatoes
    3 cups hot salsa
    1/2 cup chopped cilantro
    1 tbsp. or so of ground cumin
    tortilla chips

    Optional:

    cheese (whatever you prefer in your soup)
    sour cream

    The steps:

    • Grill the chicken breasts. Shred them with a fork and knife.
    • Combine all ingredients except cheese, sour cream, and chips.
    • Cover the pot and cook on low for 8 to 10 hours.
    • Enjoy the soup, adding chips, sour cream, and cheese to taste.

    What I like about this recipe is that it's incredibly simple, involved grilling (always fun), and takes no more than about 15 minutes to get going. You're then left with enough soup for four adults (or two for two days in our case).

    Personally, I skip the cheese and sour cream. The soup itself is excellent with some chips added in.

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  • How to Copy a Filesystem and Preserve Hard Links in Linux

    As part of my Linux backup scheme (which I need to write up someday) I've recently been swapping and upgrading/replacing some USB hard disks at home. There's a Linux box at home (a Thinkpad T43p running Ubuntu if you must know) that has a 320GB disk attached and mounted as /mnt/backup and was running fairly low on space.

    jzawodn@wasp:/mnt$ df -h /mnt/backup
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1             276G  211G   51G  81% /mnt/backup

    That was after I moved about 50GB of stuff off it last night.

    I want to replace it with a newly attached 750GB disk and need to move all the data over to the new disk. But since much of the data consists of remote filesystem snapshots produced using rsnapshot, which makes copious use of hard links, it's rather important that I do this correctly. If I don't, the data won't even fit on the 750GB disk!

    (If that seems impossible, you don't quite grok hard links on a filesystem yet.)

    Digging deep into my Unix past, I remember needing to do this once before. The trick was not to use any of the usual suspects: cp, tar, rsync, or mv. Instead, you use either dump (yuck) or a combination of find and cpio.

    It looks something like this:

    mkdir /mnt/backup2/snaps
cd /mnt/backup/snaps
find . -print | cpio -Bpdumv /mnt/backup2/snaps

    Then you just wait a long time while stuff scrolls by and you wish you were using disks in eSATA enclosures rather than in USB 2.0 enclosures.

    The trouble is that cpio didn't properly preserve timestamps on directories (not sure why--I expected it to), so I had to dig even deeper to remember pairing up dump and restore.

    cd /mnt/backup2
mkdir snaps
( dump -0 -f - /mnt/backup/snaps | restore -v -x -y -f - ) >& ~jzawodn/dump.log

    And then I waited about half a day for the copy to complete.

    root@wasp:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1             276G  212G   50G  82% /mnt/backup
/dev/sdc1             688G  284G  370G  44% /mnt/backup2

    Not bad. A quick edit to /etc/rsnapshot.conf to change my snapshot_root from /mnt/backup to /mnt/backup2 and that's all it took.

    Next time I have to go through this, it won't take me nearly as long to devise a scheme to get it done.

    Now, does anyone have alternative methods? Or do you know why cpio didn't preserve timestamps correctly?

    Thanks to the folks at TechCzar for translating my tech blog posts and including them in their blog network.

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  • FriendFeed Launches, Provides New Lightweight Social Activity. Needs API.

    When I thought about writing this last night, I didn't realize that FriendFeed was launching. Good timing.

    My intent was to point out two things, really. First off, usage of FriendFeed seemed to be really picking up steam in the last few weeks. In retrospect, that's probably because they were letting more and more folks into the private beta as they got closer to launching.

    But the more interesting thing to me was the fact that my FriendFeed activity stream has become a new place for folks to comment on things I'ma doing and even voice their approval. For example, my blog post titled The Difference Between the Rich & Famous and the Rest of Us got a few reactions yesterday.

    friendfeed comments

    That made me wish there was a FriendFeed API so that I could surface that discussion back on my blog. So I made a comment on Twitter and that garnered even more discussion on my FriendFeed.

    friendfeed api

    This is all pretty interesting. FriendFeed is, in a way, attempting to join together the loosely coupled bits of social "exhaust" I produce on the web. And at the same time, they've created another new source of activity that I'd like to pull back onto my own web site.

    Once the FriendFeed API is out, a whole bunch of interesting stuff is bound to happen. Watch this space.

    See Also: Friendfeed, the best software for conversations, raises round and launches publicly on VentureBeat

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  • The Difference Between the Rich & Famous and the Rest of Us

    Occasionally the Zen Habits blog publishes something I find particularly interesting--usually because the author has figured out way to explain something that's more simple and more clear than I do. And I'm a big fan of simplicity and clarity.

    But today's interview with Stephen Covey is not only useless, it's a slap-in-the-face reminder of how different the lives of the Rich and Famous are from the rest of us.

    Allow me to quote two of his answers.

    On his "morning routine" he says:

    I make an effort every morning to win what I call the “private victory.” I work out on a stationary bike while I am studying the scriptures for at least 30 minutes. Then I swim in a home pool vigorously for 15 minutes, then I do yoga in a shallow part of the pool for 15 minutes. Then I go into my library and pray with a listening spirit, listening primarily to my conscience while I visualize the rest of my entire day, including important professional activities and key relationships with my loved ones, working associates and clients. I see myself living by correct principles and accomplishing worthy purposes.

    Okay. What about the "normal" stuff that the rest of us do? Making breakfast, feeding cats, putting away laundry, going to work, and so on?

    His next answer, about removing "distractions", sheds a bit of light on that one:

    I am fortunate to have a very helpful team that enables me to spend time doing things that are important but not necessarily urgent. This requires the development of a personal mission statement to give a larger context and also the determination of what is truly important but not necessarily urgent. People who have no such team need to also make these larger decisions so that they can cheerfully say No to that which is urgent but not important. Learn to use technology in such a way as to filter out that which you really know is important to you personally and professionally. Remember, technology is a great servant, but a terrible master.

    Ah ha!

    So what you really need is a "very helpful team" (is that the term for undocumented domestic help these days?) so that you can spend more time on the "development of a personal mission statement" to, you know "give larger context" and all that.

    Now it all makes sense!

    This is practical and down-to-earth advice that I can use to improve my life right away!
    </sarcasm>

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  • Hadoop Reactions & Announcement of Hadoop Summit at Yahoo!

    apache hadoop I have to say, I'm impressed at the coverage that news about our production Hadoop deployment in Yahoo! Search got yesterday (and today). Here's a quick list of the stories.

    I guess good technology makes for good news, huh?

    Also, today we're opening up the invite list for the Hadoop Summit to be held on March 25th at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California. For more on that, check out:

    As I've said before, this is gonna be quite a heard for Hadoop. :-)

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  • Yahoo! Search running Apache Hadoop on Large Scale

    Over on the Yahoo! Hadoop blog, you can read about how the webmap team in Yahoo! Search is using the Apache Hadoop distributed computing framework. They're using over 10,000 CPU cores to build the map and processing a ton of data to do so. They end up using over 5 petabytes of raw disk storage, eventually outputting over 300 terabytes of compressed data that's used to power every single search.

    As part of that post, I got to interview Sameer and Arnab to learn more about the history of the webmap and why they moved from our proprietary infrastructure to using Hadoop.

    One of the points I try to make during the interview is that this a huge milestone for Hadoop. Yahoo! is using Hadoop in a very large scale (and growing) production deployment. It's not just an experiment or research project. There's real money on the line. (It's too bad we had a technical glitch in the video right as we were discussing a Really Big Number.)

    As Eric says in that post:

    The Webmap launch demonstrates the power of Hadoop to solve truly Internet-sized problems and to function reliably in a large scale production setting. We can now say that the results generated by the billions of Web search queries run at Yahoo! every month depend to a large degree on data produced by Hadoop clusters.

    It looks to me like 2008 and 2009 are going to be big growth years for the Hadoop project--and not just at Yahoo!

    Stay tuned...

    Update: You can get a Quicktime version of this video now.

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  • Republicans Kiss Google's Ass...

    I threw up a little bit in my mouth this morning while reading the press release titled 2008 Republican National Convention Names Official Innovation Provider.

    Embracing technology that will propel the 2008 Republican National Convention to the forefront of the digital age, the GOP today announced that Google Inc. will serve as the Republican National Convention's Official Innovation Provider. Convention President and Chief Executive Officer Maria Cino made the announcement in a unique video posted to the convention's new YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/gopconvention2008). The video is also showcased on the convention's website (www.GOPConvention2008.com), and highlights Google's cutting-edge, computer-generated SketchUp graphics of the Xcel Energy Center, where the convention will be held.

    I didn't know that the Republican campaign was so hard up for innovation that they needed to get it from Corporate America, but okay...

    As Official Innovation Provider, Google Inc. will enhance the GOP's online presence with new applications, search tools, and interactive video. In addition, Google will help generate buzz and excitement in advance of the convention through its proven online marketing techniques.

    On-line marketing (AdWords and AdSense, presumably) generating excitement. Yeah. Sure. I get excited by ads all the time, don't you? Especially Republican ads!

    The convention's official website, www.GOPConvention2008.com, will eventually feature a full-range of Google products, including Google Apps, Google Maps, SketchUp, and customized search tools, which will make navigating the site easier. The convention's YouTube channel will enable visitors to upload, view, and share online videos. These innovative technologies will also help the GOP streamline convention organization and expand its online reach across websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.

    So they've figured out how to embed stuff in their web site to make it easier and, presumably, make up for their inability to get together a web team that could design a site that's easy to navigate? Yeah, I'd brag about that too.

    I was tempted to re-write the release without all the buzzwords and over-the-top language, but I have to hit the road soon for a long drive. I guess it pretty much speaks for itself.

    I'm not sure who's paying who here, but the republicans sure are kissing some Google Ass. It kinda makes you wonder what the revenue share on this deal is, doesn't it?

    Either way, a dumb thing like this is an excellent way to lose credibility in my mind. I'm surprised they didn't also announce HTML as their official markup language and HTTP as the site's preferred protocol.

    [Apparently I'm not the only one. See also, GOP Names Google Its “Official Innovation Provider” from the Wall Street Journal.]

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