"failures" entries

Four short links: 12 October 2009

Four short links: 12 October 2009

DSL for NLP Task, Insider Tradespotting, Outsource Fail, Cloud Fail

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 12, 2009
  1. Snowball — a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. (via straup on delicious)
  2. Insider Trades — a Yahoo! Hack Day app that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. (via straup on delicious)
  3. Air New Zealand Slams IBM — central point of failure in the outsourced IT. “In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers is not the glowing endorsement you want.
  4. Danger/Microsoft Loses Sidekick Customers’ Data — Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. This cloud had a brown lining.
Four short links: 10 Jan 2009

Four short links: 10 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 9, 2009

Here are four fun links to set the tone for your weekend: high risk money, productive failure, consumer-grade BitTorrent, and architecture criticism for the rest of us.

  1. How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing — perhaps “hack” is a little excessive, but it’s a readable short account of how Porsche made a lot of money playing “millionaire’s poker” against hedge funds. (via Ivan Krstić, the author of Apache Security former Director of Security Architecture for the OLPC)
  2. Missteps in Django — a Python programmer documents the mistakes he makes programming in Django. This helps other people as they face similar problems, and shows the Django developers where their expectations differ from those of mortal programmers. I think it’s a great idea because it makes visible the useful mistakes that are how we learn. It also reinforces the idea that it’s okay to make mistakes, we all do it, and they’re as worth of discussion as successes.
  3. Netgear Unveils TV Torrent Player — consumer device with BitTorrent built in. The easier it becomes for mortals to get files through BitTorrent, the harder it is to ignore unauthorised file sharing through BitTorrent, and the more pressing a solution to the business problem will be. (via Glynn Moody)
  4. How Buildings Learn — if you haven’t seen this show, you should. On-the-money criticism of architecture and architects, talking about what’s important when you design things for people. (via Kottke)

You Become what You Disrupt – (part two)

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | April 13, 2008

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users. This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop….