"worries" entries
AT&T Fiber cuts remind us: Location is a Basket too!
The fiber cuts affecting much of the San Francisco Bay Area this week are similar to the outages in the Middle East last year (radar post), although far more limited in scope and impact. What I said last year still holds true and is repeated below: From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why…
Experience Syndication: Powered by Zappos
I have been thinking a lot about the new Powered by Zappos service. According to Zappos: Powered by Zappos (PBZ) is a feature Zappos.com offers to its partners where we design, host, fulfill and own a partners web site. Our goal is to provide Zappos customers as well as our partner's customers with the best possible service experience. By building…
Why We're Failing in Math and Science
Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone. In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and…
The new internet traffic spikes
Theo Schlossnagle, author of Scalable Internet Architectures, gave a great explanation of how internet traffic spikes are shifting: Lately, I see more sudden eyeballs and what used to be an established trend seems to fall into a more chaotic pattern that is the aggregate of different spike signatures around a smooth curve. This graph is from two consecutive days where…
Amazon Gets Demanding with Print-on-Demand Publishers
We often hold up Amazon as an example of one of the original Web 2.0 companies. Their survival amid the tech meltdown was driven largely by the value of the data they’d acquired through thousands of reader reviews, recommendations, and "people who bought this bought that" collaborative filtering. Amazon was a system that grew more valuable with more users: a…
Goodbye, New York Times
I love The New York Times. I've read it almost every day of my life since I was in high school. For all its recent flaws — the weirdo profiles of the major presidential candidates are the most high-profile — it is still full of the most outstanding reporting. And, on the days that Gail Collins files, it offers up…
Trendalyzer view of the banking crisis
The team at "And Still I Persist" has created their own version of Hans Rosling's "Trendalyzer" (see: Radar post) to visualize the current US banking crisis. "First lets look at the top 8 banks and their mortgages that are 90+ days late. Below is a flash charting system, feel free to use the controls and experiment. We chart the total…
Today's ETech Hack is Tomorrow's Critical Infrastructure…
My friend Jordan Schwartz just gave me the perfect example of how quickly a cool hack can turn into Critical Infrastructure. Jordan wrote "How to build an SMS Service" and created SwaggleSMS as a demonstration of how to do group chat with SMS. It's a hack that he created as an experiment (it's super-useful for conference afterparty coordination). Jordan…
US Judge censors WikiLeaks.org by ordering DNS records removed
The BBC and many others report that the international whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org has been taken down as of this morning. Judge Jeffery White ordered that the WikiLeaks.org domain be removed at the request of Julius Baer Bank & Trust. Not only does the judge order that the site be removed, he orders that the whois privacy protections be turned off…
Understanding the undersea cable cuts… (updated: "fifth cable cut")
The Fiber Cuts in the Middle East are getting a lot of attention. The economic damage is real and the geopolitical issues are extremely complex (which is why I edited my earlier post). From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why having "many eggs in few baskets" is such a problem. I believe we…