About a week and a half ago I got possessed with the luny notion to collect 1 million tweets. I’ve worked with the Twitter streaming api in the past, so thought it would simply be a matter of keeping the connection up for an extended period of time.

I started with the simplest possible thing that might work, directly from the Twitter streaming API documentation:

curl -d @locations https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json -uAnyTwitterUser:Password.

First couple of cracks didn’t quite work. As documented, the HTTP connection is subject to various disruptions, so I wrapped the curl invocation in a Python script that would re-execute as needed.

So now the script has been running for about 5 days now. I’ve got about 647 Mb of data totaling north of 250,000 tweets. I can’t tell if the script has needed to do a restart, but I’m impressed it’s lived this long.

And 250K tweets, with metadata, should make for some interesting analysis.

A maxim to live by, from your’s truly:

There’s no need to sit in a parked car, listening to sports talk radio. It’s just sports blather. They’ll make more.

Occasionally I have to catch myself on this one.

All I have to say is, I’m glad Aaron Rodgers is on my fantasy football team. With the scoring rules in my league, he dropped 51 fantasy points, far and away the top scorer in the league.

Which was pretty handy, seeing as how the opposing fantasy QB was Cam Newton, who wasn’t too shabby at 30 points himself. Plus my opponent also played Greg Jennings for 19 points, Ray Rice for 20, and Darren McFadden for 14.

Besides Rodgers, the key support on my team came from WRs Santana Moss for 12 points, Julio Jones for 18, Fred Jackson for 18, and Jason Witten for 19. Between Rodgers and Witten, I cruised to an easy 26 point lead, although I had to wait out a potential Ray Rice explosion.

The league only has 8 teams in it, so there’s plenty of talent to go around. The key is getting one or two really outstanding performances, which is a combination of matchups and luck.

At this point I’m 2-2, fighting for the 4th playoff spot. Still plenty of games to go, but I have to put a little streak together. I think I’ve got a viable core, but I’m always scuffling on a spot or two. At least this week, I don’t think anyone got injured.

The NFL is heading into its stretch of bye weeks, which puts the bench and the waiver wire at a premium. I think I’m configured for success during these challenging weeks, but we’ll see.

Update: Title modified for the correct team in 2011. Yeesh! I’m slipping.

Update 2: Oops! Forgot about Rashard Mendenhall pulling a hammy, and possibly missing next week. Then again, he was due for a benching anyway.

Ben Lorica runs the @bigdata Twitter stream, which routinely provides good big data related nuggets. I don’t actually follow the stream because he occasionally summarizes the best tweets on his blog

Speaking of PostgreSQL, it’s also worth mentioning PostGIS, which is a fabulous geospatial extension for PostgreSQL. Nelson Minar recommends the book PostGIS in Action to supplement the PostGIS documentation. As an example, PostGIS is improving in the area of doing nearest neighbor searches.

Alternatively, one can try SpatiaLite which embeds GIS capabilities in the self-contained SQLite RDBMS. However, I found SpatiaLite had a lot of moving parts and didn’t get a lot of mileage out of it.

Sideways observation: Pinboard doesn’t make individual item URLs obviously visible in its HTML. A little digging in an RSS feed reveals their existence. Turns out, on the person’s web page, the dates are the permalinks for the bookmarks. Useful for giving credit.

Been noodling around with PostgreSQL at work. Great relational database system. Glad I got a chance to get back to it. Gets even better with age.

For the longest time, I’d never really used stored procedures in an RDBMS because the languages to write the procedures were unappealing. However, PostgreSQL has embedded scripting languages, including Python, as procedural languages. Makes things a lot more fun.

One caveat, it was pretty tricky to convince the PostgreSQL build process on MacOS Lion to not use the system Python. An important point if you don’t have root privileges to install modules, which comes in handy. I’ll have to look up the mods and post them since it could save someone a little bit of time.

Well the Fantasy Football gods giveth, and the Fantasy Football gods taketh away. The Rangers got beat by a little under 48 points. I was saved from the worst beating award by someone who got shellacked for a 60 point loss.

This is the third week in a row I’ve had a player incur an injury that put them out the next week. I lucked out in that Steven Jackson and Miles Austin had decent and great games. Kenny Britt wasn’t so lucky, done for the season with no production.

I’m patting myself on the back for picking up Buffalo’s Fred Jackson off the waiver wire. Only he and Aaron Rodgers scored in double digits for me. Meanwhile the opposing team had five 15+ point scorers, including Jermichael Finley going for 30. Note that it’s pretty difficult in fantasy football to gain ground when your quarterback is throwing TDs to the other guy’s tight end.

Biggest disappointment was Rashard Mendenhall, who couldn’t do anything against the Colts. The Pittsburgh running game is giving me the willies.

Anyhew, back to the waiver wire. Gotta scrounge another receiver.

Link parkin’: DJ Patil, who build LinkedIn’s data team from the ground up, expounds on Building Data Science Teams

I don’t follow too many linkblogs these days, but Nelson Minar established a Pinboard account to capture his URLs of note. He claims it’s better than his blog. Don’t know if that’s true but in NetNewsWire I’ve been flagging a lot of links he’s been pointing too. Plenty of good, solid, diverse hacking content. Time to give the stream a little publicity.

I’m sort of binary on Woody Allen films. If he’s in the film, I can’t stand it. If he’s not I generally enjoy the flick: Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Celebrity. The only exception has been Manhattan, but then that’s a very exceptional film. His typical nebbish take drives me batshit.

I made the mistake of watching Anything Else, even though I knew Allen had a role, principally because I like looking at Christina Ricci. It was doubly horrible because Jason Biggs filled the Allen lead role to accurate effect, meaning you had twice the nebbishness. Yeesh!

Glad someone else is in violent agreement, calling it Woody Allen’s worst film. Oddly enough, Tarantino apparently loved Anything Else. No accounting for taste.

Okay, for all I know they probably don’t have the biggest catalog, but HDNet Movies has made a big impression on me over the last couple of weeks. First it was just the delight of seeing Salma Hayek in After the Sunset. Then it was being reintroduced to The Rundown.

Did I mention the movies are uninterrupted (c.f. the suckage of IFC)? Unmodified? Except for the occasional, tastefully displayed HDNet Movies logo. Letterboxed, to boot, so no pan and scan.

But the closer is that somebody in the programming department thought today would be a great day for a Quentin Tarantino double bill: Pulp Fiction and True Romance. Yeah, I know Tony Scott directed True Romance, but Tarantino wrote the script and Scott retained most of Tarantino’s crime, violence, and dialogue oeuvre. It’s essentially a Tarantino film.

Brilliant. Two of my favorite films of all time, and Pulp Fiction is in my top 3.

Set DVRs to stun.

Grrrr. My trusty MacBook is feeling a bit pokey for the first time ever. I may have reached the limits of its resources what with a bazillion tabs open in Chrome, a few in Firefox, and a handful of other apps running. Plus, I’m using Spaces.

Maybe some tab clearance will help out, but whenever the next edition of MacBooks or MacBook Airs come out, I will seriously be lusting.

I realized this weekend, that whatever success I have in fantasy football is based upon the following principle. During the currently playing weekend, I start planning for the next weekend.

By halfway through the first game on a Sunday afternoon, I’m already scanning the waiver wire for promising mid-week pickups. In leagues where you can still make afternoon free agent claims, I’ve jumped on key players after early injuries.

A second minor philosophy, is to consider the real world matchups, but not over think my lineup. Don’t mess with players on bad teams (c.f. Indianapolis Colts 2011). Studs always play.

Didn’t manage to follow up on the week 1 quick hit, but the key to that week was subbing out about 20+ points that could have made the difference. Picked the wrong kicker. Picked the wrong DEF. Stuck with Rashard Mendenhall against the Ravens. Then dumped Ahmad Bradshaw, with a decent matchup, thinking I might be able to make a late afternoon waiver move. Oops! All free agents hit the waiver wire at the start of Sunday, so nobody can make moves during the day. Know your league’s rules son!

Week 2 was a much happier affair. I had some plush match ups, and actually made some good GM moves.

• Figured Miles Austin was going to have a big day against SF. Didn’t know he was going to be the top WR for our league this week.

• Made the brilliant move of picking up and starting Buffalo’s Fred Jackson. Finished in the top 5 and only 0.8 points out of the top RB scoring position.

• Rob Bironas kicked his way back into form, and Houston’s defense did a decent job against Miami.

• Stuck with regulars Aaron Rodgers, Jason Witten, Rashard Mendenhall, and Santana Moss. Everybody delivered double digit fantasy points, with Moss surprisingly totaling 14.

With everyone on my team scoring double digits, I’ve cruised to a 40+ point victory. The only downside is that Austin looks like he’s going to be on the shelf for a few games. That’s okay though, there’s a couple of emerging WRs, with good matchups, I’ve got my eye on. Been working hard to make up for my draft day bye blunders. I’m feeling that waiver wire magic again, revamping my team week to week.

The Rundown popped up on HDNet this past week. A little over 8 years since its release, the movie has held up surprisingly well. Actually, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. The Rundown is a pretty basic action film, not overly enhanced with sci-fi techno elements, or CG special effects. Fights, double-crosses, chases, captures. Hero wins in the end.

Herewith some of the reasons I enjoyed watching it yet again:

• Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson actually evinced a little acting depth.

• The directer, Peter Berg, tightly paced the flick with no fat. Comes in at a clean, efficient hour and a half. Plus there’s actually a distinctive visual style to the whole affair.

• Christopher Walken doing a great, batshit exploitative warlord.

• Rosario Dawson is, as always, easy on the eyes.

• The film is actually funny in quite a few spots. Go away monkey!! Seann William Scott’s scruffy ass actually adds a solid comedic lift.

• The kick ass opening sequence. Heck, all the fight sequences. Well done and not your run of the mill punch out.

You could do quite a bit worse than The Rundown on a slow, weekend afternoon.

Update. Forgot about the Arnie cameo.

Well that didn’t last too long. I just locked onto the Stathead flow back in June. While I found the signal to noise ratio wasn’t very high, I got a solid nugget or two.

Of course it takes a lot of human effort to filter the stats oriented portion of the sportsosphere. And the humans have just given up.

As recently as 2005, the NFL’s primetime games were quite often blowout duds. Especially late in the season when matchups that looked exciting in July fizzled because one or both teams had disintegrated. This eventually led to the flex system which allowed the networks to schedule more attractive late season games into the primetime slots.

I don’t know what deal the league made with the devil for the 2011 season, but the night games for the season opening were amazing. To wit:

• The last two Super Bowl champs, Green Bay and New Orleans, go toe-to-toe in a last play, goal line stand thriller. Rodgers and Brees come out firing on all cylinders. Plus there was a 108 yard kickoff return for a TD. That’s your season opener.

• The Sunday night game showcases America’s Team, Dallas, versus the New York Jets. In New York. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Hometeam goes on a dramatic 17 point 4th quarter scoring spree to pull out the comeback victory. Said spree includes a blocked punt for a TD

• ESPN has a double header on Monday night, with a decidedly lukewarm tilt between New England and Miami to start off. Miami hangs in for about 3 quarters. The Fish were especially helped by a pick-6 off of Tom Brady, his first interception in 350+ attempts. Then the Pats explode to put Miami down, but along the way Wes Welker goes for a 99 yard TD reception and Brady totals 517 yards in the air.

• The second ESPN game is the Raiders vs Denver, two mediocre teams that hate each other. Per usual there’s a scrum after just about every play. While outplaying the Broncos, the Raiders can’t pull away. A 90 yard punt return sparks the Broncos in the second half, but the Raiders manage to hold on for the win. Did I mention that Sebastian Janikowski kicked a league record tying 63 yard field goal?

No real duds, lots of riveting action, and even some historical performances. Way to kick off the season NFL.

Taking some “vacation” time this week, and what am I doing? Uploading multi-gigabyte files to Amazon S3. So I’m a nerd.

Turns out though that uploading files greater than 5GB requires multipart uploading, which breaks the file up into chunks for better throughput and reliability. Client support for this part of the S3 API is not obvious.

Hat tip to Joe Miller for cataloging a few S3 clients that do support multipart uploads, including Cyberduck. Open source, free as in beer, cross platform, and eminently usable, Cyberduck is the Swiss Army knife of file uploading. Just for this capability I will be making a donation shortly.

I can’t speak for every working parent, but The Job(™) and The Kid(™) have definitely killed my outbound movie going experience. At home, you’re bombarded by film choices for your in-residence studio: Premium Cable, Pay Per View, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Watch, not to mention good old Blu-Ray and CDs for the old timers.

For the classic movie theatre experience? Overpriced, blockbustered up, and inconvenient? Not so much. Until today in the theater I’d seen exactly 1 movie in the last 24 months: Toy Story 3. (Surprisingly good for the third of a trio).

Every now and then though, one has to partake of “cinema” just to remember what it was like. Since I was taking a day off I caught Rise of The Planet of The Apes, (Surprisingly good for a reboot). Yeah, I gouged myself even on a matinee: (8.50?! don’t ask about the popcorn and soda I got), but I was the only one in the viewing at Leesburg’s spanking new Cobb 12 Theater, which is quite nicely appointed. Think full service restaurant, full bar, spacious accommodations attached to your friendly neighborhood multiplex. No great shakes for the rest of the country, Evanston, IL had the same setup when I lived there over 5 years ago, but relatively new to good old Loudoun County.

The movie was good, not great. Didn’t feel stupider having seen it. No commercial ads, reasonable number of trailers. Nobody talked, cried, texted, or took a call during the screening. The seats were comfortable and the space clean. To my eyes the projectionist didn’t screw up. A 5 minute drive from my humble abode. What’s not to like? Other than the prices.

I’ll probably never get back to my grad school heyday of seeing multiple double bill classics at the Berkeley Theater in a week (The Godfather, and The Godfather, Part II back-to-back, $7, FTW! RIP Berkeley). But there’s still a little life in The Big Screen business.

Deeper analysis later in the week, but suffice it to say the Rangers went down already (no Monday night players left), and went down hard. Major disappointment from my running backs. While Stephen Jackson managed to get in the end zone, he hurt himself along the way. Rashard Mendenhall just stunk.

Shot myself in the foot by reading the Yahoo projections and switching the Bears defense out and the Browns defense in.

And I gotta get more than 2 points out of my kicker.

Another Premiership Saturday has come and gone. After the first month we’re starting to get a little insight.

Manchester United is looking pretty good. Then again Chelsea started out with 6 straight wins last year. Not that the Blues completely collapsed, or that I’d bet against the the Red Devils, but it’s a long season.

Chicarito is a bad dude.

Sheik Mansour is getting his money’s worth out of the Man City club. And Carlos Tevez just hit the pitch for his first match.

Maybe it’s just Fox Soccer Channel house style, but I don’t like how after halftime the announcers don’t reset who’s on the pitch.

Premier League games are a welcome replacement for the early NCAA talk shows. That’ll probably work well for the NFL yakfests as well. The matches are great because they move at a good pace, no commercial interruptions, and they finish within 2 hours.

Link parkin’: Warehouse-Scale Computing: Entering the Teenage Decade. Comes highly recommended. Warning though, the material is a 50 minute, 1 GB QuickTime file, password protected by an ACM account. You can Flash stream it as well.

Seems like real-time at global scale is the new frontier.

Of course on this initial night of the 2011 NFL season, it is most appropriate that I regale you with the results of my fantasy football draft. At this point in time (1:53 left in the Green Bay vs New Orleans game) it’s sort of hard to complain about the results. I got Aaron Rodgers (Cal product!) with my second pick and he’s currently racked up 25.77 fantasy points.

Still with the 6th position in a snake draft I was actually disappointed with my selections quite quickly. The problem is that I was really indecisive with my strategy. Conventional wisdom is that you focus on getting two top running backs, but that strategy never really works for me. I thought I was going to follow that strategy, then waffled, then didn’t do a good job with my wide receivers. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t get great receives, it’s that they both have the same bye week! And did I mention both of my running backs have the same bye week. Yup you guessed it. The same week as my receivers. Stupid. Now I’ve got a big roster scramble coming up in week 5.

Draft details after the break.

Overall selection #’s in parens:

1. (6) Rashard Mendenhall (Pit - RB)
2. (11) Aaron Rodgers (GB - QB)
3. (22) Steven Jackson (StL - RB)
4. (27) Miles Austin (Dal - WR)
5. (38) Jason Witten (Dal - TE)
6. (43) Santana Moss (Was - WR)
7. (54) Mark Ingram (NO - RB)
8. (59) Ahmad Bradshaw (NYG - RB)
9. (70) Julio Jones (Atl - WR)
10. (75) Ben Roethlisberger (Pit - QB)
11. (86) Rob Bironas (Ten - K)
12. (91) Chicago (Chi - DEF)

According to the Yahoo! average draft, I might have overreached on Jason Witten, Santana Moss, Julio Jones, and Mark Ingram. Then again I got a little bit of a steal on Ahmad Bradshaw and Ben Roethlisberger. With an eight team league, there’s not much of a premium on QBs after Rodgers, Brady, and maybe Brees. But I’m hoping to parlay Big Ben into some talent with a trade later in the season. Somebody’s QB has to go down this year!

I’m guessing my team will go as Aaron Rodgers does. Running back might be a strength, might be a bust. If Tony Romo comes back big, Miles Austin could be a solid number one receiver, but my number two is going to be a pain all year.

And I can’t stress enough how stupid not managing the byes was. Lesson learned.

Speaking of outsourced web crawling, I wonder if it would be possible to build a focused crawler on top of the 80legs infrastructure. A lot has changed since Filippo Menczer first introduced the concept. Sophisticated client side web programming, cloud computing, social media. Given today’s vast sprawl of the Web, there are a lot of tasks where high topical precision, completely forsaking recall, would be really useful.

As to implementation, you probably can’t get into the retrieval loop as tightly as a custom crawler, but release from the headaches of actual page fetching could free up thought cycles for creative foraging approaches. Outsourcing the hard parts would probably radically improve reliability and availability.

Another upside is that with a good front end you could scalably provide crawlers to end users. Wonder what dirt cheap personalized, adaptive, social spidering could enable.

Enjoyed Paul Lamere’s documenting how he processed a very large music dataset using Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Paul was hacking the Million Song Dataset, but the info seems highly relevant to my noodlings with the MemeTracker data. It’s pretty amazing anybody off the street can harness that much processing power for 10 bucks. And it finished for Lamere in 20 minutes.

One thing I’ve learned, munging a few tens of gigabytes, you start to time everything. Once things start taking longer than 10 minutes or so you want to 1) figure out if you’re doing something stupid, and 2) figure out how to make it faster.

Personally, I’ve got a short term goal to get my data up onto S3. Then I’ll be digging into MrJob, which I’ve run across previously.

Forewarned is forearmed. As in previous NFL seasons, I’ll be playing in an office fantasy football league, and providing weekly updates, if not more frequent. Even though I was a pretty poor chronicler, the 2010 edition of Doom Patrol at least made the the playoffs last year. Lost my first game, but won the consolation for a third place finish.

This year, I’ll be taking it a bit less seriously, especially the league draft which is tomorrow. I’ve found I’ve been most successful when I really work the waiver wires well. Last year I had the overall #1 pick, which netted me Chris Johnson of the Titans. Of course Johnson had a subpar season, mainly because the Titans stank for half of the year, which had me scrambling a lot.

Two years ago, I managed to rack up two titles. Time to get back to the mountaintop.

P.S. Given Doom Patrol’s failure last year, the name got retired. This year it’s the Plexus Rangers in action.

Well the dates slipped by early last month, without jostling a remembrance on my part. But it’s been over three years since I started this blog which was mainly driven by the fact that I had a new, bottom of the line, MacBook I needed to put to use.

Functionally, the computer’s been holding up pretty well. Of course I lust for one of the new PowerBooks or Airs, but day to day my trusty old MacBook easily supports what I need to get done. The physical elements are showing a bit of wear and tear. Battery doesn’t quit fit correctly. Parts of the body are chipped and dinged. Still a keeper though.

As for the blog, Ev Williams pointed out “You have to be a bit more dedicated to blog than to tweet or post on [Facebook] now and then.” Except I don’t really tweet or use Facebook, so I have no excuse. I’ve had some good runs in the past, but I’ll be trying to elevate the dedication over the next few months.

Recently I started munging some really large datasets for work and for fun. In just doing some basic statistical verification I learned a lesson that Brendan O’Conor documented: gawk is really useful, reasonably fast, and some versions blaze.

I’ve got to go and check out mawk, even if it is old and slightly busted.

Once upon a time, web crawling was the providence of manly men. Men who wrote hairy systems code that optimized DNS queries, tweaked operating system TCP kernel options, avoided robot traps, and honored complex, dynamic revisit schedules.

Nowadays, thanks to 80legs, you can fork over 99 bucks a month, setup 3 crawl jobs, repeating if you like, and get the contents of a million URLs. All from the comfort of your own home.

This is progress.

Cities in Fact and Fiction, an interview with William Gibson, ran across my aggregator recently. Didn’t really notice the link to his essay Life in a Meta City, but that may get me to buy a copy of this month’s Scientific American.

Not to mention that I’m just generally interested in the science of dense urban centers and the whole September issue is devoted to cities.

I’m guessing he hasn’t even started on a post Zero History book, but I’m wondering what Gibson will come up with next.

Today I Learned about pip requirement files. pip is a package installation tool for Python. It’s great when you combine it with virtualenv, so that you can easily build up complex Python installations with clean isolation from your base installation.

The kicker is pip freeze > req_file.txt and pip -r req_file.txt which will stash your installed packages and load them into a new environment. Makes it easy to kit out a new virtual environment with your favorite 3rd party modules. You only have to figure out the complete list of stuff you want once and then install it with one command line. And of course you can keep around variations of req_file.txt for different install types.

Bonus: You can use virtualenvwrapper post install hooks to automatically run pip on a newly created virtual environment. You are using virtualenvwrapper aren’t you?

Holy Smokes! The Premiership starts tomorrow. I’m dumping Arsenal and rooting for Chelsea this campaign. Hopefully The Blues won’t gack at the finish line like they did last year. Doesn’t look like Chelsea made many moves over the summer, but maybe having Fernando Torres from the get-go will lead to a more dynamic squad.

Two things I learned about The Premier League last year. First, I didn’t know the season was so long. Pretty close to a nine month schedule. Second, the top teams are actually playing four seasons simultaneously: Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup, Carling Cup. That’s a lot of football!

So after a few days of using Lion on an older, white MacBook I’ve realized that the multi-touch trackpads are probably core to getting the most out of Lion. Even though I don’t have access to a machine with a trackpad and Lion (foo on slow upgrade processes at work) I’m sure there are some gestures you just can’t make on the old trackpads.

Of course that’s a big nudge to upgrade to more recent models. Rumored 15” MacBook Airish machines would make a nice Christmas self-present.

So I spent a scorching afternoon upgrading my MacBook to OS X Lion. So far, so good, no major issues. The new scrolling is a bit disconcerting, but it shouldn’t take long to adapt.

Besides the reverse scrolling behavior, the only obvious changes are the addition of Launchpad and Mission Control. I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of those, as my Dock situation is pretty solid and I also like to use LaunchBar. But they look purdy!

To get the most out of the new OS, I’m going to have dig into Lion backgrounders like Glenn Fleishman’s overview at TidBITs or of course John Siracusa’s gargantuan review. Probably the Kindle edition.

Unfortunately, things just seem a bit pokier in terms of performance. Hoping it’s just some behinds the scene OS housekeeping burn-in.

Apropos Elle Driver. I’ve always liked that word… “gargantuan”… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.

As predicted, the latest versions of Apple’s MacBook Air computers are very tempting. Since the Apple url isn’t particularly stable, I’ll point to Jacqui Cheng’s writeup at ArsTechnica for the specs in human comprehensible form.

If at some point I do take a bite, I’ll probably go top shelf and get a maxed out 13 inch edition. Too bad you can’t get 8GB of RAM in the things, then it’d be a fabulous developer machine. Depending on finances, I’d splurge on the Thunderbolt driven display as well. Although not cheap, that combo would do me for a good 3 to 5 years.

Ripped through Peter Sims’ Little Bets. I’ve advanced enough in my career that technical proficiency won’t make or break me. Leveling up involves all that management goop that I’ve disdained in the past. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to get a class to fill in my gaps, so I’ll have to do it myself.

I thought Little Bets would provide some productive insights into the creative process. Little Bets though comes from the Malcolm Gladwell school of popular science. Long on anecdata, short on rigor. How many times can you name drop Chris Rock?

Actually, the book is chock full of references and notes which back up the assertions on the text. Should have picked on the links on the Kindle sooner. Even so, I never felt like I got deep into the practice of little bets. How does one effectively gauge the cost of a small effort or experiment such that it’s cheap enough? What happens if you hit a losing streak on your bets? What’s the difference between little bets and deliberative practice?

For those reasons, I can’t really recommend Little Bets although it’s an easy quick read. On my Kindle 1/3 is taken up by notes and the index, thus the end sneaks up on you real quick. Surprisingly so. Leaving it feeling as substantive as the origami on the cover.

I’ve been reading futurist Jamais Cascio’s Open The Future for a while but nothing’s come across the transom that was really interesting. At least until now.

Sight Licenses is a short essay on what happens once Augmented Reality lenses become a fixture amongst the populace. Suffice it to say that once vision becomes mediated, mayhem ensues. If you think our current copyright and fair use regime is woefully inadequate in the face of technology, imagine if everything you could see might be regulated in some fashion.

Perpetual ubiquitous advertising might not even be the worst outcome.

That was quick. I told you last Thursday Charles Stross’ Rule 34 was up next. Case closed, book finished on Sunday. Great read, remarkably dense, and thought provoking to the end.

Loosely a sequel to Halting State, Rule 34 involves a complex mesh of characters and plot threads. The book is written in the second person, and no two sequential chapters are told from the same character’s point of view. Ergo, you are constantly switching between them. Takes a bit of getting used to, especially since Scots figures heavily and you have to make the language adjustment along with the perspective switches.

When I’m not fawning over William Gibson, Stross is my go to guy. Rule 34 doesn’t fail to deliver.

The three main characters, Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, Anwar Hussein, and The Toymaker all get spun into a hyperkinetic web of flat out weird technology driven crime. Spammers are offed by household appliances. Phony nation states are constructed to hide fancy financial instruments (read scams). And venture capitalists are now Gangster 2.0, or is it vice versa?

Kavanaugh is the heroine trying to figure out who or what is wreaking this havoc, despite being banished to the cop hinterlands after losing at some political infighting. Hussein is the chump, but oddly sympathetic, two bit “developer” continuously getting sucked into get rich quick schemes to no good end. The Toymaker is a fucked up psycopath (that is all). A number of minor characters also get a chapter here or there, but Rule 34 really revolves around these three.

First of all, Rule 34 is just a good, fast paced police procedural/thriller/mystery although it probably doesn’t obey the covenants of all those forms. Secondly, it is extremely dense on the nerd/pop culture call out front which is much different than my remembrance of Halting State which seemed a bit kindler and gentler. At certain points, I thought every graf in Rule 34 had to have some sort of oblique reference to a Real Life (TM) emergent meme. Almost like a mashup of Accelerando and Halting State. Keanu starring in a Godfather reboot was a nice tweak though.

Obviously I’m recommending Rule 34. But there’s one essential concept to take away: panopticon singularity. Be careful what you wish for nerds…

I was considering picking up an Apple TV using some credit card points. But Jacqui Cheng of ArsTechnica is reporting there may be a 1080p version of Apple TV coming in the Fall. Very tasty. Definitely worth waiting for.

So I was noodling around with Amazon EC2 a few days ago. I used one of their quick start Linux machine images for about 10 minutes, then terminated the instance. Afterwards, I noticed I had some EBS volumes that were terminating also.

This is a complete noob lesson, but some AMIs use EBS volumes for their root disk instead of loading from S3. Thus the unexpected EBS volume. Operator error, please read the fine print.

It’s not a huge deal, although you could inadvertently incur costs with an EBS volume, since they’re metered by I/O operations in addition to storage. I’m assuming Amazon pays for the storage on these volumes but the user forks over for the ops.