Full Metal Blog

Wait Wait... Don't Google!

2008-08-05T22:06:00.001-07:00

Peter Sagal of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell me! visited Google a week or so ago to discuss his book from last year. He also give his take on Google and some behind the scenes details of how they produce the show. I visited a taping of the show waaay back in 2005

Feynman @ Thinking Machines

2008-05-25T10:32:00.000-07:00

Fabulous story of Richard Feynman's time working on the Connection Machine:

When we finally picked the name of the company, Thinking Machines Corporation, Richard was delighted. "That's good. Now I don't have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. I can just tell them the name of the company."

I do not mean to imply that Richard was hesitant to do the "dirty work." In fact, he was always volunteering for it. Many a visitor at Thinking Machines was shocked to see that we had a Nobel Laureate soldering circuit boards or painting walls. But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us.

Inside Stepney-gate

2008-05-24T12:07:00.001-07:00

Wired has a great article reliving the 2007 scandal in Formula One where engineers allegedly stole information from Ferrari and gave it to McLaren.

A few days later, Trudy Coughlan picked up the two CDs, along with the 780 pages of documents. Following her husband's instructions, she destroyed the papers in a home shredder and burned the remains in their back garden. Thus began the biggest scandal ever to rock the world of Formula One racing.

If you enjoy F1 (or tales of industrial espionage) it's a great read.

Own your own F1 car

2008-04-13T16:43:00.000-07:00

If you've ever dreamed of owning your own classic Formula One car a) your out of your mind and b) you should read this article at F1 Technical that describes the pros (but not many of the cons):

The average price range is around €45,000 - €60,000 which is only the same as a pricey road car. Although maintainence may cost a bit on top, these could even make good trackday or just enthusiasts cars. As well as these there are several Formula 3 cars and other open wheelers while not the same kind of history are sure to be fun behine the wheel.

I suspect the maintenance on these is going to be more than "a bit" if you really want to run the car. Spare parts might need to be manufactured, fuel / tires are hard to come by and engines typically need to have the oil pre-heated. But it's fun to dream!

The "Hero-shithead roller coaster"

2008-03-05T21:06:00.000-08:00

Apparently there won't be Flash on the iPhone anytime soon but John Paczkowski comes up with this zinger about what it's like working with Mr Jobs:

Subordinates are geniuses or ‘bozos,’ indispensable or no longer relevant. People in his orbit regularly flip, at a second’s notice, from one category to another, in what early Apple colleagues came to call his ‘hero-shithead roller coaster.’”

Inflation

2007-10-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

The fed has been saying that inflation is under control but I think I have evidence it isn't - the news program 60 minutes has been running 2 hours long for the past few weeks!

Bladerunner Redux

2007-10-05T22:26:00.000-07:00

Wired has an interesting interview with directory Ridley Scott about his upcoming re-edit of Bladerunner. This is a further refinement of the Director's Cut from the early 90's which is going to consist of a 5 disk set! I love Bladerunner as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy isn't Ridley Scott...) but I don't think I could sit through 5 DVDs. The interview also answers some questions like why it rains all the time in the Los Angeles of 2019 - to hide the wires ok course! It really is remarkable how contemporary the film looks even 20+ years after it was released.

301 Moved Permanently

2007-09-09T21:20:00.000-07:00

After 6 great years at Adobe, I've decided I need to do something a bit different. I won't say much about the new company other than it rhymes with oogle.

Monterey Historic Ferrari Video

2007-08-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned yesterday, the video I took of the Ferrari Historics practice session at Laguna Seca. The video quality is not great but the sound of the engines more than makes up for it. I like to think if I owned one of these amazing cars I would drive it this hard....

Monterey Historic Ferrari

2007-08-16T15:01:00.000-07:00

I took the morning off to check out the Historic Ferrari Races at Laguna Seca - it's part of the larger Monterey Historic Races. There's nothing like the sound of a V12 Testa Rossa to refill your soul. Pictures are here - add comments to the pictures if you know the model. I'm working on some video (don't get too excited, it's from a digital camera...). A personal treat for me was seeing a Ferrari 312PB being driven around the roads of Laguna Seca - don't see that everyday!
Update: The video is now available

My Favorite Mac Utilities

2007-08-11T20:38:00.000-07:00

These are the apps I have to have on a mac to make it usable:

Adium - A single chat client that works for Jabber / AOL / Yahoo / Google Talk and is fairly configurable.
CoRD - Open Source Windows Remote Desktop client
iTerm - Terminal tool that supports tabs (although apparently Leopard will fix this in Terminal)
QuickSilver - Uber app launcher
VLC - Media file player
TextMate ($) - An extensible programming editor that finally weened me off VIM (for mac editing at least).
OmniGaffle ($) - Diagramming tool with thriving community of stencil developers
Parallels ($) - Run Linux / Windows in a sandbox.

Isle of Man Shifter Karts

2007-08-10T17:32:00.000-07:00

I enjoy driving go-karts (and have the broken rib to prove it!) but driving one of these 250cc shifter karts in the rain on the Isle of Man just seems crazy to me.

Scott Berkun on the Myths of Innovation

2007-08-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

Scott Berkun (author of the Art of Project Management and the Myths of Innovation) gave a talk about why innovation is often an ephemeral goal that doesn't necessarily lead to great success. I was able to attend on of his talks but now it's available on Google Video.

Working Ferrari 312PB 1:3 Scale Model

2007-07-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

I found this amazing video of Pierre Scerri who built a scale model of a Ferrari 312PB. Perhaps not so amazing except everything works - it has a scale 12 cylinder engine with fuel injection, dry sump and 24 valves, a working gearbox with 5 gears and reverse! It took Pierre 15 years because he made every part from scratch and it really sounds like a Ferrari 312. Here is a longer article with some detailed pictures.

REVIEW: RESTful Web Services

2007-07-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

Sam Ruby and Leonard Leonard Richardson have written an excellent introduction to the world of RESTful Web Services - web services that work like the rest of the Web. While I was reading this book several people commented that the books "is just the HTTP Standard" so clearly there is a need for this book. REST is an architectural model for designing web services within the HTTP specification and maintaining the spirit of the Web by keeping the focus on resources. By contrast, SOAP complies with the HTTP specification but uses it as a generic transport layer because SOAP was designed to be used by other transports like SMTP or Messaging Queues - this approach has it's pluses and minuses (mostly minuses).

The book begins with an overview of how HTTP works with an emphasis on the resource aspects of the web and how the different verbs (GET / PUT / POST / DELETE) operate on resources. This is followed by an analysis of various commercial services (del.icio.us, flickr, S3) and how they measure up to the RESTive ideals - the book does a reasonable job of defining REST thru counterexample without being too preachy.

The real meat of the book is the chapter on Resource Oriented Architecture which defines concrete rules for designing a resource centric API and how the uniform interface (the standard HTTP verbs) act open them. The authors make the point that one of the primary reasons that remote procedure call interfaces (like SOAP and XMLRPC) are so seductive is that they make it easy to take an existing legacy system and web service enable it. By contrast, Resource Oriented Architecture requires that the entire system be designed around resources and the manipulations on them - and it's hard for vendors to sell tools that do this sort of thing. However, it's a lot more likely that a service that has been designed around resources will work well on the web. The book goes through some examples of applying this architecture in various scenarios, covering some common problems like how to model transient resources for things like transactions.

One of the parts of the book I really liked are the appendices which cover all of the HTTP response codes and request / response headers. While all of this is covered in various specifications, the book goes into some detail of all the codes, when (if at all) they are likely to be seen and common pitfalls.

Overall the book is excellent - it is very much a practical guide to web services rather than an academic book. Like practicing Feng Shui, producing a perfectly RESTful application may not always be possible but applying the principles to any extent will result in better web services. One of the key points is that the web sites that end users interact with are also RESTful web services and many of the design principles of resource oriented architecture will also result in better web sites.

Fast TextMate project search

2007-07-18T08:30:00.001-07:00

I use TextMate as my primary editor (and VIM for everything else). But I really hate the project search which is slow (like "computer grinds to a halt" slow). However TextMate is extensible so Henrik wrote a UI that uses GREP to do the project search so it's fast.

Victory by Design - Ferrari

2007-07-13T09:29:00.000-07:00

I found this on Google Video - Alain de Cadenet hosts a series that explores the classic vehicles (for racing and the road) made by different high end manufacturers. And by "explores" I mean he drives them around closed roads at a very high speed. In this case, he drives various classic Ferrari cars and talks about how they came about. The 250 GTO would probably be my favorite - designed by Pininfarina with a body built by Scaglietti, it's the perfect Ferrari.

Here's a list of other cars he drives / discusses in the show:

166 MM
250 MM
375 Plus
121 LM
250 Testa Rossa
250 TR 60
246S
250 SWB
250P
250 GTO
275 LM
275 GTB
330 P3
312 PB
375 Daytona
333 SP
550 Barchetta

Mountain View Kwik-E-Mart

2007-07-04T12:11:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned, the 7-11 in Mountain View has been turned into a real life Kwik-E-Mart. It seems like someone put a lot of effort into designing the store as a lot of the references to the show are fairly subtle (although sadly no Chutney Squishee). The store was packed when I went and they were also out of Krusty-O's and Buzz cola so I guess I'll have to go back.

[Photos Here].

Real World Kwik-E-Mart

2007-07-02T09:19:00.001-07:00

As a promotion for the upcoming Simpsons movie, several 7-11 stores have been turned into the fictional Kwik-E-Mart stores featured in the show. I'll report back once I check out the one in Mountain View.

Group B Rallying Retrospective

2007-06-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

Jalopnik waxes philosophic about "the good old days" (a.k.a the mid '80s) of Group B rallying when the cars were essentially unlimited in power:

And we mean unlimited. While engine displacement was strictly categorized, Group B rules failed to specify any limit in terms of boost (insert maniacal cackling here). This proved to be a loophole engineers gleefully exploited with stupefying, almost dumbfounding results. Actual horsepower numbers are murky at best and even downright cryptic. Quoted numbers for the 2.1-liter Ford RS200 for example range anywhere from 550 hp to over 800 hp. Reasons for this secrecy are many and varied. The most commonly cited are that the primitive all-wheel-drive dynamometers weren't up to the job. And because there was no cap on power, manufacturers just didn't care all that much. We would wager however, that teams didn't want the competition to know just how full-on berserk each others' cars were. But here's the skinny: Group B cars could out accelerate F1 cars. 0-60 times of less than three seconds were common – on gravel. Sadly, in the days before computerized traction control, so much unwieldy power proved to be Group B's downfall.

Of course, like the Mille Miglia and the Targa Floria, Group B rallying was too dangerous to continue indefinitely.

And then everything went very wrong. Near Sintra in Portugal, driver Joaquim Santos came out of a gully only to find dozens of fans standing at the peak. His Ford RS200 careered into the crowd, killing three and injuring more than 30. Every team immediately pulled out of the race. Soon after, Lancia's Henri Toivonen inexplicably missed a tight left-hander and plunged into a ditch. The fuel tanks of his Delta S4 ruptured and burst into flames, incinerating him and his co-driver Sergio Cresto.

There are a selection of videos of the different Group B rally cars in action - my personal favorite is the Audi Quatro Sport.

Petascale computing for Particle Physics

2007-06-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

Google Tech Talks has a video presentation on the data collection for detectors being developed for the new Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. The ATLAS detector they are developing has fairly unique computing requirements due to the massive amount (a Petabyte per second) of data produced. A lot of the processing requires them to very quickly reject most of the collision events (like low energy collisions) and then do more complicated analysis of the rest of the data. The abstract:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled to begin operation in Summer 2008, will collide protons at energies not accessible since the time of the early Universe. The study of the reactions produced at the LHC has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the most fundamental forces in nature. The ATLAS experiment, currently being installed at the LHC, is designed to detect collisions at the LHC, to collect the relevant data and to provide a unified framework for the reconstruction and analysis of these data. This talk will review the goals of the ATLAS program and will describe the software and computing challenges associated analyzing these data. Among the relevant issues are the need to develop and maintain a unified analysis framework for use by more than 1000 scientists and the need for distributed access to large (petabyte) scale data samples, including a significant metadata component.

Crashing Las Vegas

2007-06-20T08:36:00.001-07:00

Via Worse Than Failure...

Cartalk Podcast

2007-05-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

NPR now offers a podcast of the full episodes for CarTalk which is great news because I usually miss about 50% of every episode (even with the repeats). Other great NPR shows available as a podcast:

It's great to see NPR acknowledge the changing role of radio and adapt. I hope PBS is thinking along the same lines.

Startup Camp 2 Report

2007-05-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned, I attended Startup Camp 2 this past monday. The event was fairly well attended, mostly by people attending Java One that week - Sun made an effort to provide a forum for a bunch of free one-day events called Community One. One downside to this was that there were several events that I would have liked to attend going on at same time and I spent most of the breaks doing work...

For the second iteration of Startup Camp the event was compressed to a single day in San Francisco (presumably to live within the constraints of Community One). The event seemed to have a somewhat different vibe from the first one - not better or worse, just different - maybe it was a different crowd or the layout of the conference rooms at the hotel. Some of the discussions tended to turn into lectures and it took a concerted effort to not turn things into a monologue. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz spoke at the start about why startups are important to Sun as customers and to him personally (he called Startups 'the Swamp from which I spawned').

Some of the sessions I attended:

Should Startups "think scale first"?: Jinesh Varia from Amazon Web Services ran a discussion to trade off the costs and benefits of designing for scalability up front versus dealing with problems as they arise. My own take is "it depends" on lots of different factors about your startup - some level of planning is appropriate but a lot of thinking tends to ignore survivor bias - for every Twitter.com there are many many failures and priority #1 should be proving out your idea. Jinesh gave some information at the end about the tools that AWS has for startups which allow you to pay for what you need, not what you think you might need. His presentation reminded me about Amazon Simple Queue Service which I had tried out several years ago but which makes a lot more sense in the context of EC2 and S3.
OpenID: What can it do for my Startup?: Luke Sontag and Kaliya Hamlin answered people's questions about Open ID and how to use it in your webapp. There were a lot of concerns about phishing and trust in general which apparently are not currently addressed. My take away was that Open ID aims to solve a limited problem and because it's recently gained a lot of support from various groups, it now needs to increase the scope of the problem it solves to be web single-sign on.

At Startup Camp 2

2007-05-06T11:35:00.000-07:00

I'll be at Startup Camp 2 tomorrow morning. The last one was quite informative and this time it's in San Francisco so the crowd may be a little different. It also looks like it will be even better attended at least as far as I can tell from the registration page with more than 400 people. Unlike Startup Camp 1, it's only a single day long which it about all the time I can spare right now but I'll report back tomorrow. Startup Camp is sponsored by Sun and is part of a bunch of Community events around Java One including RedMonkOne by the guys at Redmonk who I met at the previous Startup Camp.