Gadgetopia

Spies like us: NSA to build huge facility in Utah: The NSA is building a new datacenter in Utah.  Why Utah?  Simple: power.

It will also require at least 65 megawatts of power — about the same amount used by every home in Salt Lake City combined. A separate power substation will have to be built at Camp Williams to sustain that demand, […]

[…] In 2006, the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA — Baltimore Gas & Electric’s biggest customer — had maxed out the local grid and could not bring online several supercomputers it needed to expand its operations.

So, essentially, they’ve run Maryland out of power.  Electricity is cheap in Utah, and data centers are insanely power-intensive.  Read this NY Times article from a couple weeks ago for more on this.  Within a couple years, server purchase costs get dwarfed by the cost required to power them.

No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam: This is a really good article about how relational databases are falling out of favor with many, in favor of “alternate” datastores like key-value databases or XML databases.

Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain’s heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of slow, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data.

“Relational databases give you too much. They force you to twist your object data to fit a RDBMS [relational database management system],” said Jon Travis […]  NoSQL-based alternatives “just give you what you need,” Travis said.

In Chicago, the big vibe I got was that content management in general is moving away from relational databases and towards XML databases, like Xindice, eXist, Mark Logic, etc.  It’s weird, and will take some getting used to, but there are some huge advantages to it.

Here’s another article along the same lines: Should you go Beyond Relational Databases? It covers things like CouchDB, MapReduce, BigTable, etc.

And if you’re really in for something funky, I present you with Caravel, a CMS that uses LDAP (a key-value store, at heart) as its storage mechanism.

Even if you swear you’re never giving up your relational database, read these articles for some perspective.

Content Modelling: It’s kind of eerie how similar this series of posts is to my presentation.  Especially the third one, where he talks about the reasons to model content.  This guy and I are seriously on the same wave-length.

Below sea level is where the content lives. The more complex the site and/or the amount of content there is, the greater the need to model the content. Content modelling is the process of creating and maintaining a content model. A content model is a representation of your information. This could be a diagram on a whiteboard, a pile of cards describing your products and services, an excel spreadsheet, or a fancy content modelling tool. All or none of them may be appropriate for your particular situation.

The Real Genius Of The Kindle? The Return Of ‘Unitasking’: This guy echos sentiments I’ve made in the past:

Over a few weeks, I rediscovered my ability to simply read the book or article I had punched up in the first place. (Just like—gasp!—old-fashioned printed matter.) It’s particularly enjoyable when reading a newspaper or magazine—enough so that I’ve been routinely purchasing some of these publications when I could have grabbed my laptop and read them for free on the web. In effect, I’m paying for the lack of distraction.

See these earlier posts for the same general message – it’s easier to read when nothing else is fighting for your attention.

• The Printed Blog and the Difference Between Exploration and Consumption
• Reading Print Publications Electronically (my thought on the general concept is towards the end)

Web video site Joost cuts service, jobs, CEO goes: A victim of Hulu, I suspect.

Joost, an early pioneer in bringing popular TV shows and movies to the Web, is dropping its consumer service, cutting jobs and losing its high-profile chief executive as it struggles to find revenue to survive.

The company said Tuesday it is changing strategy to serve as a white label video platform for media companies such as cable and satellite providers, as well as broadcasters. This moves it away from being primarily a consumer website.

StackExchange™—The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform: Spolsky and Atwood have productized the Stack Overflow platform, so you can buy it as a service and customize it as a knowledge sharing site for anything.

The idea of a knowledge exchange, running the same software as Stack Overflow, can be applied to just about any subject matter. With StackExchange™, you can run a site with all the same features that made Stack Overflow successful.

Prices start at $129 a month.

Joshua Davis (web designer): I kinda like this – it’s a Wikipedia page on a Web designer, essentially.

Joshua Davis (born June 13, 1971) is an American web designer, author and artist in new media. He was an early pioneer in the use of Macromedia Flash.

Of course, not just any designer.  Joshua Davis was with Kioken, one of the most awesome firms back in the late 1990s.  I wrote about them here, and Davis even came along and commented some time later.

It’s interesting to read about how things worked at the higher levels back in the day.

A proficient illustrator and painter with a passion for technology, Davis’ work brought an entirely new dimension to art. Utilizing randomization in controlled environments, or Chaos Theory, Davis established a new and unique perspective on visual communication and creative expression, pioneering an area previously unexplored in graphic design.

In January 2001, as part of issue #100 of K10k.net, Davis posted an autobiography — a revealing look at his personal life in the New York City art/club scene in the early 1990s, his drug addiction, and his ability to overcome it to pursue his goal of being a full-time artist.

Perhaps some day there will be a Wikipedia page about me. “Content management visionary” has a nice ring to it…

Foxconn: Just because their name is on it, doesn’t mean they actually make it.  In fact, it’s likely they don’t make it – Foxconn does.

Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer retailers Dell, Inc. and Hewlett Packard; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, and the Amazon Kindle.

So, Eric Higgins from Google posts an article called PHP performance tips in which he presents all sorts of ways to supposedly make PHP execute faster.

In response, Gwynne Raskind from the core PHP team, responds with:

[…] all of the advice in it is completely incorrect. We at the PHP team would like to offer some thoughts aimed at debunking these claims, which the author has clearly not verified.

Gwynne then proceeds to debunk Google’s article, piece by piece.

The example the author gives results in absolutely no significant use of extra memory […] This is exactly the opposite of correct advice. […] this piece of advice is total nonsense […]  We also urge the author to consider the troubling security implications of his examples, at least one of which suggests an extremely dangerous coding style.

Awkward (said in a happy sing-song tone).

Anti-Abuse Bus Stop Ad Only Batters Women When Nobody’s Looking - Bus stop domestic violence ad: This is pretty cool, tragic subject matter notwithstanding.  Click through to see it.

Amnesty International has installed a new anti-domestic-abuse ad fixture in Hamburg, Germany which is equal parts clever and shocking: when you look at the photo, it’s a smiling couple; when you look away, it’s a dude punchin’ a lady.

The billboard works by scanning its proximity with an eye-tracking camera, which triggers an image switch on the display panel when it senses someone looking at it. The change only occurs after a brief delay, so that observers understand what’s going on, and get the message.

Melody: Community Powered Publishing: Now that Movable Type has gone open-source, it has forked.

Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature. We believe that a vibrant community is the foundation on which all successful products and services are built today.

I think is probably a pretty friendly fork, however.

$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC: What a great idea.  Load an customized OS for low-end machine on a USB key, and make old machines new again.

The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.

“What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost,” says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. “It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.”

Coding Horror: Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs: Great post from Jeff Atwood comparing how much it costs to run your site on one massive server (scaling UP), against multiple smaller servers (scaling OUT).

At any rate, let’s assume $100,000 is a reasonable ballpark for the monster server Markus purchased. It is the very definition of scaling up — a seriously big iron single server.

But what if you scaled out, instead — Hadoop or MapReduce style, across lots and lots of inexpensive servers?

His numbers are interesting.  I tended to think that scaling out would be cheaper, but it’s not when you throw in software licensing and power consumption.  In those two areas, the single, monster server wins by a mile.

The other thing that I don’t see Atwood discuss is getting a bunch of low-level servers to all play together nicely.  He gives the example that he could buy 83 smaller servers for the cost of one monster.  But now you have 83 servers to manage, instead of just one.  Of course, you have a crapload of fault tolerance now, so is this better?

Great presentation on content modeling: Seth made some nice comments about my presentation.  He also cut to the absolute core of the situation with a point that I’m somewhat astonished I didn’t make in the actual talk.

This is why evaluating the content modeling facilities of a CMS is so important before buying it (emphasis mine):

The reason why I find this topic so important (aside from the fact that I am a recovering DBA myself) is that content modeling capability is one of those difficult to change characteristics of a content management system. It is what I call a “load bearing wall” in the customization of a CMS. That is, while it may be possible to remediate a content modeling limitation, all the buttressing required may make such an effort impractical. Content modeling architecture is so difficult to change, in fact, that the products themselves tend to live with what they have and change very little in this area

I forgive him for stealing the term “load-bearing wall” in relation to content management.

Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it: Why would Microsoft do this?  It doesn’t make any sense.

Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images […]

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft wants your feedback. It’s time to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.

If you don’t need any more information that what I’ve provided here, don’t click through.  The site consists of about a thousand Twitter profile pictures (and adds more in real-time).  Load times are not great.