Greenpeace, Chinese Zombie Ships

The worst part of this is that these ships are probably floating toxic waste dumps. The Chinese government should spend some of that newly earned Wal-Mart money and remove these ships and clean up the sea. I wonder why all these ships are way over on the West Coast of Africa and not on the East Coast of China?

We're in the big African Queen inflatable, cruising alongside an anchored trawler. It's more rust than metal - the ship is rotting away. The foredeck is covered in broken machinery. The fish deck is littered with frayed cables, and the mast lies horizontally, hanging over the starboard side. A large rusty Chinese character hangs on railings above the bridge, facing forward. It reads 'happiness'.
- Via Greenpeace

Google Mini, Gmail + Analytics

So we received our new Google Mini. We purchased the 100k document version. It took me all of about 1 hour to do the custom integration work. We decided to do the custom integration utilizing the built in XML API. I first thought that this would be at least a several day project. I was surprised when I had it working flawlessly in less than an hour.

How long do you think it will be before Google will release an Exchange killer via Gmail-Mini?

So if they bundled Gmail, Gtalk, Search, News Reader and their CL2 calendar up into a nice manageable package like the Google Mini. IMHO you would have an Exchange killer. Throw in a nice XML API and it would be an excellent collaboration server.

Hell they could do the same thing with Google Analytics and we would probably buy one.

 Update: They seem to be getting closer.

Seti@home need funds & hardware

SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) apparently is needing some serious funds in the amount of $750,000 to keep going for the next year. They are also looking for Hardware donations.

I wonder if Jonathan Schwartz would be willing to donate a few of their Sun Fire V20z to SETI@home . He seems to be in the mood of giving away machines as of late. These machines would go to a really good cause.

Space Exploration Technologies(Space X) to launch today.

According to the SpaceX web site the launch of the Falcon 1 carrying a small satellite will be launched today at 1:00 California Time.

Today could be a good day for Space X or it could turn out to be a bad day for Space X. If they can’t prove that the Falcon can fly, they have a good chance of loosing 200 Million dollars worth of pre-launch orders.

I hope they are successful with today’s launch. Space X could really turn this industry upside down. BTW, Space X was created by Elon Musk the creator of PayPal.

Good Luck Space X!

Update: Oyeee! The Falcon 1 blew up shortly after launch. That sucks!

Microsoft should buy Sun

Interesting discussion over at Mini-Microsoft about Microsoft’s latest woes. It really seems that Microsoft Management is not the only one to blame for their OS delays. According to the discussion at Mini-Microsoft their ISV’s are placing a huge demand on the company and the OS division. This would explain why it’ seems little old Apple can ship software and Microsoft can’t. Apple doesn’t have the same set of problems Microsoft does. Apple like Sun really doesn’t have to answer to anyone on the scale that Microsoft does.

So, why couldn’t Microsoft buy Sun and produce there own hardware software solution?

Solaris is a hardened OS but lack’s the usability of Windows. Sun’s hardware IMHO is the best in the world. They could release a version of their OS for their hardware first. Then work on delivering their OS to fit the need’s of there ISV’s after their core OS/Hardware solution was released. They could also release a backward compatibility layer like Apple did with Classic for OSX.

This might help with Microsoft’s 2 biggest problems.

1. Security
2. Innovation

I would be bending over backwards to figure these 2 issues out even if it meant swallowing a little of my own pride. Why reinvent the wheel when there is a perfectly good wheel that just needs a new vehicle?

David Pogue & Scobleizer

It seems that David Pogue of the NyTimes could learn a thing or two from Robert Scoble. No more freebies.

New York Times columnist David Pogue, who is also a contributor to CBS News and National Public Radio, received $2,000 in free personal-data-recovery services from DriveSavers in connection with pieces Pogue did for all three news organizations. Pogue wrote the stories after his own drive crashed, entombing his voice message and e-mail files.

- SF Weekly

Ehh! That's enough of Pogue for me thanks.

More S3 thoughts

If you have been watching the discussion at any one of the familiar spots about Amazon’s new S3 web service you will see a lot of talk about comparing the new S3 service with standard hosting compaines.

How S3 differs

The core of S3 is the Object database, your not just storing bits, your storing bits and meta data. It’s like exposing the underlying layer of a filesystem with a platfom agnostic API. That’s a lot differnt then putting a file up on to your web host’s hardrive.

The killer app(s)

So what is S3’s killer app? I duno for sure. But I think a lot could be done in 2 areas.

- Backup

1. Platform portability is a no-brainer.
2. You can have the user expose certain files to the public(like photos or movies) or the user can could choose whether or not to share the file via BitTorrent.
3. The cost for a standard full 250 gb drive would be $37.50 a month there would be an initial transfer fee of $50.00 all subsequent backups would be differential so you cost for the transfer would only be based off what has changed or what has been added.
4. The benefits are outstanding. You get reliable distributed storage for your entire drive for only $37.50 a month. And that’s if you actually use all 250gb of your drive. I would bet the price will probably get better.

- Bloging apps & casting

1. There are a lot of different casting applications out there today Podcasting, Photocasting etc.. Most bloging systems don’t offer much storage for media beyond images. For instance this WordPress blog only allows me to upload images. If I want to do a podcast, photocast or just upload code for people to view then I have to find other server to store it.
2. Apps like WordPress, Blogspot, TypePad and Live Journal could create a plug-ins that would allow users to use there A3 accounts. A user could then store and link to what ever files they wanted to.

I bet Dave at will be the first to integrate this into his outliner app.

Amazon S3 Test Service

I was able to run a test against Amazon’s S3 Web Service using their example code. I am totally digging this! The possibilities are endless.

So here is the basic run down as far as I can tell,

1. Register with Amazon and get your key(s).
2. Download test code, I used the Curl example code.
3. Create a bucket my first one was faulkingham so my bucket url is http://s3.amazonaws.com/faulkingham/.
4. Create an object, and assign permissions if you want it public.
5. My first object(file) was index.html my second was the aws.gif the object is different from the key but they don’t have to be. Your object could be index.html and your key could be index. So your url would be /bucket/index instead of /bucket/index.html
6. Take a look at my sample files that I have made public.
7. Next step is to try the BitTorrent.

Amazon S3 has BitTorrent support

The Tech Crunch folks published a nice review of Amazon S3 grid storage. But they totaly missed what’s so cool about it. If you read beyond the standard features about price and storage you will find out why it’s really the killer app. Take a look at the developer documentation and have a look at the last section entitled “Using BitTorrent with S3“. That’s right Amazon S3 supports BitTorrent, it will create and seed your object(file).

Here is the snippet from the docs,

There is no extra charge for use of BitTorrent with S3. Data transfer via the BitTorrent protocol is metered at the same rate as client/server delivery. To be precise, whenever a downloading BitTorrent client requests a “piece” of an object from the S3 “seeder,” charges accrue just as if an anonymous request for that piece had been made using the REST or SOAP protocol. These charges will appear on your S3 bill and usage reports in the same way. The difference is that if a lot of clients are requesting the same object simultaneously via BitTorrent, then the amount of data S3 must serve to satisfy those clients will be lower than with client/server delivery. This is because the BitTorrent clients are simultaneously uploading and downloading amongst themselves. The data transfer savings achieved from use of BitTorrent can vary widely depending on how popular your object is. Less popular objects require heavier use of the “seeder” to serve clients, and thus the difference between BitTorrent distribution costs and client/server distribution costs may be small for such objects. In particular, if only one client is ever downloading a particular object at a time, the cost of BitTorrent delivery will be the same as direct download.

Wow! And to create that torrent? No problem,

Retrieving a .torrent file for any publicly available object is easy. Simply add a “?torrent” query string parameter at the end of the REST GET request for the object. No authentication is required. Once you have a BitTorrent client installed, downloading an object using BitTorrent download may be as easy as opening this URL in your web browser.

United Airlines Dragon Commercial

United Airlines Dragon Commercial, and the documentry of the making of the commercial.

Excellent!