Terry Jones

Archive for January, 2008

S3 numbers revisited: six orders of magnitude does matter

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 Posted under companies. | 3 Comments »

OK.... I should have realized in my original posting that the Oct 2007 10,000,000,000,000 objects figure was the source of the problem. I knew S3 could not be doubling every ... Read more..

Google maps gets SFO location waaaay wrong

Monday, January 28th, 2008 Posted under companies, tech. | 1 Comment »

Before leaving Barcelona yesterday morning, I checked Google maps to get driving directions from San Francisco International airport (SFO) to a friend's place in Oakland. Google got it way wrong. Imagine ... Read more..

Amazon S3 to rival the Big Bang?

Monday, January 28th, 2008 Posted under companies, tech. | 4 Comments »

Note: this posting is based on an incorrect number from an Amazon slide. I've now re-done the revenue numbers. We've been playing around with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). Adam Selipsky, ... Read more..

The Black Swan

Saturday, January 26th, 2008 Posted under books. | 4 Comments »

I got a copy of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable for xmas. In London a couple of weeks ago I pointed it out to Russell as we ... Read more..

Worst of the web award: MIT/Stanford Venture Lab

Friday, January 25th, 2008 Posted under tech. | 2 Comments »

I've just awarded one of my coveted Worst of the Web awards to the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab. Here's why. They are hosting a video I'd like to watch. You can see ... Read more..

Final straws for Mac OS X

Thursday, January 24th, 2008 Posted under companies, tech. | 14 Comments »

I've had it with Mac OS X. I'm going to install Linux on my MacBook Pro laptop in March once I'm back from ETech. I've been thinking about this for months. There ... Read more..

Understanding high-dimensional spaces

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 Posted under other, tech. | 10 Comments »

I've spent lots of time thinking about high-dimensional spaces, usually in the context of optimization problems. Many difficult problems that we face today can be phrased as problems of navigating ... Read more..

Giselle is served an apple martini, but she doesn’t drink it

Sunday, January 20th, 2008 Posted under other. | 2 Comments »

Well that's a relief. Read more..

One email a day

Saturday, January 19th, 2008 Posted under me, tech. | Comments Off on One email a day

I've got my email inbox locked down so tightly that only one email made it through today. That's down from several hundred a day just a few weeks ago. All the ... Read more..

Free wifi at Stansted

Friday, January 11th, 2008 Posted under travel. | Comments Off on Free wifi at Stansted

I'm at Stansted heading back to Barcelona. There's free wifi here (on the merula network in the waiting area for gates 1-19), for the first time I've seen it. At ... Read more..

Wifi on a bus

Friday, January 11th, 2008 Posted under travel. | Comments Off on Wifi on a bus

I'm on the X90 National Express bus from Oxford to London. At the bus stop before we left I pulled out my laptop to do some work on a presentation. ... Read more..

Tagging in the year 3000 (BC)

Friday, January 4th, 2008 Posted under books, representation, tech. | 4 Comments »

Jimmy Guterman recently called Marcel Proust an Alpha Geek and asked for thoughts on "what from 100 years ago might be the hot new technology of 2008?" Here's something about 5000 ... Read more..

Both my kids beat me at Connect 4

Friday, January 4th, 2008 Posted under me. | 2 Comments »

[caption id="attachment_711" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Image: katypearce"][/caption]My 2 older kids got Connect 4 for xmas. I've liked Connect 4 for a long time. The first TCP/IP socket programming I ever did ... Read more..

More email customization

Friday, January 4th, 2008 Posted under tech. | Comments Off on More email customization

My recent email changes are working out well. Yesterday morning I woke up and didn't read email. That's because I didn't have any email! Well, I did, but procmail had filed ... Read more..

I just deactivated my Facebook account

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 Posted under companies, me. | 1 Comment »

I just deactivated my Facebook account. This has nothing to do with Robert Scoble's account being disabled earlier today, I'm just sick of Facebook. It does nothing whatsoever for me, ... Read more..

Amazon just billed me 14 cents

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 Posted under companies, tech. | 4 Comments »

I've been messing around with Esteve setting up an Amazon EC2 machine. We set up a machine the other day, ssh'd into it, took a look around, and then shut it ... Read more..

My email setup

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 Posted under me, tech. | 1 Comment »

I like customizing my environment. I've spent lots and lots of time doing that over the decades. Some examples: My emacs environment has about 6000 lines of elisp that I've written ... Read more..

I resolve to waste less time online

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 Posted under me. | 1 Comment »

It's new year's day. I never make new year's resolutions. But today I've finally taken a step I've been meaning to take for a while, and it happens to be ... Read more..