Reasons Unbeknownst

It’s been a little while but there’s actually a lot going on behind the scenes. I’m working on the biggest and deepest blog post of my life which should be up in the next couple of weeks.

Also, in the right column I’ve added photos (Gallery v2), a calendar (WebCalendar), and my music library(Ampache).

I no longer have to rely on or pay for Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, or Google Calendar. Some of the replacements I’ve installed are actually much better than their free alternatives. It was a major hacking challenge getting everything working on BlueHost’s servers but it’s finally stable.

Some benefits of DIY:
Gallery v2 – I don’t have to pay for Flickr Pro. The uploaded video (flash) isn’t subject to quality or length limitations like YouTube.
Ampache – This is blowing my mind. My whole MP3 library is now online and I can listen to it from any computer with a web browser and Internet access. Some people have this working on their Internet capable mobile phones meaning storage is no longer an issue.
WebCalendar – Not many benefits over Google Calendar but it’s easier for people to see my public events (just click the link to the right).

My argument: Everybody will have a similar setup in a few years but it’ll be vastly easier to configure. It’ll also be seamless meaning fewer logins for the various services and they will be connected and social using OAuth and OpenID.

Photo by BridgePix, click for credit.

This is a test post. I’m trying to host video on my blog without using an external provider like YouTube, Vimeo, or the new Flickr Video. I’m also using free and open source tools to encode and play this video…

This is a short video I shot at La Jolla Cove in 2005. It’s set to repeat, click it to stop.

And here’s a widescreen clip from Juno:

The benefit is that I can host videos of unlimited length, at no cost, without quality restrictions or a goofy logo hovering over the video. I also don’t have to worry about my videos disappearing without notice. And if you care about keeping the rights to your work it’s probably a good idea to keep your files on your server.

Update: YouTube just enabled ad overlays on their videos. So if you upload a video of your kid’s first steps your family might see a slightly transparent ad for Nikes hovering over it.

Cons are complexity and bandwidth costs but bandwidth cost is approaching zero these days so unless you host the next big thing you shouldn’t have any problems.

You’ll need your own sever and a little gumption to pull it off but these two links should get you started:
Flash Video Player for embedding into your blog.

http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player

Flash Video Encoder for turning your mpegs and what-not into Flash/FLV video files for use with the player.

http://www.rivavx.com/index.php?downloads0&L=3

Update: I’m getting some traffic from Intel’s servers according to my logs, maybe I’m on to something…

Intel is about to release some new hard drive replacements in the form of Solid State Drives. The only way I think these will be interesting for the average consumer is with a price much lower than current SSD offerings. Let’s presume that these drives can max out SATAII bandwidth at 250-280MB/s. (edit: according to this article, they’re going to do 250MB/s read and 130MB/s write.) That’s about twice as good as offerings from MTron et al. but the reason current SSDs kick mechanical drive butt is due to the super low latency (see Vista bootup benches with SSDs in RAID here).

So the latency probably won’t drop which means regular users will only see minor performance benefits over MTRON drives. So why did Intel bother creating these things? I have three theories.

1> They’ve figured out how to create better drive controllers which allows them to use inexpensive flash memory without losing performance. This probably includes something like MFT(managed flash technology) and a drive controller designed specifically to work with flash memory. These things suck down twice as much power (not overall though) as competing SSDs which is a good sign that there is a lot going on under the hood.

2> The use of something like the aforementioned MFT solves the problems associated with random write performance in flash drives. That doesn’t matter (much) in a home computer but for servers it can be crippling. Even if the price is not significantly lower than the competition at launch I would expect these to be hugely popular in servers which are often bottlenecked by disk IO. In a great article by BigDBAHead flash with MFT was roughly 15x faster than Raptors in random write operations. The same drive sans MFT was only half as fast as the Raptor. MFT is currently a software add-on but my guess is that Intel has it built into the drives.

3> The new drive controller will allow higher reliability which the old school drive manufacturers are trying to use as a way to scare people into buying old technology. If these things are as reliable as they claim…

“Grimsrud kicked off half an hour or so of amazing bravado by declaring the endurance of Intel SSDs should be roughly 50 times better than the competition.”

then cost will be the sole remaining concern.

My only hope is that Intel releases smaller versions of this drive. Good RAID controllers can handle 800MB/s these days so if Intel can eek out 200MB/s with one drive an affordable 4x16Gig RAID 0 array would be possible and it would change the hard drive industry over night.

Note: People talk about the processors on RAID cards without mentioning the fact that the chips run at various speeds. Someone with money to burn needs to get a RAID card with an Intel chip @1.2 Ghz (instead of 800Mhz) which should be at least 50% faster than the NextLevelHardware Array which would yield 1.2GBytes / second or so. The brand spanking new Areca ARC-1680ix-12 looks like the perfect RAID card for this environment.

Update 2: A theory: They’re using an underclocked IOP processor inside their SSDs.
Update 3: Another theory: They’re using the IOP processor to do internal/transparent RAID 5 or 6 to increase reliability.

Idea 1: If you notice the spam that gets through your inbox it is often times intentionally misspelled (think V14GRA) to get past spam filters that check a list of banned words. My idea is to use a spell checker as well as a black list for words.

Edit: Case in point, this just showed up in my inbox.

excellent ny jh Woman n m uqi http://www.theew.domain fx zsney ekxx. jdzak f vl mdy m.
ujh r bs anmlq oq dv, gnkv xq nndjn pgo.

The default spam filter for Yahoo Mail generally misses oddly spelled variants of male enhancement supplements. But what if you also ran spell check on the the email titles? That would catch V14GRA as well as the actual spelling. If you’re just a terrible speller your email would be more likely to face the spam box but that’s just motivation to improve.

Idea 2: I have this belief that Capitalism wasn’t really able to function properly prior to the Internet (and web services) because it relies on accurate and timely information. The trade off is a growing wealth divide. I think the concept might apply to social networks as well.

This idea is that human interaction was previously hampered by the same lack of technology. Now we have email, Facebook, Myspace, cell phones. The consequence for capitalism is a growing wealth divide so what are the consequences, if any, for human interaction? What is the currency of interaction? Reputation? Can the concept of wealth be applied to friendship? Should it? Is the YMCA comprable to CompUSA and if so is it destined for failure?

What are the consequences of explicitly defining social networks so computers know how to deal with them. Are unwritten laws unwritten for a reason?

Idea 3: Relates to an unorthodox installation of a garbage disposal but it’s not fit for print on my name-emblazoned blog (though my friends think it’ll make me rich some day).

In other news, I’m working on an article for a local paper which may or may not get published. It argues that the future will differ in the ways we interact instead of emphasizing flying cars or super high definition TV. I’ll repost it here even if it doesn’t make the cut.

Image is “Golden Monkey” by FloridaPFE on flickr