Storing it All

by Zef Hemel

Amazon S3 is Amazon’s new super-scalable storage service. They say you can store as many “items” as you want with sizes up 5GB each. Items can be access through their SOAP or RESTful web services and I think files can also be downloaded through BitTorrent or something, but I haven’t really looked at that yet.

And what does it cost? $0.15 per GB per month. Additionally you pay $0.20 per GB traffic to and from your item store. That means I can keep my whole music collection (which is approximately 15 GB right now) on S3 for $2.25/month, not bad huh? Most of my songs are encoded on 192kbit, that means that one minute of music is about 1.425 MB big. Assuming I’d want to stream my music from S3 I’d have to stream 85.5 MB/hour, which is 1.67 ct/hour. So if I listen to, say music for 8 hours per day, 30 days per month (which is a lot), that would cost me an additional $4/month. Still, not bad huh?

Do I want this? Do I want to store my music somewhere online? Well I would feel safe if I could. I had a couple of hard drive crashes and my laptop (yes, my iBook) has broken down about 3 times in the past 5 months, which meant it was being repaired for quite an amount of that time, all this time the only way I could access my music was from my iPod, which wasn’t great. I want my music to be safe and accessible from any computer. And not only my music, but also my documents and pictures. I’ve played with different solutions for this.

One of them is MP3Tunes Locker which allows you to upload all your music for $39.95/year and stream it from the web and integrates into iTunes too (although this doesn’t work correctly on my Mac). But I don’t like it much, the web interface isn’t great and my music collection there is a mess after some failed upload attempts, plus it’s not very clear how I can get all my music out of it again in a simple way. And it’s only for music, you can’t store your documents there so it’s only a partial solution.

I’ve also played with Apple’s iDisk, which is a nice thing, but you only get 1 GB of space (for which you pay $99/year), but you can get a couple of GBs more, not the amounts I need and want though. Plus it’s really not meant to store and stream your music from.

My Dreamhost account comes with 20GB of storage and 1TB of free transfer, I can also set up WebDAV access and upload files there. I’ve done this and put all my pictures and a lot of my documents there. Still it’s still not it. I’m not sure how safe my files are there and how flexible it is.

S3 seems pretty nice though, but it’s just a webservice API, you have to build the applications on it yourself and I’m lazy, I see a lot of cool things you could do with it (like online music storage and streaming), but don’t have the time or, how shall I call it, patience to create it.

S3 is really easy to use, I played with a Python module that allows you to easily create items and upload files and such and it’s really nice and easy. Some people already started using this module to backup their Flickr photo collection to S3, and this can be done in about 25 lines of Python code.

And the nice thing is you can sign-up for free, you only get billed for what you use. I played around a bit and it seems I owe Amazon $0.01.

Being the third paragraph in a row that starting with “nice”, it would be really nice if somebody built a synchronization application for this, just to backup a directory or a couple. A web interface that allowed you to browse your ‘buckets’ would also be useful. I think Amazon got a very powerful product here, it’s simple, which is what makes it so attractive. But we need applications that use it!

Exams

by Zef Hemel

A bit more silence the past two weeks. This was mostly because my exams are coming up. I only have exams once and I have six of them. If I fail one I will not get my master degree, so the pressure is high. However, to be fair I should note that never in the history of this course anybody failed one, so it should be ok.

Tomorrow (Monday) I’ll have NDS 101, which is about emerging web technologies (dynamic content, peer to peer and such), web retrieval (ranking techniques like Google’s) and artificial intelligence.

Wednesday I’ll have NDS 102, which is about networking. Low-level stuff like IP, UDP, TCP, routing, 802.11, 802.14.x, bluetooth etc. Not a big fan of this class.

Friday I’ll have NDS 103, which is about distributed systems (technologies like EJB, .NET, RMI and algorithms like transactions, two-phase commit, three-phase commit, checkpointing, vector clocks etc.)

Then Monday week I’ll have NDS 104, which is about software engineering (concurrency, development processes, aspect oriented programming etc.)

Wednesday week I’ll have NDS 105, which is about CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes), which is quite theoretical and about business and innovation (how to set up a business etc.), it’s a weird combo, I know.

And finally Friday week I’ll have NDS 106, which is about security and network management (SNMP, CIM, Policy-based management).

Then on April 11th I’m flying home to rest a bit and I return here to Dublin on the 24th. From then on I’ll work on my dissertation until September.

So for the next two weeks, keep your fingers crossed!

Google Calendar, Writely, Amazon Storage

by Zef Hemel

As people have long suspected, Google is working on an online calendaring application that will tightly integrate into Gmail. It is called CL2 and there are some people beta testing it already. A couple of days ago TechCrunch had the exclusive of posting the first screenshots. It looks very nice and very Gmail-ish.

The expectation is that it will take a while until it’s ready for the public, but when it is I’m absolutely going to give it a shot. Until that time I’ll keep using 30 Boxes, which works great for me. I’ve been using it for a month or so for all my meetings and I love how easy it is to add appointments. And they add new features almost every week. On the CL2 screenshots I can see that it will offer similar features. Very cool.

A couple months ago it was already rumoured that Google was working on a calendaring application, which would of course blow the competition away (which was mainly Yahoo), like they did with Gmail. So what did people do? They started companies that build calendaring software. The expectation is that Yahoo will do what they did before, they’d realise they were beaten by Google and would buy one of the competing products, just like they bought OddPost when Gmail came out. Many of these startups are not building calendaring applications, they’re building companies to be bought by Yahoo.

Anyway, Yahoo is not the only companies that likes to acquire other companies of course, Google enjoys itself (herself?) too. They have recently acquired Writely, a startup that is working on an online word processor. I worked with it for a bit a couple of months ago and it works pretty well. You can use it to work with multiple people on the same document. Sign-ups are closed for the moment, to prevent the system from falling over because of the massive number of people that want to try it now it’s part of Google (and therefore it must be good). So if you hadn’t signed up earlier, too bad, you’ll have to wait. Not me though, I got an account already. Want to have it? No, sorry, I’m keeping it to myself. If you wanted it so badly you should’ve realised Writely’s potential earlier, like I did. ;)

Interesting thing is that Writely has been implemented using Microsoft .NET. I wonder what they’ll do with that, although, come to think of it Orkut, also from Google, is a .NET product as well, so there is some experience with that inside Google.

And then Amazon’s answer to the rumours that Google is going to launch a storage system soon (dubbed GDrive by bloggers): S3, Amazon’s Simple Storage System. A webservice that allows you to store files at affordable rates. When I say webservice I mean exactly that, you need to use SOAP or REST webservices to upload and retrieve files. Probably useful for developers of enterprise software, but I don’t think the target audience of this is you, the consumer. But we’ll see. Personally I expect that Google’s service, if it ever really launched, will be free.

And then the last thing. Look at this:

zengine_small.png

That’s right, I’m working on a Google killer. It is a well-known fact that the people at Google are wimps and their so-called “search engine” is nothing more than a couple of PHP scripts slapped together with a MySQL back-end. If somebody sneezes too hard the whole system breaks down. That’s why I wrote the ultimate Google killer search engine today, called Zengine. It only searches ZefHemel.com now, but that’s only to give the people at Google some more time before I completely crush them.

So Google, this is my proposition: $10 million and Zengine is yours. Let’s say I’m in a generous mood today.

Moved to DreamHost

by Zef Hemel

I’ve moved over ZefHemel.com to my new DreamHost account. I used a Virtual Private Server account at JVDS first which worked well and was extremely flexible (I could install anything I want), it had two draw-backs for me:

  • It’s expensive (well for me now anyway)
  • You have update it and administrate it yourself, which was something I enjoyed doing before, but now it’s just a burden

DreamHost offers everything I need: 20GB of space, 1TB of monthly transfer (both a whole lot more than I need), unlimited domains, unlimited sub-domains, subversion, CVS, Ruby on Rails, PHP (4 and 5), MySQL, WebDAV, FTP, SSH and much more. And I only pay $9.95/month ($7.95 if you pre-pay 2 years). Excellent stuff.

I recommend you take a look at their service. And yes, I get paid if you sign-up using that link.

Earphone Sound-Level Checker Ear

by Zef Hemel

For the past four months we’ve been working on a very innovative product. A product that made everybody think, “wow, yes, we had never thought of that” whenever we told them about it. And the market potential is huge. Soon we’ll be looking for investors, so if you have a couple of thousand to spare, keep on reading. Prototypes tested in the lab work perfectly.

But we won’t tease you any longer and pitch the product to you now. Here on ZefHemel.com for the first time out in the open.

Everybody knows how annoying it can be — you’re sitting in a bus and the person next to you is listening to his or her disc player, or even more modern: his or her iPod and it is very loud. It is disturbing you. You try to say something about it, but the person doesn’t hear you, for obvious reasons.

The thing is that this is not necessarily the person’s fault. There is a problem, that you as the irritated neighbour may not be aware of: the person doesn’t know if his or her music is playing too loud. It is really hard to tell for him or her.

Now let’s assume you’re a person that doesn’t like to disturb people in your surroundings with your loud music. And I know there is a lot of you around, market research shows this. What do you do? How do you make sure you’re not a disturbance to anyone?

One could argue that you could put in your earphones, play some music and ark a friend if it’s too loud or not. But we don’t believe in friends. Friends are overrated and above all, they’re very expensive. The traditional friends are on their way down. These traditional kind of friends — the ones that can actually check if your headphones are on too loud — are becoming less and less popular and are increasingly replaced by friends on the internet. Some people claim to have hundreds of such friends online. All incapable of checking the sound levels of their earphones.

So increasingly there’s an opportunity here.

That’s why we’ll soon introduce a device that will replace the friend in the mentioned scenario. The working name is “earphone sound-level checker ear” (ESLCE), but we’re still looking for a snappier name.

So, what is it and how does it work? A picture says more than a thousand words so I’ll show you a picture of a prototype:

As you can see this looks a remarkable amount like an actual ear and it is supposed to. Sometimes people attempt to determine the external sound-level of their earphones by pressing it against their chest, but this is not a valid simulation of the sound level people around you will hear. For a perfect simulation you need ESLCE. It is made of material with the same sound-transfer properties as a real ear and when available on the market it will come in different shapes, one for each type of ear.

You use it by simply putting the earphone in the ESCLE, pressing play on your disc-man or iPod and adjust the volume until you find an acceptable noise level.

We’re still in negotiation on pricing with some of the material suppliers and factories, but we expect to offer ESLCEs for roughly 30 euro excl. VAT. We are taking pre-orders by e-mail starting now. We expect to be able to ship within 3 months.

Thank you for your attention.

Presentation Zen

by Zef Hemel

Most of you probably do presentations occasionally or at least did them at some point in your life. Some are good at it, some are bad at it, some aren’t great but want to improve, some are great but want to get better. If you belong to either of the last two groups, I’ll recommend one of my favourite weblogs to you today.

I was terrible at presentations. Terrible. Throughout secondary school I had blackouts when standing up in front of the crowd and nothing came out. I hated presenting. Hated it.

When I got to university this somewhat improved. At least I didn’t have blackouts anymore. I didn’t enjoy doing them at all still, but at least I didn’t freeze up. It was good I wasn’t wearing thin shirts though, because I was still sweating like crazy. I also did two presentations in English back in Holland, they went reasonably well because I prepared them well. I’m no expert in this area at all, but if you’re a non-native speaker of English and don’t feel comfortable doing presentation in that language: prepare. Everybody will always tell you this, but it really works. Perform the presentation alone in your room out loud, it’s not enough to think what you’ll say in your head. Actually say it. Out loud. Do it a couple of times and you’ll feel a lot more confident.

Only since I came here to Ireland I started to enjoy doing presentation a bit. It’s not like I’m really looking forward to it, but I actually doing enjoy them if there’s something interesting to tell. It was a great kick for me when during one class we had 20 minutes to read a section of a paper, knock up a few slides and present it in front of the group for 5 minutes. It was in the first or second week of my studies here and it went well. This was an incredible feeling. I could do it! I’m not terrible, and it was in English too that people could understand. It was very good for my self confidence.

A while ago I discovered a site called Presentation Zen. It’s a site that gives great tips on doing presentations and comments on presentations (mainly IT related) of well-known presenters, for example Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It’s mostly about slide design, but also other aspects are covered. I really enjoy reading it.

And to be quite frank with you. It’s even great if you don’t want to improve your presentations at all, but just want to see why Steve Jobs kicks Bill Gates’ buttocks when it comes to presenting.

And be honest, who doesn’t?

Your Life On Google

by Zef Hemel

In the past years I’ve said a lot about Google and for a good reason, they’re a very interesting company. What started out as the smart search engine that you just had to check out, now is one of the most profitable companies in the world.

When I think about what I use Google for already, it’s quite a lot. I search the web, I search my hard drive (Desktop Search on Windows), I use it for my e-mail (Gmail), I read my RSS news (Google Reader), I make money (Google Ads), I spy on my visitors (Google Analytics), I sometime look at the roof of my building (Google Earth and Google Maps) and I sometimes talk to other people (Google Talk, Gmail Talk).

And there’s lots of other stuff you could potentially do on Google. You can store your video (Google Video). You can shop (Froogle). You can advertise and sell your stuff (Google Base). You can blog (Blogger). Apparently Google also launched some kind of site editor thing including hosting, but they stopped signups only a few hours after opening because of the huge number of people wanting to give it a go.

What do all these things in common? They are all hosted services, or at least almost all. All the data is stored on Google’s servers. Everything. You’d almost start wondering why you can’t just store everything at Google’s servers and be done with it.

Heh, yeah, that would be something wouldn’t it? All your files accessible from Google. Unlimited storage; your own computer’s hard drive simply functioning as a cache. Hah, that sounds pretty ridiculous doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

What are you looking at?

Huh?

The big presentation screen behind me? Oh sorry, didn’t see it, was too busy talking to you. Got distracted.

What does it say? Let me see.

In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power, here’s what we could do with consumer products –

Theme 1: Speed
Seems simple, but should not be overlooked because impact is huge. Users don’t realize how slow things are until they get something faster.
Users assume it takes time for a webpage to load, but the experience should really be instantaneous.

Gmail started to do this for webmail, but that’s just a small first step. Infinite bandwidth will make this a reality for all applications.

Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data
With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).

We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.

As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.

Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access lis…

Ehm…

Ok.

Anyone want more tea?

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