Whirlycott / Philip Jacob

The Global Pool of Money

Philip Jacob — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:44:43 +0000

I remember listening to this TAL show while driving in my car earlier in the summer. The Global Pool of Money seems like something that our politicians should have been listening to for years, but I’d have been happy if they had started paying attention to this mess before, well…

Amazon finally launches a CDN

Philip Jacob — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:59:52 +0000

That only took 21 months since I asked them nicely. What I don’t like about what I’ve read so far is that they are not using a lazy-loading proxy (ala Akamai, EdgeCast, Panther) and are instead opting for S3 as the content origin. That sucks, because it basically means that you have to do something in order to get your content onto their network. With a lazy-loading proxy, you just tell your CDN provider to effectively make static.whatever.com a mirror of www.whatever.com. It’s much simpler.

Spotted on the T

Philip Jacob — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:48:52 +0000

I was walking through the electronic turnstile onto the T the other day and noticed a partially obscured Microsoft Visual C++ runtime error dialog box on the screen!

Amazon EBS

Philip Jacob — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:56:43 +0000

I think this is the fifth blog post that I’ve written today. Seriously. Just a quick pointer to an article on Xconomy that I wrote this morning about Amazon’s new Elastic Block service.

Some thoughts on memcached

Philip Jacob — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:50:40 +0000

I put some thoughts and scrappy data about memcached over on the StyleFeeder tech blog.

Helios Voting System

Philip Jacob — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:02:08 +0000

Ben launched this new Helios Voting System earlier today. I heard him talk about it once and will be very interested to dig in to the code to see under the hood.

That’s a good way to put it

Philip Jacob — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:51:41 +0000

if you feel compelled to comment, please try to think of something interesting to say. youtube needs remarks like “awesome song” and “this video sucks” like it needs another shaky, blurry, garbled & distorted, 27-second camera-phone clip of Feist performing 1234 in [YOUR TOWN HERE]. thank you.

The Ben Adida HMAC Smackdown

Philip Jacob — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:41:16 +0000

Ben Adida is a super nice guy until you start misusing message digests. He once gave me a smackdown (I like to think of it as a learning experience) that was very helpful and now he’s done the same thing in public: don’t Hash Secrets.

Don’t make the cryptographers cry. Especially not Ben.

Algorithms, Architecture and Caching

Philip Jacob — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:50:24 +0000

How to scale « François Schiettecatte’s Blog
It not about the language, it is about the architecture.

Nearly: good algorithms and proper caching are also part of the picture. Sure, caching is part of good architecture, but it makes such a difference that it’s worth calling it out separately.

(This should really be a much longer post…)

So long, YottaMusic

Philip Jacob — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 01:49:03 +0000

I’ve enjoyed using YottaMusic ever since Jake told me about it last year. I signed on and became a paying Rhapsody customer but I used the YottaMusic frontend for streaming my music. I was wondering why YottaMusic shut down over Christmas and now I know. If anybody knows of another service like it, I’d love to know. The Rhapsody.com website sucks rhino and I’m certainly not going to continue paying for that slow, buggy heap of junk.

Thanks for killing one of the best legit music experiences, Rhapsody. You’re losing at least one customer (me) over this nonsensical decision.