ExTechOps

With the recent adulation (and blunders) of Cloud Computing,  I’ve wonder what is a good name for plain old regular computing? Just as “acoustic guitar” was created to differentiate it from the new “electric guitar,” and “snail mail” is used to poke fun at the postoffice in the age of e-mail, there should be a retronym for “Cloud Computing.” How about “Raindrop Computing?”

Raindrops are the opposite of a cloud in many ways. Clouds transform into raindrops (and visa-versa via evaporation). In contrast to whispy ephemeral clouds, raindrops are tangible objects. Raindrops are tiny, but in combination they can carve mountains and valleys. At best, clouds can only provide some temporary shade.

Raindrop computing is any computing done on your own computer, either alone or combined with others raindrop computers. Typing a shopping list into a notepad application on your computer is raindrop computing, while entering the same list into Google Docs is cloud computing.

The Reddit social news site is an example of a cloud computing system that runs on Amazon’s Web Services computers. BitTorrent is a raindrop computing system forming a completely decentralized file storage system. A classic raindrop computing system is SETI@home (at its BONIC brethren), which harnesses the idle time of thousands of small raindrop computers to create a virtual supercomputer.

My Macintosh port of the W3C HTML Validator (Validator S.A.C.) is a good example of cloud vs raindrop. The W3C’s validator is a cloud computing service, while Validator S.A.C. is a straight port of the web service to a local application — a raindrop application. Both the service and application do the same thing, validate HTML, but the application version runs on your own Mac under your own control and avoids the network and privacy issues inherent in the cloud service.

Cloud computing seems to currently have the upper hand, but I’d bet it will be the raindrops that shape the computing landscape in the long run.

If you place an old hollow-core door out on the sidewalk, with a “Free Hollow-Core Door” sign on it, then every pedestrian that passes and reads the sign will gently knock on the door.

My first reaction on seeing the BBC’s map of CCTV camera density was: Well, they are certainly keeping a good eye on the Danelaw!

(Thumbnail maps from the BBC and Histoire de l’anglais)

I released a simple iPhone and iPod Touch web app called “Blistering Barnacles!” (BB) — a homage to my favorite Tintin character, Captain Haddock. I submitted BB to Apple’s Web Application Catalog, which produced a small flurry of hits. Here are some of the numbers. In total about 770 unique visitors ran the app, about 460 on the first day when BB was listed high on the front page. There were very few repeat visitors, averaging about 1.08 runs per visitor.

Geographically, the English speaking countries are at the top. Curiously, Singapore makes a very strong showing, and why so few Australians?

After two days, BB had fallen off the front page and was in 10th place on the Most Popular page and 4th place in the Entertainment Category. Interestingly, the percent of iPhones to iPod Touches was roughly 60%/40%. I’m surprised there were so many Touches.

I wasn’t particularly surprised by the low numbers, partly because the Adventures of Tintin are not that well know (at least until the movie comes out). Also, web apps are now a quiet backwater in the iPhone ecosystems in comparison to native apps which are directly accessible from the iPhone/Touch.

If you monitor your website error log, you often see strange events. For example, I saw three near-simultaneous hits to an incorrect URL from three different continents! One hit each from Fort Mitchell (Kentucky, USA), Seoul (South Korea), and Jiddah (Saudi Arabia).

[Thu Jan 01 11:27:16 2009] [error] [client 67.201.111.13] File does not exist: /habilis.net/chucHTTP
[Thu Jan 01 11:27:22 2009] [error] [client 125.243.141.130] File does not exist: /habilis.net/chucHTTP
[Thu Jan 01 11:27:23 2009] [error] [client 212.62.97.23] File does not exist: /habilis.net/chucHTTP

Why? And where did the broken path “chucHTTP” come from? It makes one worry about international conspiracies, but it is probably just a poorly coded botnet harvester.

Seen in Ithaca.

Cron jobs are great, but it is very easy to forget what jobs are running, especially if you’re administering multiple cron tables on different servers. The solution is to add a crontab reminder job at the top of every cron table, which emails a listing of the cron table every month:

@monthly        : Crontab Reminder ; crontab -l

The colon is the no-op command, whose arguments describe the job for the email subject line. The ‘crontab -l’ lists the cron table for the current user. Cron displays the user and host on the subject line, so you will know which account is listed.

Subject: Cron <chuck@doublebrain> : Crontab Reminder ...

Now, every month you’ll get a reminder email about what jobs are running under each account. This will also serve as a monthly test of the accounts email settings.

In all the media coverage of Obama’s historic election, he is often described as Kennedyesque, and the leader of a new generation. However, the media never names the generation he leads: Generation X.

The exact definitions of Baby Boomer vs Generation X are pretty fuzzy, but Wikipedia defines Generation X as 1961-1981, so Obama birth in 1961 makes him one of the first Gen Xers.

For the last 16 years, the US has been led by Baby Boomer presidents – with obviously mixed results. A baby boom is a population bubble, and I can’t help feeling the currently bursting economic bubble is somehow tied to the rise and fall of the baby boom bubble.

I heard an intersting new phrase used in a drug commercial. American drug ads are highly formulaic (probably due to regulations), so they almost always end with the phrase “Ask your doctor if X is right for you.”

However, a recent Ambien CR TV ad used the phrase “ask your prescriber” instead of doctor. Apparently, the phrase has been in use since last year, and was the result of petitioning by nurse practitioners (who can also prescribe some drugs).

Of course, it could also be because the Lake Superior State University placed “Ask your Doctor” on its 2007 list of banished words, describing the phrase as “The chewable vitamin morphine of marketing.”

Amusingly, another common phrase using “prescriber” is “prescriber profiling” – the practice of drug companies buying prescription data from pharmacies in order to customize sales pitches for individual doctors, and then track the effect of the promotions.