Monday, April 25, 2011

Hip Hop Basics: Journey Of Action



Cathy Erway: My Kind Of Chef

(Via Journey Of Action)

Journey of Action - Latin America Kick-Off Party!
Monday, April 25, 2011 from 7:30 PM - 10:00 PM (ET)
New York, NY

Purpose HQ
224 Centre Street
6th Floor
New York, NY 10013

Canal St 4/6/J/Z/N/Q

April Fool?
Journey Of Action: Connecting The Dots: Social Activism: Social Media
Journey Of Action

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Brandt Brauer Frick (2)

Brandt Brauer Frick


The Cloud Outage

O'Reilly Community: The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment: if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model....... two dueling architectural models of cloud computing applications: "design for failure" and traditional. ..... The Amazon model is the "design for failure" model. Under the "design for failure" model, combinations of your software and management tools take responsibility for application availability. The actual infrastructure availability is entirely irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has a massive, data-center-wide outage. ...... The advantage of the "design for failure" model is that the application developer has total control of their availability with only their data model and volume imposing geographical limitations. The downside of the "design for failure" model is that you must "design for failure" up front. ...... Physical redundancy encompasses all traditional "n+1" concepts: redundant hardware, data center redundancy, the ability to do vMotion or equivalents, and the ability to replicate an entire network topology in the face of massive infrastructural failure. ...... If you had redundancy across availability zones, you would have survived every outage suffered to date in the Amazon cloud. ...... If you had regional redundancy in place, you would have come through the recent outage without any problems except maybe an increased workload for your surviving virtual resources. ...... Cloud redundancy enables you to survive the complete loss of a cloud provider. ....... Being home to the world’s reserve currency confers great advantages on the U.S. economy. Because of it, our government, companies and households can borrow money more easily and cheaply. And because all that demand for dollars artificially raises its value, we can import goods at a cheaper price than other countries. ...... Applications built with "design for failure" in mind ..... will achieve uptimes you can't dream of with other architectures and survive extreme failures in the cloud infrastructure. ...... no humans, no 2am calls, and no outage! ..... Netflix, an AWS customer that kept on going because they had proper "design for failure" .. ? Try doing that in your private IT infrastructure with the complete loss of a data center.
I should have, but I did not expect this to happen. Servers are known to go down. Heck, PCs crash. The browser freezes. The cloud went down. In a big way. What's next? Datacenters? I think it did happen once. One Google datacenter went down. Correct me if I am not remembering it right. What if Facebook's datacenter in Oregon went down for an hour?

So the cloud went down. And there has been much talk. The Amazon Web Services is pretty much the cloud that most of us are privy to. And you thought Jeff Bezos was in the business of selling books.

The cloud should not go down. The cloud can not go down. It is like when there is a power cut the generator turns on on its own immediately, and so although there was a power cut, you did not feel it. The cloud needs that mechanism. Otherwise it is not a proper cloud. The cloud is not like the rest of us. The cloud is not supposed to go down.

Jessica Wilson Hearts Mahatma Gandhi


New York Times: 100,000 PayWall Payers

The New York TimesImage by Laughing Squid via FlickrThe New York Times did not get me, but looks like it got 100,000 people and counting. When they erected the paywall I think they had an inkling as to this number. But the numbers are still not adding up for me.

Let's crunch. 100,000 people paying $20 each is two million. Is that per year? Per month? If it is per year, the paywall is a fail whale. If it is per month, the paywall might still be a fail whale, although a smaller one. 20 million can't keep the New York Times afloat.

Glass Half Full Phase

A carnival glass vase.Image via Wikipedia
Fred Wilson: The Word Bubble: There will come a time when the environment we are in will be in the rear view mirror. And entrepreneurs should be crystal clear about that. This is a time to raise money and sock it away for a rainy day. Because it will rain. ...... deals are actually companies and most venture investments are held for five to seven years. I've likened them to marriages over the years. Don't let the lust for the deal lead to a bad marriage that you have to be in for the next decade. ...... we are in the glass is half full part of the cycle. Investors are focusing on the upside and ignoring the downside. That part of the investment cycle lasts for a while and then things change and investors focus on the downside and ignore the upside. Markets are defined by greed and fear. We are in the greed mode right now
I will have to agree. A lot of people sat on a lot of money for about two years. But money does not want to sit still. Money wants to grow. And right now it feels like the basketball that was held at the bottom of the pool was let go. It is not going to end at the surface. It will eventually. But first it will go into the air a little. We are in the air a little phase.

But this is no bubble. I don't see an imminent industry wide collapse. Going out of business also happens in the restaurant business, all the time, but that does not mean the restaurant business is going through a bubble.

War Reporting

Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

(Via Kevin Slavin)

Another One Bites The Dust
Saudis Going Into Bahrain Like Saddam Going Into Kuwait
Ai Weiwei
To Zimbabwe Through Ivory Coast
Obama 2012 Is On
Time For Nonviolent Protests In Libya
A Rwanda Was Prevented

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Brandt Brauer Frick

I listened to all music I could find listed here. I am declaring Brandt Brauer Frick the best group in the crowd. And I noted, from following him on Tumblr, Fred Wilson is big on Arcade Fire.

Coachella
YouTube: Coachella

Coachella (5)
Coachella (4)
Coachella (3)
Coachella (2)
Coachella (1)




Fred Wilson, Soraya Darabi: Both Crazy About Music

Coachella (5)

FourSquare Up To 500 Million Valuation?

Be There, Or Be Square: The FourSquare Day Party At Sidebar
FourSquare Day Tomorrow: Rad
A FourSquare Mayor?
FourSquare Has 6000000 Users

I think they were at two million users or less when they got their 100 million valuation. Moving from two to eight million jacks up your valuation by four hundred million dollars, looks like. That is really something.

FourSquare is not mainstream yet, although the tech insiders might not believe that to be the case. It is still early days of Twitter for FourSquare. Eight million is not a lot of people, but the trajectory of moving from two to eight million people is what you have to notice. The movement has happened fast.

Mike Arrington And I: Close

Did not realize we were this close.

Mike Arrington Liked My Comment
Mike Arrington's Big Day