mikew's blog

Street Artists with Balls

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 20:23:47 +0100

I must admit that I don't like most graffiti I see on the streets; it mainly ego tagging with no ideas of their own. But I do believe in street art and guerilla art; bring the art and the ideas to the people and make them think. The stuff banksy does is amazing. (I visited his Santas Ghetto in Oxford Street this year. The Tony Blair picture is killing..). But the worse which can happen to banksy and friends is a slap on the wrist..but these guys in Iran probably risk a chop at the wrist or worse to do what they do:

via Wooster Collective

Kidney for sale..

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 15:26:52 +0100

one of my jokes if we come up short in the financial planning of a project is that it is not a problem because we just sell a kidney. It was an idea i picked up from the illegal organ trade and the urban myths surrounding the subject (and we got 2 of them). It turns out to be legal in Iran to sell your kidney and the very serious economist suggests that more governments should allow the sale of kidneys to reduce the waiting list and the deaths of patients waiting for the essential blood scrubber.

it seems to be very successful in Iran although the street value of 2000-4000 USD is a bit disappointing. I always assumed 25K USD as the unit price; at 2K is going to take a lot of kidneys to close the gap on some of the projects and some teams weren't big enough to cover it and using 2 kidneys per team member is not good for the productivity..the cost of an office dialysis machine would have been prohibitive.

Since I am not one of the chromosomally challenged renting out my womb had never occurred to me and it turns out to be 6 times more dangerous than selling a kidney. The stuff you learn from the internet.

update by bert boerland: I closed the comments on this thread. After deleting some 100 comments of people who will sell their kidneys and their right arm, I decided to stop this nonsense!

More than they bargained for..

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 14:55:43 +0100

I went to the LogicaCMG Guru4pro session with Chad Fowler (Ruby & Rails evangalist, author) yesterday. It was a nice talk complete with obligatory Ruby-on-Rails-app-in-10mins demo but I couldn't help but wonder if the Logica suits with ~~red~~yellow neckties where too happy with the anti-java/anti-enterprise angle of the talk. Guru4pro is a thinly disguised courting session for Java "J2EE" Ontwikkelaars/Architects/Software Engineers.

The subject of the talk was the (non)innovation of the RoR platform and one of the conclusions was be arrogant and lets face it:David Heinemeier Hansson is an arrogant bastard, why else would you build a MVC web platform in an obscure language like Ruby and tell the world how they should use it; how to name your tables, columns, controllers views and how your directory structure should look. And yes the plural of sheep is sheeps... RoR has basically one configurable item: the database access. The rest is default. This fits well of course with Enterprise software development...not.

Enterprise customer want standard services as long it is their standard. but it doesn't fit very well with the community thinking either in which freedom is paramount (often resulting in more options, features and ways of doing the same thing than you can wave an XML file at..)

it was an entertaining evening. And I got a free Rails Recipes book.

update by bert, mike is a guest blogger and friend and went to this event.

post-natal abortion candidates?

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:56:05 +0200

It is that kids are so damn cute ...otherwise the pro-life movement had to protect a group that is really alive.

via Picture I like..most of the other pictures are certainly NSFW but some are very funny

Too damn hot..

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:23:03 +0200

Poor Bovine...as usual jwz drags the weird and wonderful from the Internet: and he has well disciplined commenters (get it wrong and you get beat up by jwz personally..)

Wrong in so many ways...

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 19:45:31 +0200

Not only it is a wrong place to adverstize:

I was at an ATM at a news stand and when I went to retrieve my cash I noticed that there were a few extra bills at the bottom of the stack! At first I was excited, but then I took a closer look and realized it wasn't real money. Oh well! Turns out the fake money is something called "Boob Bucks"! And it's for $5 in free credits on the website MyFreeImplants.com

It is the wrong thing to advertize: myfreeimplants.com is a social networking site like myspace.com which who selfless goal in life is to bring together

* Women that have a strong desire to enhance their physical appearance through cosmetic surgery
* Benefactors who wish to help these women improve their self esteem and confidence through cosmetic surgery

For all the wrong reasons...with all the wrong hype..social networking of benefactors...yeah right..with all the wrong design:

NSFW? Hell it is not even safe for life...

Bert, it was time for a animated gif on the frontpage again and what better than pigbank boobs...I blaim the heat..

A softer world

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 17:29:06 +0200

A Softer World is a web comic on the weird and wonderful side of the Internet. Usually 3 cut-outs of the same photograph turned into an idea at a slight angle to normality. I love stuff which takes an idea and twists it in an unexpected way.

Some other mind altering webcomics

The Perry Bible Fellowship looks at first glance a friendly and religious cartoon..click again.
xkcd is a math and love comic..

Guess the movie

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 09:03:22 +0200

Retrocrush has a collection of Polish Film Posters of major blockbusters. It makes you wonder if they actually watched the same movie..very strange

via kentucky nightmare

youtube bandwidth usage: 25 Petabytes per month

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 19:41:42 +0200

When I read today that youtube hit the 100 million downloads per day and I had heard that they pay $1 million USD per month for bandwidth alone without a clear business model behind it, I decided to do the math myself to see if it made any sense.

100 Million/day	Downloads	BBC- youtube mentions 70M/dl/day on their fact sheet but youtube also claims it growths exponentially so 100 M/dl/day is reasonable.
3.35 min/movie	Average Movie Size	Based on the average length of the top 100 downloads of all time.
2.5 MB/min	Average datarate per movie/download	Based on 5 samples of the most popular downloads. There was almost no variation in the datarates between the movies.
8.3MB	Per download
24980858378.92 MB	Per month	= 8.3 times 100Mdl/day times 30 days/month
24980858.38 GB	Per month	Using decimal aka harddisk standard
24980.86 TB	Per month
25 PB	Per month	or 1250 "Library of congres" collections per month; an increasingly meaningless unit of size
or 77 Gbps	sustained datarate over one month

That is a fair amount of bandwidth they burn each month so what would it cost?

If they would pay $0.05 per GB/month(that is 50% of the lowest GB/mon prices I could find) the bandwidth cost would be $1.2M USD/month.

Bert figures they would be able to get a $5 Mbps/month price with their volumes and in that case the cost would be around $385k USD/month, expensive but their $11.5M USD funding should last them a little while (30months).

Of course this is only their bandwidth cost without hosting, storage, infrastructure and management. For comparion a Streamload managed service would around $7.3M USD/month but they probably could get a volume discount.

Youtube uses the Limelight CDN to deliver their content. Limelight's monthly revenue is about $4.7M USD/month. I guess youtube is a major portion of that revenue. I would assume that limewire provides the storage, hosting and bandwidth for youtube content.

And how are they going to make money? They carry very little advertising, only some google ads, but those don't play a role for video's embedded in blogs etc. Perhaps it is more sneaky and evil and they 0wn the distribution rights of all content published via youtube and are going to exploit it against the will of the contributors:

…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels.

(via boing boing).

But with that business model you are not going to stay populair for very long..

Shakespeare and monkeys

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:02:30 +0200

Just an idea for an cool hardware mash-up (an "hack" in oldspeak)

Wouldn't be great(in any case very Brazil)to

take an old type writer
insert a sheet of electronic paper in the roll
add an USB interface to the keyboard.
Disable necessary mechanical bits
add a small form cpu
record a great "ding"

And create a typewriter with electronic paper output..and finally a decent spellchecker. An nice addition to Mobile Rotary Dial phones

And the changes for the monkeys would improve significantly.

Life on Venus.

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 11:18:50 +0200

Carbon dioxide.
They call it pollution.
We call it life.

Yes and life on Venus is doing great too..

The Competivite Enterprise Institute, an conservative thinktank, aired these ads in the US. This is pure demagogy (a demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. (H.J. Mencken))Of course burning fossil fuels has made life better for most people in developed countries but that doesn't mean it is not harmful for the planet and that we need do something about it now.

It is interesting to see that these institutes need to shift their position in the last decade from denying the global warming, to denying that human activity had anything to do with it, to accepting that the global warming is caused by human activity but it is harmless now: a 0.6 degree in the avg global temparature is clearly nothing and 1.5-5 degrees increase by century end doesn't sound too bad..completly ignoring all the scientific evidence that even a 2 degree increase means a significant change for everybody on this planet..see the Panorama documentary :Bush's climate of fear from yesterday in which bush defines global warming as "the globe is warming"...sigh

updated with a couple of links

The Biggest Idiot.

Wed, 24 May 2006 09:51:01 +0200

And I am not only referring to duyba but also to Michael Novak, a Scholar at Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new employer: the American Enterprise Institute

This scholar has published an article about The Bravest President. The main gist of his argument seems to be that dubya doesn't change his mind and continues on doggedly on the path taken. Perhaps that is brave but only if he makes to the end of the path..otherwise it is considered stupid and inflexible and not dealing with reality..not unlike the captain of the Titanic..(stephen Colbert, perhaps they are re-arranging the deckchairs on the titanic not the hindenburg..)

Michael Novak humbily admits that he is not capable enough to judge the correctness of the path taken, which is an odd statement for somebody working at a thinktank on public and goverment policy..(as a sidenote: the whole article seems to be at odds with the "non-partisan" goals of the institute..)

But what really stood out in this article was the attempt to downplay the violence in Iraq:

In Paris, France, more cars may have been set on fire this past year than car bombings in Baghdad. In the decade of the Algerian war some time ago there may have been more bombings in France per week than there are now in Iraq.

In Paris 8973 cars were burned with no fatalities...while there were 71 carbombs with 1649 deaths in Iraq since August 2003.. So I guess the positive point Micheal tries to make that only 71 cars were burned in Iraq. (btw in New York City there are 8700 car fires per year). The Cafe wars were a gang war between 2 Algerian political groups FLN MNA and resulted in 5000 deaths over a period of 8 years (625 deaths per year) The low estimated total of the civilian deaths in Iraq is 37848 (until Apr 2006) which comes to 946 deaths per month since Jan 2003. The suggestion that the situation in France may have been more violent than the current iraq situation is incorrect and not based on any facts. Note the use of the words "there may have been" (btw the number gang related deaths in LA County was 448 in 2000).

The scholar Michael Novak is free to declare Bush Jr the bravest President since Lincoln but misusing irrelevant and incorrect facts to support his argument and to distort the reality of the insurgence in Iraq is inexusable for an former US ambassador, associated with a influential organisation as the AEI. More than 20 AEI (former) associates, including Dick Cheney, (have) work(ed) for the Bush administration.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali will fit right in with the AEI; she doesn't worry about the truth of her facts either...

Bravest President or Biggest Idiot? as the scholar says time will tell but my money is on idiot. Is dubya on the right path? I think we shouldn't have been on this path in the first place but I don't see any exits either.

ratios: Food for Thought

Wed, 17 May 2006 14:38:34 +0200

On the site of Professor Peter Cochrane former CTO of BT I cam across the following:

if we could shrink the earth's population to a village of exactly 100 people, with all the current human ratios remaining the same, then there would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 Westerners
8 Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male

70 would be non-white
30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the USA

80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 would have a college education
1 would own a computer

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

This list brings the fact that we belong to an priviledged minority to a more human scale..it doesn't make it any better.

Brain off -> Music off

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:25:34 +0200

Lets create some prior art..before somebody put a patent on it

In the New Scientist of 19/04/06 there was an article that scientists monitored the brain turn off self awareness when people totally focus on something.

They found that the brain assumes a robotic functionality when it has to concentrate all its efforts on a difficult, timed task – only becoming "human" again when it has the luxury of time.

This is interesting because it suggests that consciousness is just a function..not some undefinable magic (sorry roger penrose).

But an idea came to mind:

Wouldn't it be great if that your mp3/video player would pause or switch to background music while your brain is occupied somewhere else and continue when you are there again..so you never miss parts of your favorite podcast/program/movie etc again...(even a bookmark when you lost consciousness and another one when you came back to earth would be nice...that would a nice feature for recording live streams on your PVR...).

Maybe something for the halfbakery...

Cross posted to http://www.mikew.net..

Ed W aka Mr-T big plans...you are not going to like it...

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 17:38:39 +0200

I don't have a lot of time but read this Analysis by the Salon of the rumblings of Ed Whitacre (AT&T CEO) about a multi-teared Internet where content suppliers would have to pay to use Ed's pipes to deliver the content to your home..

After the merger with Bell South and with Verison on T's side the "Ma Bell re-incarnate" will control a large portion of the access into American homes.. It is a clever play because they will be extract money from the consumer through the triple play set-top box nonsense and on the other side from the content producers

I am sure Ed already figured out that he doesn't need the networks (ABC/NBC etc) at all if he can control the internet access to the consumer--access to the scarce medium of tv-broadcasting was what gave the networks their power..

In effect they will create the walled garden without a need to put a lock on the door because it is only dirt-roads outthere...

Ed W comes across a friendly and open southerner with an Texan accent but unlike the other W he is a very clever and sly..

And I don't think this a US only threat...every European broadband Telco/cable company is watching this one with a lot of interest..finally a way to regain control over these pesky consumers who don't want to play their little triple play game...

As the guys from Internet2 point out there is not a lot of technical need for a QOS/CoS Internet. An architect from Cisco told me once that QoS/CoS is poor substitute for bandwidth; using bigger pipes was going to make the client a lot happier. But Cisco makes more money selling expensive routers and management platforms (and consultantcy). Besides Cisco is better in making clever kit than making fast kit..

(and yes the Salon ad is very annoying...deal with it..)