Author: JP

Smorgasbord 3

Here’s another smattering of open tabs, stuff I’m looking into, stuff I’m thinking about. Incidentally, I considered moving the Smorgasbord tab sweep series on to tumblr, then decided to keep it here for now. What do you think?

1. Jim Rokos Design: A truly bizarre set of design projects, some mesmerising, some not-safe-for-drinking-coffee-while-reading (in case you do yourself an injury). I came across Jim’s work as part of my research into sharing by design. Here’s a classic example of his work, wineglasses where two people have to cooperate in order for either to be able to drink. Check his site out. I’m particularly bemused by Leaping Rabbit.

 

2. xkcd. No real introduction needed for Randall Munroe’s brilliance. Even if you’re a hardened and blase fan, he still has the capacity to delight. We live in Occupy times. So his recent poster on money is apposite and a stupendous piece of work. Please go to his site and take a look, it’s worth it.



3. Streaming news: Not a good time to be selling pepper spray. Witness the reviewer comments on this product.

4. Calcutta 1945: The University of Pennsylvania’s wonderful collection of Clyde Waddell photographs of Calcutta around the end of World War II. Here’s a sample, showing what open outcry really meant at the Calcutta Stock Exchange. Intriguingly, everyone wore white.

Thinking about Sixties and Seventies music

The first album I can remember holding in my hands was a Beatles album: A Hard Day’s Night. Until then, my musical upbringing was largely Western classical, jazz through the ages, fifties musicals and crooners. Not surprising, given that I was born in 1957 and lived in India.

It was a good upbringing to have, as far as Western music was concerned: Perry Como and Pat Boone, My Fair Lady and South Pacific, all interspersed amongst the Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and accentuated by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mussorgsky and Ravel. It wasn’t a question of choosing either: we listened to what our parents listened to, and that was that. It didn’t occur to us that some people thought musical taste was an individual thing; music, like food, like reading, like life itself, was a social thing, enjoyed best in the company of others.

I must have been around 10 when we bought ourselves a new gramophone player for the house, and shortly after that a few albums emerged that were different from the others. Peter, Paul and Mary’s seminal In The Wind. The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out. And of all things, Edmundo Ros’s Bongos From The South.

And the Beatles, with A Hard Day’s Night. The start of a wonderful trip through the music of the age.

Over the next ten years, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of albums flowed through the house. No sense of ownership. We bought some; traded some; some were parked there by friends, loaned indefinitely; some just turned up, forgotten leavings.

We were eclectic in our listening; if there was a bias, it was towards singer-songwriter folk rock, but it went a lot further than that, starting with the Beatles (together and solo) and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan. Simon and Garfunkel. The Grateful Dead. Traffic. Cream. John Mayall. Jethro Tull. Joan Baez. Dave Mason. Crosby Stills Nash and Young, together and separate. Buffalo Springfield. The Who. Emerson Lake and Palmer. Yes. Neil Diamond. America. Janis Joplin. Kris Kristofferson. Joe Cocker. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Santana. Donovan. Don McLean. Clapton. Hendrix. Jim Croce. Cat Stevens. Leonard Cohen. Allman Brothers. Elton John. Lindisfarne. Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones. The Doobie Brothers. Joni Mitchell. James Taylor. Carole King. The Band. Jose Feliciano. Melanie. Seals and Croft. Loggins and Messina. The Doors. The Eagles. Steely Dan. Poco. New Riders of the Purple Sage. Ten Years After. Deep Purple. The Kings. Herman’s Hermits. Iron Butterfly. King Crimson. Pentangle. Queen. Police. Elvis. Stevie Wonder. The Temptations. The Jackson Five. The Moody Blues. Pink Floyd. John Martyn. Gordon Lightfoot. Chicago. Blood Sweat and Tears. Van Morrison. Harry Nilsson.

You get my drift. One paragraph. My pantheon from 1967-1980. Not that much into heavy metal. Not that much into pure pop. Deeply into rock, but mostly based around a folk-rock foundation. Usually singer-songwriter, usually able to play an instrument or two, usually in harmony.

I just loved the music. Really really loved it. At the time I felt like there were a couple of hundred albums that were all I ever needed to listen to, with songs that were full of life and stories and joy and sadness and melody and poetry. And memories.

That’s how I used to think, in my teens and early twenties. I felt rich in the music I knew and loved, and felt no real reason to step out beyond that area.

Guess what? It’s largely stayed that way. Thirty, forty years on, that’s pretty much all I listen to. And I’ve been very privileged, able to watch many of my childhood idols live since then. In fact, tonight, I’m off to see Bob Dylan at the Hammersmith Apollo, and already holding tickets for Jethro Tull next April. I was always sure I’d spend most of my life listening to Sixties and Seventies music. I hadn’t quite considered that it would mean going to concerts where the musicians were in their sixties and seventies!

To all of them, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, for filling so much of my life with pleasure, with joy, with delight.

Thank you Sixties and Seventies musicians. Particularly those who believe that music is a performance art, not something to can once and exploit forever.

Thinking about pizza and private clouds

I must have been around 13 when I had my first pizza, courtesy of my neighbours, a warm and friendly Sephardic Jewish family; Flower Silliman, the mother of the family, was, and continues to be, an incredible cook; I took the family to India for a reunion last year, and we had Christmas lunch (!) at her home. (One of her daughters would later become my first ever girlfriend).

And what a pizza it was. The bread was flat, round and unleavened, gently golden. There was a light yet generous tomato sauce, lots of cheese, soft in the middle, a little crisping at the edge; some onion, some garlic, amazing fresh herbs. I keep imagining there was the hint of chilli, but that may just be me…. I like imagining things with chilli. And everything was cooked to perfection. Even today I salivate thinking about it.

It looked a bit like this photo from foodporndaily:

Now my memory’s not what it used to be. Perhaps there were other ingredients in the pizza. Perhaps I was 14 not 13 when it happened. Perhaps I’d already started going out with Flower’s daughter Michal. As I said, my memory’s not what it used to be.

But I still remember what a pizza was. And I still know what a pizza is.

A pizza is not a vegetable.

Apparently this is not a universal truth. According to the Huffington Post, in a story carried last Wednesday, Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. Confused? Don’t worry. The Gothamist story illustration, reproduced below, may help you:

 

I read the story, and I was more saddened than surprised. Because I’d seen pizza masquerading as vegetable before.

The recipe seems to run a bit like this:

  1. Take a data centre.
  2. Add two spoons of tomato sauce.
  3. Decorate with the words “private” and “cloud”
  4. Serve
An organisation may want its own data centre, for a variety of reasons. There may be regulatory issues. There may be a demand for sub 30 millisecond latency. The organisation may be risk-averse enough to warrant paying a significant premium for the luxury of its own data centre. All this is possible, natural, to be expected.
But the data centre remains a data centre.
An organisation may want to move towards the cloud — the word public is, in my opinion, tautological when placed in front of cloud — but it may want to migrate slowly. Techniques to make the journey easier are also normal and to be expected. So the organisation may choose to implement public standards — public in the sense of open *and* adopted — in its infrastructure, as part of the process of moving to the cloud. The organisation may choose to adopt a hybrid environment for a period, both data centre as well as cloud, as the estate is migrated piece by piece. And as I said earlier, perhaps not everything gets migrated, constrained by regulation or the need for millisecond speed.
But the data centre remains a data centre.
One of the essences of the cloud is the scalability and flexibility engendered by the existence of fungible resources. You pay for what you need and use. For it to make economic sense, the fungibility needs to extend beyond the boundaries of the firm. Otherwise it’s a zero sum game, as I’ve written about earlier.
There’s a natural temptation to say that if your market, your internal estate, is large enough, then surely you can run your own cloud. But what happens when demand outstrips supply? You will need to acquire capacity for peak rather than average, and then to defray those peak-associated costs. Once you implement for peak, what happens when supply outstrips demand? You’ll still need to defray the peak-associated costs.
Just like when you had your own data centre.
Actually that’s not surprising. Because that’s precisely what you have: your own data centre. A pizza is not a vegetable.
Sometimes an organisation may go even further. It may build an open multitenant infrastructure on public open standards. It may ensure that all its resources are fungible, and trade its way out of peaks and troughs, selling excess capacity to the market and “bursting” excess demand in similar fashion.
Open, public standards. Fungible resources. Trading supply and demand across a host of companies in the market, not just within your corporate boundaries. Now you don’t have a data centre any more. You have a cloud.
Two spoons of tomato sauce cannot turn a pizza into a vegetable. Nor a data centre into a cloud.

Smorgasbord 2

Had a number of you ping me about my last post, when I shared the tabs I had open. So I thought I’d do it again:

1. Radiation levels in Fukushima lower than predicted. Couldn’t understand why this story didn’t receive more coverage. The levels being encountered seem remarkably low, so I wanted to look into it. I was in Japan last month, due there again next month. Love it.

2. Soccket To Me: I just love the idea of Soccket, decided I would spring for giving someone the energy-producing football. Amazing invention. Great video as well. Found via TED.

3. Sustainability, 21st century style: I’d heard that Patagonia were encouraging people to create a secondary market for their products rather than keep buying new. Now that’s a story I like. Someone at Salesforce.com gave me a Patagonia garment, so I looked into it.

4. Trent Reznor on TuneCore: I’m not a big fan of Nine Inch Nails, some of their music is too noir for me. But I love Trent Reznor’s attitude to the industry. So I try and keep up with what he’s saying and doing. Their latest album is, as usual, downloadable for free.

5. Brit on the PlugBug: Friend Brit Morin launches a fascinating site, I love the PlugBug and the rickshaw. And Weduary will probably make a bang not just in the US, but also in places like India. I like seeing what friends are up to.

6. Evolutionary ecology of pungency in wild chillies: I have a real passion for capsaicin, so I tend to spend some time every week trying to understand more about it.

 

That’s it for now. Tell me if you like my doing this occasionally. Tell me to stop. All feedback useful.

Smorgasbord

I happened to look at the tabs I’d got open over the past few days, stuff I was gently drifting through, stuff I intend to complete reading/experiencing later. And I realised they were sufficiently eclectic to be worth sharing, in case some of you hadn’t come across them or were interested anyway. So here goes:

1. Malaria’s Achilles Heel: Details of a recent breakthrough in understanding how the parasite gets into red blood cells, and the discovery of a single receptor without which the parasite appears to be powerless. Early days, but there is now a real possibility that an effective vaccines emerge.

2. Crowd-curating: Continuing to track what hypothes.is is doing, something I’m very excited about. “A distributed, open source platform for the collaborative evaluation of documents”.

3. Matsutake dobin mushi: Ever since I experienced this dish a month or so ago, I’ve been mesmerised. Been trying to find out everything I can about it.

4. Unintended consequences of age-based privacy laws: danah boyd, John Palfrey, Eszter Hargittai and Jason Schultz looking into Facebook ToS and age constraints and COPPA

5. Preserving the lifesaving power of antimicrobial agents: James Hughes’ seminal paper on running out of antibiotics.

6. Keeping fit in 1919: An uproariously funny booklet issued in 1919, not intended to be funny at all, brought to life by the wonderful How To Be A Retronaut. Thank you Chris Wild.

7. Serge Storms: An excerpt from Tim Dorsey’s next book. Can’t wait.

8. Wolfgang’s Vault: The best live music downloads site in the world for retired hippies like me.