chrishitchcock.com

Amazon's Cloud Search

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:01:55 -0500

This has the potential to be massive. And make no mistake, it’s a shot right at Google, just from the other direction. What if the future of search isn’t web search, but data search (which includes web and native apps).

The Amazon/Google rivalry is quickly shaping up to be more intense than the Apple/Google rivalry.

Good scoop by Sarah Lacy. Undoubtedly the first of many.

This is an interesting move. It seems like there are a lot of options out there to store data, but not a lot of options to do interesting things with that data in an easy fashion. Maybe Amazon’s Cloud Search will be a step in this direction.

"There is no ‘healthiest’ meal. You can spend all day preparing the healthiest meal you..."

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:32:09 -0500

“There is no ‘healthiest’ meal. You can spend all day preparing the healthiest meal you can imagine but it does no good unless it’s in your stomach. Code quality is important, but it’s nothing unless you ship it.”

- Jesse Stromier, The Hungry Programmer

Sunset over the dump by my office (Taken with Instagram at...

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:38:50 -0500

Sunset over the dump by my office (Taken with Instagram at Cobasys)

Plans from 1908 for a Pyramid in downtown Detroit

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:17:00 -0500

Plans from 1908 for a Pyramid in downtown Detroit:

An interesting article about Detroit surfaced during D3’s hours laboring through old academic texts. On 1908, an engineer mused about the requirements to build a complete, full-scale replica of the Giza’s Great Pyramid in Detroit.

Could we get a Kickstarter project going for this?

"I say “it made me” but I made it, too. You get the power by using it. Nobody confers it on you."

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:11:35 -0500

“I say “it made me” but I made it, too. You get the power by using it. Nobody confers it on you.”

- Zeldman, The maker makes: on design, community and personal empowerment

"So why invent police? What are they for? In “The Institutional Revolution,” the economic historian..."

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:36:02 -0500

“So why invent police? What are they for? In “The Institutional Revolution,” the economic historian Douglas W. Allen theorizes that their purpose was to preserve manufactured goods from theft. Before the nineteenth century, Allen writes, theft was easy to detect. If your transport was a horse, you could recognize it. (For that matter, it could recognize you.) Not only was your coat hand sewn, but a tailor looking at its fabric could probably tell who had woven it. If any of these items were stolen, they were easy to reclaim if they could be found. With the advent of the industrial revolution, handmade goods gave way to standardized commodities, which all look alike, and it ceased to be possible to know an object’s provenance just by looking at it. The phrase “possession is nine-tenths of the law” came into vogue, and it was made illegal to hold stolen goods. After all, once goods became untraceable, they were all too easy to fence.”

- Caleb Crain, iPhones vs. the Police

".. the new home screen finally allows users to customize the contents of the dock (a feature that..."

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:26:25 -0500

“.. the new home screen finally allows users to customize the contents of the dock (a feature that wasn’t previously available).”

- From Ars Technica’s review of Ice Cream Sandwich

Why was this not available in an earlier version of Android?

My first computer still runs after all these years.

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:18:57 -0500

My first computer still runs after all these years.

Photo

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:46:39 -0500

theavc: Today in news from the darkest timeline: NBC...

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:55:30 -0500

theavc:

Today in news from the darkest timeline: NBC pulls Community from its midseason lineup

We are so sorry to bring you this news.

Bullshit

"The fake rib bones, those porky railroad ties that give the McRib its name, are a big middle finger..."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:23:04 -0500

“The fake rib bones, those porky railroad ties that give the McRib its name, are a big middle finger to American labor and ingenuity—and worse, they’re the logical result of all that hard work. They don’t need a pitmaster to make the meat tender, and they don’t need bones for the meat to fall off—they can make their tender meat slurry into the bones they didn’t need in the first place.”

- Willy Staley, A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage

"We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories."

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:53:15 -0400

“We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.”

- Mona Simpson, A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

Replace Shia LaBeouf with Jason Statham

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:13:00 -0400

Replace Shia LaBeouf with Jason Statham:

avclub:

… but producers are already considering replacing him with a new lead, Jason Statham, who would presumably be introduced as an all-new character. However, let it be known that we would be at least 50 percent more excited for the film if he just stepped into LaBeouf’s role with no explanation.

I would pay the IMAX 3D ticket price to go see the next Transformer’s movie if Jason Statham ran around as Sam Witwicky

"Ten years ago today, we still had not yet met the iPod. The last of Steve’s five decades on this..."

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:33:00 -0400

“Ten years ago today, we still had not yet met the iPod. The last of Steve’s five decades on this Earth ended up being his most accomplished by far. Remember that whenever you think your best days are behind you. We can’t control when our lives begin, and we can’t really control when they end. All we have is what’s in between. Make it count.”

- Matt Drance, SJ

Following up on my post from this morning, I saw this image...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:50:25 -0400

Following up on my post from this morning, I saw this image during This is My Next’s coverage of the iPhone 4S event. The photo shows the iPod app gone and replaced with the Music and Video apps à la the iPod touch.

I’m sure this is probably a feature of iOS 5 and not a feature of the iPhone 4S.

On the latest episode of Build & Analyze, Marco and...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:02:56 -0400

On the latest episode of Build & Analyze, Marco and Dan discussed the rumor that Apple may be canceling the iPod classic during the special event that is going on today.

This got me thinking about the iPod icon on my iPhone. How long is that icon going to stick around? The iPod classic is the only iPod that the icon still bares a resemblance to (rectangle screen with scroll wheel below it). If the iPod classic is discontinued, then that icon quickly becomes something like the floppy disk toolbar icon that is used to save files in applications like Excel. It will start to look a bit dated. The mental connection between “rectangle screen with scroll wheel below it” and “play Lady Gaga” will be less clear to people who never used/saw an old iPod.

The iPod touch has always split the iPod app functionality into a Music app and a Video app. I haven’t played around with the iOS 5 betas, but maybe Apple has done the same thing with the iPod app on the iPhone.

"The reality is that there are no global service brands. Not in telecommunications (operators are, at..."

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 12:02:00 -0400

“The reality is that there are no global service brands. Not in telecommunications (operators are, at best, regional), not in Media (TV, radio, publishing are a local businesses), not in Banking (not even in commercial banking) and not in Retail (even Wal-Mart was humbled trying to export its disruption). The internet has not broken down any of these boundaries and even Amazon has modest reach outside the US for any of their franchises.”

- Horace Dediu, The case against Kindle as a low end tablet disruption.

Another reason why service jobs are safe jobs in the global economy.

Finding Data Store Read and Data Store Write blocks

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:47:00 -0400

I was recently dealing with a system of Simulink models that makes use of DataStoreRead and DataStoreWrite blocks to communicate data (basically global variables) between the separate systems in the software. I was having trouble finding the corresponding Data Store Read blocks for a particular Data Store Write block. I couldn’t figure out how to do quickly lookup this information using Matlab’s built-in tools. I’m guessing this was due to the fact that the blocks were in different referenced subsystems

After doing some searches, I found out about a Matlab function for working with Simulink models called find_system. Using find_system and get_param I was able to whip up a small function called FindDataStoreBlocks that takes as parameters a model name and the name of a data store. The function would then search through all referenced models in the specified model to find where this data store name is used in a Data Store Read block or a Data Store Write block.

You can download FindDataStoreBlocks from github.

The following code can be used to exercise this function:

Perhaps there is a better way to do a search like this in Matlab, but I couldn’t find it.

"Initially, I’d figured the Appstore wouldn’t be much more than a way for Amazon to earn a little..."

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:06:26 -0400

“Initially, I’d figured the Appstore wouldn’t be much more than a way for Amazon to earn a little coin off the booming, highly profitable mobile app business. Instead, they’ve picked the very lock that Google uses to control Android. By creating a legitimate Market alternative with over 10,000 apps (at last count) and the full backing of the Amazon juggernaut, Jeff Bezos no longer needs a thing from Google.”

- Chris Ziegler, Editorial: How Amazon picked Android’s lock

Finally, I was wondering how long I would have to put up with...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 08:43:36 -0400

Finally, I was wondering how long I would have to put up with the summer drinkware that I’m using now.