Behind the Scenes - Production Pushes

And another busy morning coordinating with engineers and product marketing folks who are anxious to see their feature live. Is it done? Is it done yet? Its the end of a long process for many of the people involved, months of planning and designing, weeks of coding and testing back and forth. And then an hour or so to see it become live in front of many users. People often ask, what exactly do release engineers do. The short answer is, we help make software development an engineering grade industrial strength activity. In all aspects of it, from the design and planning through the execution and finally in days like this pushing all the right switches to make things come to life in front of an audience in a smooth way. Without interruption. Without downtime.



Today's push - AdSense UI for interest-based advertising. This is a feature which is covered with wide interest and, as I flip the bits, has already received coverage in The New York Times and other news organizations. Here in short;

"Google will begin showing ads on Wednesday to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which has been embraced by most of its competitors but has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.

Perhaps to forestall objections to its approach, Google said it planned to offer new ways for users to protect their privacy. Most notably, Google will be the first major company to give users the ability to see and edit the information that it has compiled about their interests for the purposes of behavioral targeting. Like rivals such as Yahoo, it also will give users the choice to opt out from what it calls “interest-based advertising.”

Privacy advocates praised Google’s decision to give users access to their profiles.

Given Google’s position as the No. 1 seller of online ads, its approach is likely to put pressure on other companies to follow suit. Online advertising industry groups said it might help quell calls for government regulation." -- NYT 3/11/08

And so while the public debate about the feature only starts, the production push on my side is almost complete. The production push process of this feature actually started about a week ago when I first released the new binaries which had the functionality built in - but not yet turned on. We then spent some time running and poking it on internal systems making sure everything was working properly and all elements were in place. Yesterday I received the final go from Sam as an open issue #1608551, I have approved code change #10431732 which Sam checked in shortly thereafter. We agreed with Robby on the timing - 9 AM PST. Today's part was to essentially flip one bit on all the user facing servers turning feature based advertising on for the first time on live user facing servers.

This is now done and thus far humming happily in production land. The issue is closed and for myself its back to regular programming and working with my colleagues on the next challenge.

NYT Article

The Man From Mars

I was looking around our image search site following a launch. Looking for things related to planet Mars, space exploration and the Space Shuttle. But then I stumbled onto this - "The Man From Mars".



Click here for a high res version of the above Martian. The source Life Magazine, 1951 has more shots with high resolution detail. Has anyone a clue what's going on here?! Go figure.

SpaceX at Google's Zeitgeist 2008

A capsule from SpaceX appeared at the Googleplex today. Here's a couple of pictures. Rumor has it that SpaceX founder Elon Musk will show up at Zeitgeist and talk about private initiative and space exploration. Given the company boasts the world's lowest cost flight to orbit he'll likely receive some attention from the audience. The capsule on these pictures is codenamed Dragon. At first glance the hatch hinges and rubber rings seem a bit weak, but this being a prototype, I am sure it'll change eventually. Here are some of the highlights of the capsule:

• Fully autonomous rendezvous and docking with manual override capability in crewed configuration
• Pressurized Cargo/Crew capacity of >2500 kg and 14 cubic meters
• Down-cargo capability (equal to up-cargo)
• Supports up to 7 passengers in Crew configuration
• Two-fault tolerant avionics system with extensive heritage
• Reaction control system with 18 MMH/NTO thrusters designed and built in-house; these thrusters are used for both attitude control and orbital maneuvering
• 1200 kg of propellant supports a safe mission profile from sub-orbital insertion to ISS rendezvous to reentry
• Integral common berthing mechanism, with LIDS or APAS support if required
• Designed for water landing under parachute for ocean recovery
• Lifting re-entry for landing precision & low-g’s
• Ablative, high-performance heat shield and sidewall thermal protection

The current plan calls for a full long-duration system check-out in 2009. Dragon will perform approach, rendezvous, and breakaway operations with the Falcon 9 upper stage simulating an Interantional Space Station rendezvous.




Further info on http://www.spacex.com/

Ubiquity

A compelling way to interact with information available on the Internet was released yesterday by Mozilla developers - Ubiquity. Removing clunkiness is laudable but more than that I hope this further steers developers into leaving the immediate interface issues and starts them on thinking structurally about the information they process or/and publish. I expect plenty of privacy and security concerns to arise soon. It's one thing to email ascii and its another to send rich markup over unencrypted links.

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Gmail on Mobile Clients Communication Issue

If you decide to switch your Gmail preferences to always use https for all connections to Google servers, do not forget to do the same on your mobile devices, with the mobile client. Note: Yes, you should be using https, its a bad idea to let attackers close to your cookies sent unencrypted over your sessions - any sessions - not just Google ones. For the time being things can get out of sync and your mobile client will get server errors when trying to access your account. Here's a read from the Gmail google group. I noticed this after my blackberry stopped sending emails, or performing searches on my Gmail account. After a fresh install it pretty much stopped doing anything.

http://groups.google.com/group/google-mobile-help-blackberry/browse_thread/thread/d5f94637cbaf3837/5d00e5d1d54bd680?lnk=raot

The Theory of Bullshit

I haven't read H.G. Frankfurter's book yet, but I find interesting his assertion that "we" (society?) have no theory of it yet. Stepping away from it's literal meaning, describing feces of a bull, bullshit describes a type of speech and statements correlated with incorrect, false, misleading or made up arguments. A common misperception is that such language is often used and needed in politics and advertising, it is however certainty that bullshit is not confined exclusively to any particular area of human activity.

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory."

Indeed, I think there is a very valid point in trying to understand the nature and sociological value or cost of bullshit in society and its relation to politics in general and power in particular, as it seems lying at least requires acknowledgment of the truth, whereas producing bullshit seems immune to this constraint.

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

God is not Great

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.



This book has many reviews already, there's no point in trying to write one more. Hitchens brings vividly the inconsistencies in religious philosophy forward and he finds these in every major religion of contemporary times. Whereas some reviews compress his writing into a simplified label "radical atheist", his book is much more than so often seen scribblings by barely literate fundamentalists or even worse, in this day and time, the sending of messages by beheading people on poorly taped TV. The book brings facets of the interplay of society and religion, the long history of this relation and some of the sour fruits of it including those of religious power over society. The best word for the book is given by Mr. Hitchens himself, I had the privilege to attend Mr. Hitchen's talk at Google in Mountain View and I am happy we are able to share this talk with the public.