Valley Proofs

Pixel Overlord

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:53:00 +0000

Home Page Overload. Wednesday, June 9th, 2010. An instant centithread has emerged on eng-misc following the radical insurgent change of our home page.

"Oh, wow. That's hideous."
"The tech blogs are going to lose their sh*t over this, but the regular users are going to love it."
"I don't like it."
"Shut up, nerd!"
"It kind of feels like the 90s called, and they want their website back."
"WTF?"

New Coke didn't last long, this won't either...

Update: Indeed gone fast... phew... good ridance.

Behind the Scenes - Production Pushes

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:28:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 04:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:46:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:28:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:43:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:47:00 +0000

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.

Mashing up and where do I work

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 05:09:00 +0000

The coming year promises to bring a new face to many web apps, mashing up content from different sources is becoming easier by the day. I am going to test some of these ideas on this blog and file it under Mashups. The idea behind mashups is simple leave the lifting to those who do it best, and concentrate on where you add value to the chain, be it your friends or your customers.
Here's an example, the Google Maps team just announced adding 8 new cities to the street view layer on http://www.google.com/maps. What's interesting to me is not the eight new cities but the ability to add the street view snippet into my own, in this case, blog post. So here, today I'll share the street where I work and point visiting friends to it. Note one little but important detail, to get the right html snippet you have to use the http://www.google.com/maps URL to navigate to the right place and not http://maps.google.com, this will change in the future but right now you have to be aware of it otherwise the html snippet will not work properly.

View Larger Map

But it may as well be the place in Berkeley where I buy music from time to time.

View Larger Map

Here's a page which describes how to add street view imagery to web pages.

Why Web 2.0 and how I started to move off the server

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:59:00 +0000

I have to admit, being a computer hack for 25+ years I really love to meddle with software on my own. I have my own servers plugged to the Internet and I have ways and ways to make them useful to myself. It started way back in the Andresen days with pics my family could peek at and then it went more and more complex with more and more stuff running on them.

But I am fed up now, the tipping point for me was wordpress. Not because it's a bad piece of software, I just grew tired of moderating a whole pile of comments whose content was just a pile of spam. I loved the geeky aspect of being able to grep through log files or setup cron jobs to move files between raid servers. However, at the end of the day. It's not cutting it. I spend too much time worrying over those details where I could be writing about a good book I read and how it changed my perspective (Steve thank you for the comment). I moved to blogger though anything similar will do. No more fuss and more time to do creative things. Let my colleagues who are scaling the infrastructure of the future take charge. It makes my day, and it makes my publishing effortless.

Moreover, its not anymore just blogs, or pictures but documents, presentations, financial modeling, even credit card aggregation through mint.com. I thought of this service while at E.piphany seven years ago, it is finally available. My goal, cleanup all my servers, move everything to willing providers live with just a couple of laptops and phones and have the server without much content, perhaps ready for a quick experiment or two.

This being said, it's not rosy. I hawk around mint and their security and privacy policies. I hawk around the company I work in to make sure the right thing is done for users. If you move things to Web 2.0. you ought to have a way to download YOUR property and archive it from time to time. Beyond that, you need to understand whether your provider has an effective way for you to terminate your commitment, i.e., erase all information you decide to remove. Today it looks a lot like reading the fine print of credit card agreements. I think this seriously ought to change. And this is just scratching the surface.

It does at one point become a question of trust. And how this trust will evolve or devolve, will be part of my posts here.

The Oil and the Glory

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 06:32:00 +0000

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve LeVine.

Steve LeVine covered Central Asia and the Caucasus for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for 11 years — starting two weeks after the Soviet collapse through 2003. From 1988-1991, LeVine was Newsweek's Pakistan-based correspondent for that country and Afghanistan. While the book doesn't have the documented rigor of say Taubman's biography on Khruschev it is quite clear that Steve knows very well the region; central Asia, the Caucasus and Russia. Moreover the book is vivid in both historical detail and the well rounded detail on the cast of players. It's importance is not only in shedding light the light on the region it covers, but even more so into understanding the dynamics at play in some of world's most influential corporations. The book has a great balance of historical context and a detailed account of the power struggles around the oil in the Caspian basin. I will add in the coming days a post with some memorable quotes from the book, for the time being take a look at the video of a talk Steve LeVine gave us at Google. Thank you Steve, great book!

Steve keeps a blog on central Asia, Caucasus and Russia.

Hello world

noreply@blogger.com (Boris Debic) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 21:46:00 +0000

Welcome! These are the notes of Boris Debic, a Silicon Valley veteran currently hacking at Google. Once I fill up this place you should find lines on technology, science, reading and of course politics. My interests are currently split between complex software systems, the technology needed to send humans to Mars and international politics of concern to small countries. For historical reasons I keep an eye on UNHCR and Croatia as well.