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In his first weekly address as the president elect, Obama talks about rebuilding roads, bridges, and schools. Is he going to create a new deal era Public Works Administration? This could be a good way to spend the billions in bale out money. Instead of propping up failed institutions why not build our countries infrastructure while giving people jobs at the same time. I for one hope if this happens we get some good Art Deco buildings out of it this time too.

Cloud storage unreliable?July 26

There is some press about a outage of Amazon's S3 cloud storage service. ars technica raises the point:

Fundamentally, cloud storage that centralizes functionality can also centralize failures in functionality, making cloud services vulnerable to widespread outages.

But centralization and failure are not unique to cloud storage. CDNs, colo facilities, and hosting providers, all can be single points of failure. I can recall a outage at 365 main in SF that bought down most of the "web 2.0". Economies of scale dictate that we will have large central resources. It is up to good application designers to build with the expectation that services will fail.

Powers of 10May 24

Classic science short about the scale of the universe.

Context for the surveillance debateMay 17

The current debate about surveillance turns out not to be a feature of September 11th, instead being born of the move to mobile telephony and digital switching that started in the 1980's. govexec.com has a thorough article that gives the history of the debate here. It is well worth a read if you have the time.

Waiting at the doorMay 5

When running in the underground portions of the muni metro system, the trains are controlled by computer and because of this, they stop at the same place along the platform every time. Unlike bart, which is similarly controlled by computer, the spots where the doors will open are not marked out. Even without these markings it is still possible to tell where one will need to board. As people enter and leave the trains, their feet wipe clean the dirt form the very edge of the train platform leaving clean marks at each door opening. By observing and counting off the marks in sets of four it is possible to tell where to stand to enter at a particular door on a particular train.