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joshua's blog

overclocking the lectureNovember 2 2008

The growth of both bandwidth and storage mean that in the last few years practically everyone from individuals to large universities have begun putting lectures and talks online. While I can easily pick out a dozen or a hundred videos that that would be fascinating and educational, I am hamstrung by my short attention span, and I drift off almost immediately. Not to mention the fact that one browser crash or accidental tab closure loses my place and probably the video itself as well.

After tinkering a while, I've managed to figure out a way to cut down the time it takes to watch a video. This works for me, on my Mac; your mileage may vary:

1. Make sure you have the appropriate codecs installed. I generally use the Perian codec package. I additionally find that some FLVs require QTPro to be installed; it's not very expensive.
2. Download the video somehow. Some sites, like Google Video, let you download a copy. Others, like YouTube, do not allow this. However, most embedded flash video can be grabbed via the technique in the bottom video in the demo videos at Perian.
3. Open the video in QuickTime. The video is now happily outside the browser.
4. Go to Window → Show A/V Controls; change the playback speed in the relevant window. I find that 2.0x generally works pretty well; the video will be faster and the audio is a little clipped but nicely de-chipmunked.
5. Enj

amateur economistSeptember 13 2008

Ever since seeing a presentation by Dolores Labs about Amazon's Mechanical Turk, I've been itching for an excuse to play with the system.

I recently saw a thread that highlights the distinction between expected value and utility. Would you take a more likely but lower payoff instead of a less likely but higher payoff? Similarly, the St. Petersburg Paradox takes the problem to its logical extreme. By constructing a game that has a series of increasingly rare payoffs of increasingly larger size, a game with infinite expected value is created.

So I constructed 21 versions of the questions, varying the size of the dollars as well as the rate of payoff for the second outcome.

For one cent apiece, I sent the questions to be answered by one hundred people each, and collated the results. 2100 questions, three hours, and thirty dollars later, I have my results.

beyond restJuly 24 2008

Rabble and Kellan's presentation, "Beyond REST? Building data services with XMPP" is both a great idea as well as a good introduction to coping with massive amount of traffic that large systems have to service.

A publish/subscribe architecture is natural to other problem domains such as instant messaging and financial data systems (Tibco, Reuters, and so on).

Similarly, Brad Fitzpatrick implemented something similar as a never-ending Atom feed a few years ago for Livejournal (sans XMPP, which wasn't as conceptually prevalent then.)

One important point in the presentation is that, for example, a single application would poll Flickr approximately three million times in a day to fetch only several thousand updates. At Delicious we saw a similar level of polling activity, made somewhat worse by speculative querying (hitting the URL information pages to see if there was any data for arbitrary URLs, which was generally unlikely.)

One solution that ocurred to me at the time was to build a simple callback system over HTTP. This would fall comfortably between full polling and full pers

rhizomeMay 12 2008

I'm speaking briefly at the Rhizome 2008 Benefit in New York City later this week. There are still tickets available, so you have no excuses for not attending.

tag mockeryMay 1 2008

A sure sign that I've hit the big time: