Derek Gottfrid
May 2011
42 posts
Spotify – Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming
csc.kth.se
I read quite a few boring papers about various nerdy topics but this paper is not boring - it’s AMAZING. I was already a fan of Spotify but after reading this, I am sort of blown away. A few tidbits that I didn’t know -
- Uses Peer-to-Peer to distribute music
- Using Ogg Vorbis for encoding
- Song data comes from 8.8% servers, 35.8% p2p, 55.4% cache
- 88% of access were against 12% of the catalog
- 60% of the catalog was access at least once a week
- All TCP based
- No NAT Traversal but wide use of UPnP on home routers
The whole paper is packed with a ton of insights. Spotify is an impressive engineering feat.
Kisko Labs: Introducing Snowfinch: open source realtime web analytics
blog.kiskolabs.com
Snowfinch is an open source realtime web analytics application built with Ruby on Rails and MongoDB. The project was developed as a part of my thesis, and has then been released under the MIT license.
The application focuses on what is happening right now on your site. To a user it works just…
“In the currency wars, the nerds are winning. The value of a Bitcoin, a digital currency trading over peer-to-peer networks, has rocketed more than ninefold in two months to more than $8.60 as of Friday afternoon. The preordained supply and decentralization of Bitcoins have intrigued geeks and paranoid inflationistas alike. But this abstract gold may not survive what looks like a bubble.”
—Some Faint Praise for Mr. Ballmer - NYTimes.com
“Social networks have changed they way we use to com-
municate. It is now easy to be connected with a huge
number of other individuals. In this paper we show that
social networks did not change human social capabili-
ties. We analyze a large dataset of Twitter conversations
collected across six months involving millions of individ-
uals to test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number
of stable social relationships known as Dunbar's num-
ber. We found that even in the online world cognitive
and biological constraints holds as predicted by Dunbar's
theory limiting users social activities. We propose a sim-
ple model for users' behavior that includes nite priority
queuing and time resources that reproduces the observed
social behavior. This simple model o ers a basic explana-
tion of a seemingly complex phenomena observed in the
empirical patterns on Twitter data and o ers support to
Dunbar's hypothesis of a biological limit to the number
of relationships”
—http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.5170v1
“Building on existing research, the present study uses a sample of 320 homicide offenders convicted, sentenced, imprisoned, and released in New Jersey from 1990 to 2000 to assess which factors predict future recidivism. We find that classification tree analysis in random forests outperform logistic regressions in classification and prediction of recidivism.”
—Predicting Recidivism in Homicide Offenders Using Classification Tree Analysis
“Pharen is a compiler that takes a Lisp-like language and turns it into PHP code.”
—Introduction to Pharen
Hadoop Summit 2010 - Agenda
developer.yahoo.com
It actually looks like a pretty decent agenda.
“The Techno Hoodie is a blue zip-up sweatshirt with headphones wired into the drawstrings; the wearer plugs an iPod into the kangaroo pocket, and jams. Arcangel heard about the sweatshirt through a friend, discovered that Old Navy had discontinued it, and became hell-bent on finding one. (Inevitably, the search ended on eBay.) “I’d known that techno hoodies, with crap for your iPods and phones and stuff, have existed,” he says. “So then somebody tells me that Old Navy has one. And all of a sudden I’m very interested because it’s Old Navy—a store that had a little bit of a moment, but it’s culturally ambiguous right now. So we have an object loaded with two different interests of mine, combined. And I’m like, now we’re talking!”
—Artist Cory Arcangel on His Latest Exhibit, “Pro Tools,” at the Whitney — New York Magazine
JavaScript emulator lets Linux run in a browser tab
The name Fabrice Bellard may not be recognizable to a lot of people, but the work he carries out as a programmer and computer scientist is. He is the man behind the LZEXE compression engine,FFmpeg audio and video converter, the QEMU emulator and virtualizor, and he also held the World Record for the computation of PI to 2,700 billion digits in 2009.
There is bad ass and then there is this dude.
I hear you used to pull in the ladies back in the day pimping out the Torino, were there any strippers ever involved?
no of course not.
Otis Redding - Cigarettes And Coffee
Otis Redding never fails me.
In Which I Make My Last Mention of AP Style Guides
- Derek: as the lurker here i agree w/ david and not to beat up on mark but AP Style and how people feel are complete different ideas. i would rather have people feel respected than stick w/ AP Style
- Derek: and now to beat up on mark - seriously what a fucking arrogant old media purview - no wonder people hate media and it's ny elitist attitudes - you people make me sick
“If it is possible, it is done. If it is impossible, it will be done. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I live by.”
—Evel Knievel (via houseofevel)
The One-Second War | May 2011 | Communications of the ACM
cacm.acm.org
Wonderful writing about leap seconds. A seriously fun read.
Machine Learning, etc: Neural Networks making a come-back?
yaroslavvb.blogspot.com
Neural Networks making a come-back?
If the killing of Osama bin Laden teaches us one thing...
it’s that I need to cut the number of people I follow on Twitter by about 80%.
“On Tumblr, the blogging service, the president’s speech became fodder for quick animation loops, and there were doctored images of Mr. Obama riding a unicorn, with rainbows shooting out of his hands.”
—
Online, an Urge to Be a Part of the Bin Laden News - NYTimes.com
Nice bit from Jenna
(via markcoatney)
