There is a Y in Daylesford

The R5 Paoli Station situation has me aggrevated. I tried to get a
parking pass twice and the substitute sales person was unable to sell
me one. When the regular lady was back to work and I tried a third
time, there were none left. A week of car shuffling had been insane.
Last night I made the 5:41 home and then realized that the family
truckster was off to soccer practice and I was castaway in Paoli. I
strolled over to TJ's and for a cold one and read an ACM Queue article
on the Five Minute Rule applied to Flash. Enough is enough.

The Great Valley Flyer is fast stop to stop but queuing theory
applies. The Flyer is packed and it is the same set of gnomes (of
which I am one) each day. It takes longer to board and exit the train.
It takes a long time to offload at 30th Street and even longer at
Suburban. Worst part is that the trek up and over to the Comcast
Center reminds me of the rat race at 53rd and Lexington in midtown
Manhattan E subway. Is Bear Sterns still around? I can't keep track.

The only thing worse than trying reach the Flyer at 5:08 is trying
making the second leg of my journey down North Valley. You can either
increase your chances of collision getting out of the parking lot at a
reason time or you can wait until the lot drains off.

Now to rationalize. Getting from the lot to the inbound platform you
have to cross North Valley. Frogger. Enough said. Best case scenario
is to line up your crossing with a talented lady and maybe the traffic
will stop - they never stop for me. Once you cross the bridge half the
time you find the breakneck 75 year old iron staircase is closed for a
repair.

I am going to try Daylesford out. The Flyer Gnomes are "in the picture".

I got to my office by 8:15, was alone in the elevator, and could jog
up the stairs into the lobby with dodging people.

Fielding On Rails

To distract me from looking at too much production Akamai data, Greg
gave me an Untangled posting on notification architecture. I was
considering a mental picture of what Roy means by "inverse economy of
scale" for PubSub. I assume he is referring to cost function C(n,m) of
consuming clients n and rate of messages m and that cost increases
versus decreases with HTTP REST style architecture along the n and m
domain. I also think that as n increases C inflects at certain points.
I will have just wait for Roys upcoming posting.

Seven Years Ago Seven Months Ago

Seven months ago today I started at Comcast. It's 11:37PM and I am on
the R5 passing Narbreth. Train is filled with chatty, giddy college
kids, more than a few intoxicated. I hope they get off soon at
Villanova. I guess I was that annoying 20 years ago when first
semester freshman year was a reckless abandon. This evening was
Comcast Interactive Media all hands at The Hub. My boss called out my
name while referring to overall improvements because I have been
looking through logs for errors. I am glad to have a shout-out and he
was a gentleman for making mention. Now if he had only said, "if we
fixed the errors Matt found it would increment the number on the
bottom line"...I may have had a couple of folks wanna meet me
afterwards. I am pretty sure most folks think I enjoy watching grass
grow. No booze was served. Here comes the Paoli stop...and my
Brazillian taxis driver who drives my RSX more than I do. Why she
thinks that shifting constantly is necessary to keep the engine
running ... 12:21AM I will have pretend it's still 9-11 and roll this
posting back a bit. It seems like years ago that started this new job.

Seven years ago I wouldn't have pictured myself working in a
skyscraper. I was working from home, living on West Coast hours on the
JATO engineering team. My sister woke me and had me turn on the TV.
What a terrible day. It seems like it was yesterday.

Evito Signum Ter

I didn't initially realize why I found work so tedious today. Then Gmail provided this moment of clarity. I am just bored out of my freakin skull because the novelty wore off 10 years ago to the day. I had not totally forgot that I had been consulting at IBM Interactive Media in the Fall of 1998. Same brittle Java application server issues...different "Interactive Media". If I disposition another fubar Java application server and have to spend more than a minute teaching people how uncomplicated it is . . . I will . . . I W I L L

. . . I will go into work tomorrow and explain it for the 1000th time. I just can't help myself. Java developers are not blissfully ignorant but rather innocently unburdened with what I know could have been.

From NetDynamics

Missing Vertical Swath on Comcast HD Channels

Starting about a month ago, all HD channels including HD VOD display a green sidebar on the right. Below is an picture taken with iPhone of the right side of Sunrise Earth this morning. I estimate this to be just over 1cm wide on my 52" Sharp AQUOS. There is another issue too

From 2008 Finding Momentum

On the left side of the HD picture there is a 3cm wide sidebar of pixelization which makes it look like a strip of clear packing tape is up and down the whole side of the screen. Seriously, I suspect that anyone with plasma screens would get burn in from this - certainly the green sidebar.

From 2008 Finding Momentum

When I look at it more closely it appears that its not pixelization but a missing vertical swatch of the image...about 1cm long. Perhaps what is happening is that this swatch is clipped and the whole images slides over the left causing this hairline alias 3cm in from the left and green filling in the gap on the right.

Internet Meta Grid

(note: I drafted this entry while attending the Akamai Conference in August 2008. In recent days Tom Leighton published whitepaper concerning A Perspective from the Edge of the Cloud so I thought I would complete this posting after being inspired by hearing the message I was hoping to hear and knew would come)

I need a great big httpd in the sky. I need it cheap. I am building the Media Grid. Well actually I am going to build a few grids but I need to practice on one first.

I was "in the picture" during the CEO Keynote when the Akamai anthology video was played. A highlight was shown of the Philadelphia Live8 stage outward to the city skyline and I could see my svelte figure up on the camera tower. I was also "in the picture" when a still photo was shown of me talking to Akamai engineer Vinay at the Media Technology booth in the science fair.

Akamai does 300Billion requests per day

"I am the Walrus" says the T-shirt of a guy on the streets of Boston in a video who says he won't wait any longer than 4-5 seconds for a page and has cancelled cable and watches all video online now. You are right and wrong dude. Noone will wait more than 4 seconds and most of the time you demand 1 second response time. You may be right that customers will only pay for an IP pipe and video will be satisfied with Internet devices. The Akamai CEO agrees with you. He suggests that given the speed down to the house IP TV will be competitive. Your T-shirt is mistaken though...I am the Walrus - not you.


700 Million page views on CNN in 2004
what will happen in 2008 election (what did happen...?)

10 billion online videos per month

Bill Hensler, Dynamic Media Organization, Adobe
VP of Engineering

12 Billion online videos in May 2008

You don't go to Google to search for toothpaste and snack food. How to have a Brand Conversation with consumers is challenging. 500 billion in advertising is being challenged by the web.

Consumer wants more content and best video experience (novelity is one)
Publisher wants to monetize new and existing content and make it easy to delivery to consumer (how do you make money?)

Internet offers one major change "bi-directional communication". Word!

Suspects it will take 10 more years to understand the Medium of IP TV

Advertiser wants to reach more people and interested in interactivity with the engagement.

Content type, medium and advertising are all symbiotic and shape each other.

Try to think of the general mills - how are they going to sell pop-tarts.

I am hearing Bill talk about metadata to capture the context of the audio/video and I don't know if I agree that the metadata needs to be tightly coupled to the media. I think that the interface can just be on a simple interface based on the time domain. The YouTube video annotations is an example where the metadata and the media resource are connected by ID and discretely connected by time domain.

In the video

Flash 10 h.264 mp4 files switching between video files. Demonstrated that different bit rate flv files being switched with apparently no interuption in experience.

Why would someone want to watch video off axis?

Why would someone want to have bit filters running on the client?

Is Web Measurement Broken

Why can't we spend more money on online advertising?

Time spent online is not equivalent to time spent watching TV.

click thru rate has been both a blessing and a curse

Engagement is so ambiguous. What does it mean anyways?

Metrics that matter most is revenue and yield.

Inability of publishers to use excess inventory.

At the end of the day it's all about revenue and margin