Year in Review

Last year, I made a New Year’s resolution to post something on this blog every week for a whole year. At the time I made that resolution, that meant that I’d have to write 50 blog posts before the end of the year. If I count correctly, this post makes 46 total. Not perfect, but not bad. At one point, I even had a buffer that was several weeks long!

One of the things that I was curious about going in was what the effect of an increased post volume would be on my pageviews. According to Google Analytics, my number of visits increased by 40% from this time last year. Most of my traffic came from search engines or referrals from Facebook, and most people came for my esoteric tips or my crotchety advice.

For those who like looking at graphs (because really, who doesn’t?), here’s my weekly “views” every week this year (blue) vs. last year (orange):

Truth be told, I started to run out of things to say sometime in November. We’ll see if I keep this post-a-week thing going into 2012, but it’s been an interesting experiment at the very least. Happy New Year!

Escape to New York

I got the opportunity to spend some time in New York a few weeks ago. Officially, I was there to attend Hadoop World, but I flew up a few days early to visit friends and see the city. I hadn’t been there since middle school (and I can’t really say I’ve been to New York if I was twelve years old and with a tour group). My friend Mangesh and his roommate graciously let me crash on their couch for a couple of days until my official (and reimbursable!) conference hotel room was available. They are wonderful people.

I had a couple of days to walk around and enjoy the city. Spent most of Sunday at the American Museum of Natural History. The museum was just as great as I remember it being back in 1997, and their newly-renovated planetarium is absolutely spectacular.

I spent most of Monday wandering around Manhattan. Since a lot of the touristy things like museums are closed on Mondays, I spent a good deal of time in Central Park and wandered around Times Square and Rockefeller Center. There’s this amazingly stark contrast between Central Park and the rest of Manhattan. The decision to put the park there rather than developing that land was a really inspired choice on the part of city planners; it was a great place to wander around and relax after spending so much time getting jostled on the streets. The weather was perfect while I was there, which was a lucky break considering that the weather is apparently pretty erratic there in November.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at Hadoop World, hobnobbing with fellow big data geeks and interested businesspeople, talking about the state of Hadoop and the big data landscape in general. Since I’m in this weird pre-thesis-writing-but-thinking-about-graduation state right now, I spent much of the time getting a feel for what the various companies in the big data space were up to and doing a bit of shameless evangelizing of our group’s work with Themis (our follow-on work that has grown out of TritonSort). My friend Yanpei (who is now wrapping up a Ph.D. at Cal) gave a great talk along with Todd Lipcon from Cloudera on measuring and improving Hadoop’s performance that you should check out if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

Tuesday night was spent at EMC/Greenplum’s bowling-for-charity event, in which I affirmed that a) I am not that great of a bowler and b) tech companies know how to throw a party. The attendees (with the help of sponsors) ended up raising over $20,000 for Artists for Elephants, which is also pretty cool. If the choice of charity sounds random, it’s worth noting that Hadoop’s mascot is a little yellow elephant. We are actively considering adopting an adorable mascot for the Themis project.

In general, my impression of New York was a lot more positive than I thought it would be. I’m not a huge fan of crowds, but for some reason Manhattan felt a lot less crowded than I imagined it would be, although there were still a ton of people everywhere. I can definitely see why people want to live in New York; there’s so much cultural diversity and so many things to do and see there. On the other hand, the ridiculously high cost of living (granted, my exposure to the city at this point has been Manhattan, which is probably not representative) and the constant crowds would kind of deter me from moving there.

I took a ton of photos during my trip that are up on Flickr.

A Beginning and an End

So today has been, to say the very least, eventful.

So much has already been said about Steve Jobs’ life and legacy that I feel like I might just be rehashing what others have already said more eloquently. The first computer I ever used was a Mac. I wrote my first program on a Mac. His work and the work of his company have affected me profoundly and his singular vision will remain in the DNA of the computing industry for decades to come, even if Apple were to vanish tomorrow. I wish I could have thanked him in person.

In much happier news, my friends Alex and KC welcomed their daughter into the world today! Congratulations to them both. Nadia could not have asked for better parents.

Happy birthday to me

What a convenient excuse for not having content this week!

As is usual for this time of year, I’m in the middle of a conference deadline push, so there isn’t going to be a whole lot of celebrating until that’s done, unfortunately. Thanks to everyone for your kind birthday well-wishes.

SDCC 2011

Last weekend was Comic-Con.  This was the third consecutive time I’ve been to SDCC. I really don’t have an excuse not to go, since I live pretty close to the convention center. As always, it was a lot of fun. It’s gotten me thinking about a couple of things that I’ll try to puzzle out here.

Holy crap, the lines. Somehow the lines seemed a lot worse than in previous years, although I’m sure they were probably comparable. We managed to get to the convention center pretty early, and we still waited almost two hours in line just to get our badges to get in (first world problems, right?). Thankfully they let you print all of your days’ badges at once rather than having to wait in line every day.

We were originally thinking of buying next year’s tickets at this year’s con (given how poorly the ticket buying experience went this year), but that was a non-starter. They released a certain number of tickets per day (2500 or 3000 I think), and those tickets sold out within 45 minutes of going on sale. People were camping out in front of the hotel where tickets were being sold. No matter how popular the event is, that’s kind of ridiculous.

The incredible lines (for just about everything) really make me think that the convention has outgrown the venue. I think they’re trying to artificially decrease demand by raising ticket prices (four day passes are $175 next year, which is kind of steep and a significant increase from last year) but I’m not sure that’s going to have any effect. If you’re flying in from out of town and staying in a hotel for four days, you’ve spent well in excess of the ticket price just to get to the door. It might stop a lot of locals from showing up just for kicks, though. The consensus among our little group seemed to be that they’d have much better luck putting it somewhere like Vegas that has the convention and hotel space. Somehow though, I don’t think it would ever be quite the same after that. Given that San Diego just renewed their contract to host the convention for the next several years, it sounds like the long lines are going to keep being a feature of the convention for some time to come.

What’s the deal with all the QR codes? Having a QR code (those square two-dimensional barcodes that you can read with your smartphone) somewhere on your booth or product seems to have been a requirement this year. I’ve never seen so many QR codes in one place. I’m wondering if this was a tie-in to the SDCC iPhone app or if there’s some larger QR code trend going on. Still, it was fun to actually be able to scan QR codes.

SDCC is really two conventions. I started writing about this aspect of the convention and realized that I had a lot more to say than would fit comfortably in one post, so I’ll post that particular screed tomorrow.

I’d definitely like to go back next year (assuming I can get tickets, of course), but I think I’ll be satisfied with only going for one or two days. The only reason I would imagine you’d want to go for all four days is to go to the panels, and while the ones I did get into were pretty cool, I’m not sure they were worth the hours standing in line.

It’s Thesis Proposal Week!

I’m currently working on my thesis proposal, and am hence entirely snowed until next Tuesday. One of these days I’m going to give myself a buffer a couple weeks long …

I’ll fill space this week with this:

First, congratulations to my friend Imran on a successful thesis defense!

Second, if you’re using Terminal.app, stop and use iTerm 2 instead. It’s an amazing piece of software.

Break week for NSDI

Frankly, I didn’t think I’d be able to last this long without skipping a week.

I’ve been putting in absurd hours working on preparations for this year’s sort benchmark submission and the talk I’m giving on Wednesday at NSDI (the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation), so I haven’t been able to prepare anything.

In lieu of content, if you want to read our NSDI paper, it’s available online at tritonsort.eng.ucsd.edu.

Pi

Today is the 14th of March, which some of the dorkier among us call Pi Day because the date (3/14) corresponds to the first three digits of pi.

Recall that pi () is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. There are a number of surprising things about pi, perhaps the most well-known of which is that it is an irrational number. Irrational numbers can’t be expressed as the ratio of two integers; that is to say, there are no two integers m and n such that . A side-effect of this is that the decimal digits of pi never end and never repeat. Humans with a lot of free time are capable of memorizing a few tens of thousands of digits of pi, and computers have calculated pi to about 5 trillion digits.

The thing that interests me most about pi is that it shows up everywhere, even in places where it’s not immediately apparent that it should be involved. Whether the ancient Egyptians knew it or not, the ratio of the perimeter of the Great Pyramid of Giza to its height is approximately . The ratio of the length of a river to the straight-line distance from its source to its mouth has been shown to approach pi. So many things in the natural world seem to involve circles (or spheres) that maybe it’s no surprise that pi is so ubiquitous.

One of pi’s most elegant appearances relates to complex numbers. Complex numbers are numbers of the form , where a and b are real numbers and i is . They show up all over the place in physics and mathematics.

You can think of each complex number as a point (a,b) on a two-dimensional plane called the complex plane, where a and b denote the real and imaginary parts of the number. Since you’ve got a point in a two-dimensional plane, you can form a circle based on it – just draw a radius from (a,b) to the origin (0,0), sweep that line around 360 degrees and boom, circle.

You can even use this radial line to re-define the point (a,b) in polar coordinates, so that rather than being defined by its real and imaginary parts, each complex number is represented by the angle that its radial line to the origin makes with the x-axis and the length of its radial line (see picture). So now instead of defining the point as (a,b), you define it as (r,) such that

Now it turns out that Euler’s Formula states that any point on that circle in the complex plane can be described as Euler’s number – – raised to a complex power. In particular,

So any complex number can be written as for some values of r and . The really amazing thing here comes when we make . Since and , Euler’s formula yields

or

which relates – in a single, extremely elegant equation – five of the most important constants in all of mathematics.

Happy Pi Day, everybody.

Why isn’t Istanbul called Constantinople?

One of life’s great mysteries, explored by some of the greatest scholars of our time. So why, in fact, did Constantinople get the works?

With Wikipedia as my primary source and the confidence of an armchair historian, here’s (very, very roughly) why Istanbul isn’t Constantinople. Most of this is ripped off wholesale from Wikipedia – my thanks to the authors of those articles. I summarize Wikipedia entries so you don’t have to.

First we should note that before it was called Constantinople, it was called Byzantium. The city was founded by the city-state of Megara back around 660 BC and was named after the king of Megara, Byzas. It was part of various empires and consortiums until it gained independence in 355 BC. Byzantium had been friends with the Roman Republic for a long time, and so when the Roman Republic dropped the republic bit and became the Roman Empire, Byzantium joined the party in AD 73 by becoming part of the massive bulk that was imperial Rome, where it would stay to some extent for roughly the next 1400 years.

Cut to 251 years later when, in September 324, Constantine I became emperor of the whole Roman empire. I say “the whole empire” because until recently, the Roman empire had been divided into western and eastern portions, each administered by an augustus (the emperor of that half of the empire) and a caesar (a sort of junior emperor who was assumed to succeed the augustus of that region upon the augustus’ retirement or death). This Tetrarchy, as we currently know it, was supposed to help eliminate the chaos that had plagued the empire throughout the third century AD. This chaos was caused mainly by issues with succession (there were 25 emperors in 49 years during this period, with most of them having gained the post by killing their predecessor) and military and economic mismanagement. Unfortunately for the empire, the success of the Tetrarchy was pretty short-lived and it wasn’t long before Rome’s rulers were at each other’s throats again.

In 306, one of the augusti died and two different people were elevated to succeed him. By 308, there were four people jockeying for the position of augustus and claimants to the position spent the next little while killing each other off. By 313, a man named Constantine had secured the title of augustus of the west, and a man named Licinius had secured the title of augustus of the east. Constantine, however, decided that he wanted the whole pie and waged war against Licinius to re-unite the Roman empire under one ruler. In September 324 Constantine was successful, becoming the first man to hold the title of sole emperor in nearly 40 years.

As sole emperor, Constantine was ready to make some big changes. Constantine was the first Christian emperor of Rome, and he wanted to build a new Christian city at Byzantium to replace Nicomedia as the eastern capitol of the empire. He called the city New Rome, but most people just called it Constantinople, or The City of Constantine.

By the 390s, most of the emperors of the western empire were puppets controlled by the military. The western empire held on by its fingernails until, in 476, Odoacer deposed the last emperor of the western empire and that was that for the Roman empire as we know it. The eastern Roman empire, or the Byzantine empire as we usually refer to them today, emerged largely unscathed from the chaos that ravaged the western empire and its capitol, Constantinople, was the largest and most wealthy city in the western world for much of the Middle Ages.  In the 1200s, though, things started going downhill for them too.

Constantinople was sacked during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, during which the Byzantine empire was briefly usurped in favor of the Latin Empire established by the crusaders. The Byzantine empire was restored in 1261, but the empire and Constantinople itself were both badly damaged. The Byzantine empire would never fully recover. In May 1453, Sultan Mehmed II’s forces seized Constantinople and declared it the new capitol of the Ottoman Empire.

Constantinople had been referred to in normal conversation by the Turks as Istanbul since before the sack of 1453. The name Istanbul derives from the Greek istimbolin (I’m so sorry for butchering this, Greek scholars!), which means both “in the city” and “to the city”, and it and various Greek words like it had leaked their way into some Turkish place names over the centuries. By 1453, many people within the Ottoman empire referred to Constantinople simply as “The City”, or Istanbul, although it was still referred to on official documents as Kostantiniyye (the Arabic derivation of Constantinople). By the 19th century, much of the western world still referred to Constantinople as Constantinople, but the Ottomans were officially calling it Istanbul.

The Ottoman empire ended in 1922 with the exile of the last sultan, Mehmed VI, and the Republic of Turkey was formed in the following year with Ankara, and not Istanbul, as its capitol. The Turkish Postal Service Law of 1930 finally made the name change to Istanbul official; it declared that all packages and letters referring to the city as anything other than Istanbul would no longer be delivered by the Turkish postal service, forcing the rest of the world to comply with the name change. So if you sent a package to Constantinople, it would not be received in Istanbul, at least after 1930.

So long story short, I guess people did just like it better that way.

Getting Rid of Old Tech

Lately, I have become the middleman for my parents’ old technology. They took their recent remodel as an opportunity to get rid of some things that they didn’t use anymore. Cameras (both still and video), DVD players, stereo equipment, iPods and computers – most of it between 5 and 15 years old – came to rest on the floor of my apartment. Some of it, I ended up using myself; speakers, for example, don’t ever really become obsolete. The rest of it couldn’t just sit in my apartment forever, so it had to go.

One of the big ways that I’ve been able to sell some of this old tech without a lot of hassle is by using tech resellers like Gazelle and BuyMyTronics. Sites like these will buy your old tech for a price based on their estimates of its resale value, its condition, how many accessories you still have, and so on. They then turn around and sell these products, either for parts or as a whole unit depending on its condition, to third parties. Sometimes they’ll send you a box to ship your stuff in, but they’ll always provide a pre-paid shipping label so you don’t have to pay to ship it. This cuts out much of the hassle associated with sites like eBay; just fill out a form, print a packing slip, put your stuff in a box and ship it. A week or two later, you’ve got a check in the mail.

One drawback with sites like Gazelle is that they won’t always take older items and you’ll probably get a little less for it than you would had you sold it on eBay or Craigslist. For stuff that resellers won’t take, I usually turn to friends and co-workers next. If Gazelle deems an item worthless, I’ll either give it to a friend who wants it or sell it for a few bucks to someone I work with. I really prefer staying within my immediate social graph this way to turning to something like Craigslist or eBay because, frankly, it filters out the crazy people.

I once had a winning bidder on eBay ask that I pack her item in a box and pack that box in a larger box “because the mailman steps on our boxes and that’s the only way it will arrive intact”. Seriously? If this is true, your mailman is a jerk. The facts that most of these e-mails WERE WRITTEN WITH THE CAPS-LOCK KEY ON did not help my confidence at all.

I’ve had multiple Craigslist ads yield nothing but phishing e-mails and missed “I’ll pick it up tomorrow at X” appointments. I’d much rather handle getting rid of this stuff on my timetable, and am always kind of apprehensive about giving my address and phone number to a total stranger. I could exchange money with these people in neutral locations but that somehow seems even weirder; I’m selling an iPod, not making a drug deal. When given the choice between eBay (and its cut of my profits) and Craigslist, I’ll almost always choose eBay for reasons like those.

My final avenue for getting rid of old electronics is donating them. Usually, this happens to really old, but still usable, computers. Sometimes (like if you’re trying to get rid of CRT monitors) donation sites simply won’t take them. At that point, I usually bring stuff to the local e-waste recycling center. I think it’s important that old electronics are responsibly recycled, so I try to use reputable e-waste recyclers whenever possible.

Bottom line: if you’ve got old tech to get rid of, your friends might be able to get more life out of it. If not, you can probably make more money from it than you think. If you can’t, please don’t just throw it away.