Gregable.

Back from Kilimanjaro

2010-08-31T05:35:00.000-07:00

I'm a little late in writing this post, but better late than never. Two weeks ago, I got back from my trip to Tanzania where me and 3 buddies climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was a great trip - a week on the mountain, 3 days of Safari, and a few rest days scattered between. I posted some photos to Picasa: Kilimanjaro Trip Pictures.

99% of the hikers climbing Kilimanjaro start at midnight from Barafu camp at around 15k ft altitude, hike to the top (19k ft) for sunrise, and then turn around and descend a few minutes later back to 10k ft altitude. Our group instead opted for the little known Crater Camp option. We started our hike from Barafu at 8am, daylight and much warmer. We ascended to Stella's Point on the Crater Rim, 500 ft lower and a 30 minute hike from the actual peak (Uhuru Peak) and then dropped down into the Crater for the night. The plan was to wake up and start hiking at a leisurely hour of 5am in the morning.

The crater was well worth the extra day, most of the hikers never set foot in it, but we had time to explore. I opted to check out the glacier inside the crater, which is shrinking and may soon be gone completely. Many of our porters had never done the Crater Camp option before, so they were just as excited as we were.

Unfortunately, after going to bed, the altitude kicked in for me. We were all already weak, but it really hit me hard. When our guides woke us up in the morning, I decided to descend instead of finishing the last few hundred feet to the top. Acute Mountain Sickness was an interesting experience - it felt like the worst flu you've ever had: headache, nausea, vomiting, and extremely low energy levels. I had to take a break between tying one boot and the other. I was wearing a heart rate monitor for the trip and my resting heart rate was around 120 beats per minute - normally, it's around 70. Fortunately, dropping altitude did the trick. A few hours later at a lower vantage point, I was feeling absolutely fine. The other 3 in our group finished the route to the top and joined me that afternoon.

Not too many meteors, but the stars were better than I've ever seen before. By day 2 we were camping above the clouds, so there was essentially no man-made light pollution except for our own flashlights. The milky way was not only bright and clear, but I swear that I could actually make out hints of different colors in the stars with my unaided eye. I tried but failed to take any photos worthy of sharing.

On the tail end of the trip, we went on a 3 day Safari. I have to admit that I was mostly on the trip for the hike and hadn't really researched the Safari much in advance, but it was also a blast. Nice and relaxing, and crazy amounts of wildlife as you'll see in the photos.

Kilimanjaro: Wish me luck

2010-08-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning, I'm off to hike Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. It is 19,334 ft above sea level at the summit, the tallest peak in Africa.

If we're doing well, we'll even sleep one night inside the Crater, at roughly 18,000 ft. That should be amazing and painful at the same time. We'll be hitting the summit around new moon. Most people go for full moon as you have to do some night hiking, but we'll be hiking during the Perseids meteor shower, so the lack of moonlight, the lack of human-made light, and the high altitude should really make for quite a show.

I was hoping to be able to use MyTracks on the journey and post the route when I return. On some test trips, I tried a few solar chargers to keep my phone going, but none of them were able to collect as many photons as my Nexus One wanted to eat. I'll still be bringing the phone along for identifying stars (see my previous post), but I'll leave it off most of the way. I'll also bring back lots of photos to share on the blog.

If you want to get more involved, Jeremy, one of the other hikers, will be carrying a Spot messaging device that will track our route. You can see the map at http://jeremyshapiro.com/kili/. Another way to participate it to "sponsor" our climb in a sense. Matt Cutts set up a page at charity:water in honor of our trip, and he blogged a little bit about his choice of charities. Lastly, check back in about 2 weeks for a final update.

The 4 Android Apps that all backpackers should carry

2010-07-30T20:01:00.000-07:00

If you go backpacking or even hiking and use an android phone, here is a list of the Android Apps you should be carrying.

My Tracks: Record GPS tracks of where you hiked, view elevation profiles, and upload to Google Maps. Tip: To keep battery low, change the settings for coordinate frequency to "battery miser". This is what I use to generate nifty maps and elevation profiles of my hikes that I post on this blog.
Google Skymap: Augmented reality for showing the stars in the sky. Hold your phone up to the starry sky and see whether that bright thing is a planet or a star, and which one. Works even without data access.
Peak.AR: Augmented reality that will tell you the name of every mountain peak you are looking at.
Rainy Days: Overlays moving weather images over google maps to show you live weather around you. Obviously only works if you have data coverage.

I'm headed to Kilimanjaro on Tuesday, what are some other good backpacking Apps?

Training for Kili

2010-06-07T22:03:00.000-07:00

In August, I'll be doing my best to hike to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest peak. In the meantime, I've been trying to hit the trail whenever I can to make sure I'm in the best shape I can be in. The better shape I'm in, the more fun I'll have.

Pinnacles Day Hike Elevation

Last Monday, May 31, Memorial Day, Cristin and I joined @JeremyShapiro and Emily to hike around Pinnacles National Monument. Our route climbed from the east entrance up the High Peaks Trail, descended from the peaks on Tunnel Trail and Juniper Canyon Trail, and then looped back along the mellow Balconies Trail through Balconies Cave, a Talus Cave formed by rocks falling into a V-shaped valley. The whole trip was supposedly around 9 miles, of course with as much elevation change as we could find in order to prepare for the climbs we expect on Kili. The graph on the right is the elevation profile that MyTracks recorded. The GPS bounces around a bit though so the total distance of 12 miles is an overestimate. We were on the lookout for some California Condors, but failed to find them. The area was starting to get a bit hot for the summer, but still not too bad. Hopping into a dark cool cave in the middle of the afternoon was still an appreciated break from the sun. A few photos that I snapped with my cell phone when I remembered can be found here: Pinnacles Photos.

Ohlone Backpacking Day 1, Elevation

This past weekend, June 5-5, @JeremyShapiro, Ryan Moulton and I loaded up the backpacks and went for a 2-day trip in the Ohlone wilderness, hiking from Del Valle to Stewart Camp. Since it's a training mission, I opted for plenty of comforts and extra water, my pack weighed in at right about 40 pounds. While only 6.5 miles (again MyTracks is incorrect), The route was quite steep and exposed for much of the way as you can see in the elevation profile on the left. We ate lunch in the little dip you see around 1,800 ft, alongside a shady brook in Williams Gulch. Then it was more climbing up to the final ridge.

Nearing the campsite, we saw a small cairn indicating a path the bottom of Murietta Falls. We dropped packs and wandered down to find that the falls was only a trickle at the time. There was a small pool at the bottom with several small snakes in it trying to stay cool. The basalt rocks on top of which it flowed were fairly unusual looking for the area, and since two of us are regular rock climbers, we decided to free climb the falls back to our packs instead of hiking back up the path. The climb had several large ledges so it was fairly safe, but the climbing was sketchy in places, we thought we might need to downclimb a couple times. We eventually made it up the falls with only minor injuries, and startling only a handful of snakes. A little extra adventure for our adventure.

Another half mile of mellow trails and we reached our campsite, only to find someone else already in it. We held the reservation for this site for that night. The other group we found in our campsite had a reservation for the next campsite over - another 4 more miles. After completing the 6 miles of strenuous climbing, they had found themselves unable to continue on, so they squatted in our site instead. Fortunately, we found another spot just a short distance further down the trail that had been used as a campsite before and while it was smaller it turned out to be an even better campsite. A rock outcropping above the site provided some great flat spots to cook food and enjoy a fantastic view of the bay area, overlooking Livermore, Oakland, the SF Bay, San Francisco, and even the Pacific. It was possibly the best view we saw on the trail, and we only found it because someone else had stolen our campsite. We hung out and watched the sun set, the lights of the cities come on, satellites and shooting stars flying by overhead, and airplane traffic starting the descent into SFO. Ryan played the role of cameraman for this venture, you can find more photos over at Ohlone Backpacking Photos.

Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Price Comparison Shopping

2010-05-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

I use a ReadyNAS NV attached to my home network. When I bought the device, I initially installed 3x 300GB drives into it and that has served me well providing 600GB of RAID protected storage.

I recently decided to upgrade the drives. Netgear has a ReadyNAS Compatibility Guide which lists specifically tested and recommended drives to use with each of the ReadyNAS products. I knew that I wanted 1TB drives, which seemed from limited research to be a fairly good spot in the market. That left me with 11 drives to choose from, which seemed like alot of work to research and price compare. I researched a few on Amazon and bought my first drive for around $145.

For the other 3, I decided to try a different approach mostly as an experiment. I created an account on Mechanical Turk and asked 3 workers to find me the lowest price they could on any of these drives. I charged the task out at $3/worker and since there was no clear success criteria, I promised in the task description to give a $10 bonus to whichever worker found the cheapest price. I mentioned that coupon codes, discounts, and rebates were all fair game, but not to worry about shipping/taxes to keep it simple. I only cared about price: performance didn't matter much since it was a NAS drive. Total cost = $3 x 3 + 0.30 x 3 (Amazon's fee) + $10 = $19.90.

Here are the results, about an hour later:

Seagate Barracuda LP ST31000520AS at buy.co.uk for £68.02. I didn't specify US, my mistake. Still approved the work.
Seagate Barracuda ST31000528AS at unistorage.com for $68.84. This worker actually listed lowest prices for every one of the drives. The $68.84 one was the cheapest before shipping/taxes. This worker got the bonus by a slim slim margin (see worker 3).
Seagate Barracuda LP ST31000520AS at Newegg for $69.99. This drive ended up cheapest after shipping/taxes.

Ultimately I went with worker #3's suggestion, despite awarding the bonus to worker #2. Either way, I saved about $75 per drive over what I had bought with my own poor research, so this paid off in spades. I might have been able to figure this out myself and save the $20 as well, but this approach was less work and more interesting.

I think if I did it again, I'd be a little bit more specific about what I want (US retailer), maybe add shipping/tax to the mix, possibly ask for the 2-3 cheapest drives they could find so I have some choices. I'd also probably drop the task price to say $0.25 but add that any worker that gets within 10% of the lowest price worker will also earn a $3-5 bonus. I suspect that the ability to earn $3 for a few quick pricegrabber searches might make sticking around and spending more time doing research less enticing. Still the results weren't that bad with my first try, enough to make me wonder what else I could use the turk workers for.

Google Encrypted Search

2010-05-23T20:39:00.000-07:00

It's often fun to read the response that the internet community has to Google's launches, especially ones that I'm somewhat familiar with. There is always a bit of tinfoil hat concerns about Google's intentions.

Late last week we launched to Beta an Encrypted Google Search option. Most discussions focus on the privacy aspect of this launch, but there are a number of discussions noting that this disables referrer (and hence query) passing for many destination websites: take the webmasterworld discussion for one example. The tin foil hat interpretation is that Google hidden agenda is to prevent webmasters from seeing their query data.

Fortunately, it's easy to see what is actually going on. When you surf using the HTTPS protocol, the goal is to encrypt(hide) your surfing traffic from your transmitting network, not from the destination sites. However, if you click from a HTTPS page to an HTTP page, passing the referrer would leak a small amount of data about your encrypted traffic to the network. As a result, all web browsers that I know of send an empty referrer string in this case. Interestingly, if you navigate between HTTPS pages, even on different domains, the referrer is passed. This is consistent with hiding the data from the network but not the destination site.

If a webmaster so desired, they could move their entire site onto HTTPS and then start getting the HTTPS referrers sent to their server again. If Google's intent was to prevent websites from seeing query strings, there are much easier ways to do so, such as using POST.

Gas Station Inefficiency

2010-05-22T21:18:00.000-07:00

Near where I live is a gas station that is almost always packed and overflowing into the road. It's not particularly small, but they have decent prices.

I've wondered why the station always looks so busy. I think I have the answer. In addition to having decent prices on gas, they also have a big sign that reads "9c/gallon off with cash". I've observed that the vast majority of the users wait in line until their car is in front of a pump, then walk into the store to get in another line to prepay in cash for their gas. Once they've prepaid, they return, pump, and sometimes go back in for change. If you add all this up, they spend about 5-10 minutes with their car in front of the pump for every 1 minute or so of actual pumping of gas.Pump utilization is abysmal, leading to low throughput, leading to long queues. Sounds like a dumb algorithm to me.

What I don't know is if this behavior increases their sales or decreases them. I know that Cristin and I sometimes avoid this station because of the congestion meaning lost sales. However, it's possible that the lines of overflowing cars out into the road draws attention and gives a false sense that this must be the cheapest around driving more sales still.

Google I/O Site Review

2010-05-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

If you are going to be at Google I/O next week, I'll be on stage for the SEO Site Advice from the Experts Session with Matt Cutts and Tiffany Lane. It'll be a fast-paced Site Review, lots of fun. Check us out, Thursday the 20th, 2:15 PM, Room 8. Matt has put out the call for sites to review, ideally get in on the list early.

Henry Coe, Kelly Lake, Backpacking

2010-05-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I went backpacking in Henry Coe with JeremyShapiro, Matt Cutts, and David Signoff.

We hiked in on a perfect day from the Hunting Hollow entrance on a gorgeous day, a grueling climb up Middle Steer Ridge Trail, a short stroll along Steer Ridge Road to lunch at Wilson Peak where we saw a deer also relaxing and having lunch. We backtracked slightly and quickly descended half the elevation we just gained down Serpentine Trail. Back up on Tule Pond Trail, following the ridge on Wasno Road, then Wagon Road, and then a very steep descent down Kelly Lake Trail to Kelly Lake. Total distance: roughly 10 miles

There were 4 parties including ourselves overnighting at Kelly Lake. Beautiful spot, but lacking for ideal campsites and we weren't the first to arrive. I think I still prefer having Redfern pond to myself 2 years ago to sharing Kelly Lake with others. Serenaded by birds and then frogs, our crew played cards and then got a good nights' sleep.

The next morning, rain clouds started appearing so we packed up camp quickly and headed out. Our plan was to stick to trails back to Hunting Hollow, but we hit some moderate rain on the return hike and so took a shortcut. Back up Kelly Lake Trail on the other side, ridge walking on Wasno Road until descending on Dexter Trail which is when the rain hit, and then a moderate descent along Grizzly Gulch Trail until we reached the Coyote Creek park entrance. From there, only a 2 mile flat walk back to Hunting Hollow Entrance where my car was getting a nice shower. Total distance: roughly 7 miles.

I found a similar hike done by another crew, with GPS map and altitude here: Hunting Hollow to Kelly Lake round trip with GPS. That trip was 20 miles with 6800ft of elevation gain/loss.

Domain'ing is Annoying

2010-04-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

The way in which domain names are allocated seems broken to me. Speculators register domain names for a very small amount of money ($6/yr for .com's, sometimes pennies for some ccTLDs) and then refuse to give up the rights for anything less than $10,000. The domains are worth more than the registration cost to someone who would actually use them, but less than the squatter price. As a result, excellent domain names go unused (parked) while good content creators with low budgets end up with stupid domain names that nobody wants but which are affordable.

A strawman proposal for fixing this:
Instead of a flat $/yr charge for domain names, charge based on demand. If a user comes along to the registrar and wants to buy an already used domain name, they can file a bid with the registrar. The registrar records and authorizes the charge for the bid, perhaps even taking the money into escrow. At the same time, the current owner is contacted. The current owner can now choose:

Accept the offer, sell the domain name.
Accept an immediate increase in the annual registration fee for that domain name of 5% of the offer price.

So for example, I might bid $1,000 for greg.com. The owner of greg.com doesn't have to accept my bid, but if they don't, the registration cost rises to $50/yr. This should make them less inclined to squat. More valuable domain names will end up with a higher registration cost and worthless domain names will end up with a potentially lower registration cost.

The 5% is just a random number. Tweaks might include a some cap at $500, or having the percentage decrease as the offer increases so that the registration fee for google.com or whatever isn't astronomical. Perhaps reduce the percentage the longer the current owner has owned the domain as changes in identity are undesirable. It also seems like you might want to have registration fee hike exceptions in some cases, such as trademarks. Lots of options available.

Where should the extra registration money go? The registrars don't deserve most of this. I'd probably put it towards public projects to build better planet-wide network infrastructure (fiber in the ground) or something.

Twitter Queries and the Telephone game

2010-04-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

Last week, during the Twitter Chirp conference, Evan Williams apparently (I wasn't there) said that twitter gets about 600 million queries per day. Danny Sullivan claims to have caught Evan after the talk and Evan confirmed that the number was around 19 billion queries per month.

Danny then takes this number and made a blog post about this on Search Engine Land: Twitter Does 19 Billion Searches per month, beating Yahoo and Bing (sort of). In this post, Danny compares the 19 billion number to comscore numbers on google/yahoo/bing worldwide queries. He follows up by pointing out the "(sort of)" part, the caveats as I read them:

The comscore numbers are third-party, twitter is self-reported. Apples and oranges.
The number doesn't count partners like Google and Bing.
The "vast majority" of the searches are API requests, via applications running standing queries.
Many queries are generated by widgets placed on web pages that automatically return search results to display.

Danny even adds that Evan mentioned that twitter search itself only contributed to the overall queries in "the low double-digits". I'm not sure if that means 10s of millions per day or something else

Danny's article seems completely accurate to me, although certainly suggestive of a comparison that isn't entirely accurate. However, few people seem to read closely to the caveats. People have started reporting Danny's numbers verbatim without mentioning any of the caveats. For example:

Twitter Chirp: Twitter Search is Bigger than Yahoo and Bing Combined

Daily searches on Twitter Should Reach One Billion Queries in May

People have started quoting the articles that are quoting Danny, the notion that twitter is a bigger search engine than bing/yahoo seems to be gaining popularity. I believe that I even heard someone at SMX yesterday claim the 600M/19B numbers were search.twitter.com queries, and that the actual API queries far exceeded this.

My theory though is that the 600M/19B numbers refer to a backend query count, not actual user search queries. The comscore numbers are referring to actual queries done by users in a search box. If a running Tweetdeck instance is monitoring a query every 5 seconds or so, that one instance could rack up around 20,000 queries/day for each query it is monitoring. Similarly, widgets placed on web pages will generate at least one query per page view on those web pages. That's similar to saying google has bajillions of queries because analytics is installed on lots of webpages. Its even possible that me looking at my twitter stream or @gregable stream is a counted query. Furthermore, if I conduct a query on search.twitter.com and leave the page up, it refreshes every once in awhile - presumably each time it polls for new data, that's also considered a query - so 1 user query on search.twitter.com could be hundreds of queries the way Evan is counting.

Note, I don't claim Evan lied. I don't even claim he did anything deceptive in the way he counted queries. Danny put the twitter queries in context with comscore numbers, not Evan. And Danny was clear to point out the caveats, no blame there either.

I would take a wild guess that apples to apples, if you looked at actual twitter search "queries" in the sense that a user considers a query, it's "low double-digit" counts - say 20 million/day, and that those are actually roughly 10x smaller due to repeated polling - say 2 million / day. That puts Danny's comparison more like:

Google: 88 billion per month

Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month

Bing: 4.1 billion per month

Twitter: 0.06 billion per month

Still a huge number for twitter, but a bit more accurate of a comparison. Am I right? Evan? Danny?

Update: 06/08/2010: Techcrunch quoted Twitter's COO Dick Costolo as saying that twitter has 190 million visitors per month. This casts additional cold water on the notion that twitter actually gets 19B user queries every month. It would be strange indeed if the average visitor actually made 100 queries/month on twitter.

Preloading Hard Drives with Movies - Sneakernet

2010-04-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

The financial times has an article yesterday about Seagate preloading USB hard drives with movies. Apparently the drives will come with around 20 popular movies already present, but reading between the lines they are encrypted. If you want to watch them, you can do so by buying the decryption key online. I'm sure there is more DRM to it so that you can't easily share the movies, but the basic idea is kinda neat. Essentially, you are bypassing the biggest issue of digital delivery of movies (bandwidth and the latency of waiting for the download) by having the access to the movie controlled by a download of only a few kb encryption key.

I think this approach has potential beyond what Seagate is doing. Imagine if your Netflix subscription, instead of shipping you DVDs one at a time, just shipped you a hard drive with your entire movie queue on it in encrypted form. When you are ready to view the next movie in the queue, you just log into your netflix account and download the encryption key in a few seconds. Instead of having X DVD's out at a time, you could have X encryption keys per month or something. The advantage is that there's much less shipping involved and you can rearrange your queue however you want and start watching any of the movies immediately with no wait for the mail or slow internet download. Even a HD movie is probably only around 10GB, so a cheap 500GB hard drive should be able to hold around 50 movies, and moore's law will only improve on this.

Going a step further, using the MPAA's own statistics, there are roughly 600 big movies released to theaters a year, not all that many. At 10GB per movie, that's only 6TB of space required, or 500GB per month. Lets say all of these movies were "finished" at least 1 month before release. You could buy a 500GB drive for way less than the cost of a month of a cable subscription and by sending this back and forth to netflix, you'd have continuous on-demand access to any of the blockbusters the day that they are released and for roughly a month to follow. The producers could simply not sell the decryption keys until the chosen release date.

This is just the latency/bandwidth tradeoff of using the sneakernet.

Rock Climbing at Red Rock

2010-04-08T23:50:00.000-07:00

Cristin and I just returned from an action-packed rock climbing trip/tweetup at Red Rock outside Las Vegas. We spent 2 days climbing rocks, leaving our hotel around 8am and heading back around 5pm each day. The original plan was to climb for 4 days, but after day 2 we were a bit worn out and took a day off, and on day 4, rain clouds rolled in at about the same time we did so we had to bail and take advantage of the local indoor climbing gym instead where we found several other disappointed red rock climbers-to-be.

There were about a dozen total climbers in our crew, I met about half of them for the first time on the trip. Hello to @eleddy, @sudarkoff, @adrienneknits, @rockgrrl, @voden, @katiebeth, @tiffanymroyal, @joshuamontague, @chadcat, @JeremyShapiro, and @pwcarey, who took the above photo of me above on the 2nd day.

The trip was fantastic. I'd driven through red rock once before, but this was a different way to experience the park. There were unmarked trails in guidebooks which once followed led to hidden cracks chock full of other climbers, it felt like "the secret world" of Red Rock. This was only our third trip climbing outside of the gym, so it was even more of an experience for us.

On Day 1, we started out the morning climbing several routes at the Magic Bus area, which is actually one of the less red of the red rocks. A pretty vertical flat face, a great way to warm up. We heard some thunder in the distance, ate some lunch and as the area started to get crowded we headed on to Black Corridor for the afternoon. Black Corridor is a area with two vertical walls facing each other, like if you cut a loaf of bread in half and pulled the halves apart just a little bit. There were a ton of people already here, but there were also a ton of different routes available. It was a perfect afternoon spot as the two walls gave you plenty of shade when you weren't on the rock. I tried a fun route that was giving everyone trouble, a 5.10 (in theory) with a specific move about halfway up that none of us could get past. It required pulling up on a ledge not deep enough to get a whole finger joint onto.

On Day 2, we hit up Panty Wall in the morning whose base was a wide flat ledge above another vertical cliff, so it was a bit nerve wracking for several of us, myself included, when looking down at the drop below. But the view of the canyon was georgeous and the routes on the wall were lots of fun. For the afternoon, the group decided to head over to Calico Basin, on the flip side of Red Rock's best formation, but technically outside the park. We climbed around on Cannibal Crag, a massive boulder with routes on both sides. Jeremy showed me how to do a pitched route (although only 1 pitch) as well as how to lead belay, as we climbed the route "you are what you eat" with the big crack you can see in the picture to the left.

There were a few people with camera's going all the time, namely Cristin and Peter. Lots of photos available for anyone interested. I'm the guy usually in the blue jacket and orange helmet.

After we departed Red Rock, Cristin and I took a side trip to Death Valley for 2 nights. We did a couple fun hikes, including one through a canyon with extremely smooth marbled walls that get cut by waterfalls in the rainy months, making for some fun little rock slides. Another hike took us to the base of a small ice melt waterfall at a higher elevation, something I never expected to find in Death Valley. It was literally a desert oasis. Wherever the water flowed there was tons of life, but only a few feet away it was dry desert terrain. There are more photos of death valley here: http://picasaweb.google.com/jennifer.mccain/DeathValleyApril2010

Bay Area Weekending

2010-03-20T01:07:00.000-07:00

I've recently found myself telling a few people about how I found out about interesting thing X or Y to do in the CA bay area. It occurred to me that this might be a good topic for a blog post. If you always are looking for things to do, perhaps this might give you a few ideas.

Weekend Sherpa: Every thursday, the weekend sherpa publishes a newsletter of recommendations of outdoor trips to do in Northern California. I find the site is amazingly well curated, much more so than even similar magazines I've perused on grocery store shelves. For example, this post "Land of the Giants" recently inspired me to take off to Sequoia for the weekend and try my hand at snowshoeing.

Bay Area Hiker: The best single source of information I've found about great hikes in the bay area, primarily day hikes. There are tons of other great websites to look at too, this one just has alot of hikes in one place. Each hike has detailed description including photos, recommendations for time of year, and directions.

Point Reyes: This is the furthest west chunk of coastline in the area, making it a habitat for a variety of sea wildlife that you don't see as much elsewhere. Sea birds coming in to lay eggs, sea lions, etc. The peak whale watching season is just beginning now and this is the only place I know where you can see them without getting on a boat, useful if you get seasick like I do. It's also just an extremely pretty chunk of land. It's probably the largest park of this sort within driving distance with so many options for things to do. Tip: An excellent place to stop for grub along the drive is the Coast Cafe in Bolinas.

Planet Granite: Not cheap, but if you ever wanted to try rock climbing, this may be one of the best indoor climbing gyms in the country. I've been to about half a dozen different climbing gyms, so I can't personally compare, but I've heard from other folks that the Sunnyvale and SF gyms are really top notch. I wouldn't recommend the Belmont location though. This place rocks. I get a few free guest passes if anyone wants to give it a whirl.

I guess you can tell fairly easily what kinds of things I like to do on weekends. Any other good suggestions I should be trying?

Battery Voltage Regulation Prediction Software

2010-02-26T13:12:00.000-08:00

It's rare that I can talk about green energy and software issues in one post. Here's some software that someone needs to write.

Over at "This week in batteries", Venkat Srinivasan explains the tradeoffs in modern battery charging. Essentially, the problem is that the higher voltage you charge a battery to, the bigger capacity it has in terms of discharging. However, higher voltages at the same time reduce the lifespan of the battery so that the next charge will have a little less capacity. Virtually all battery chargers choose a fixed voltage to charge up to and then stop charging, and this chosen voltage is a number that gives a good balance between capacity and lifespan, but doesn't really maximize either. From the article:

Operating to 4.1V makes things better and extends the life, 4.0 V is even better and so on. So why don’t battery manufacturers cut the voltage off at, say, 4 V to get better battery life? Because every time you cut this voltage down you decrease the capacity of the battery and its run time. The 4.2V cutoff is a compromise between good run time and decent (read “not pathetic”) life.

Venkat goes on to suggest that this means you should charge your devices up to the maximum limit and then unplug them, so that they slowly drop a little below the max, to extend lifetime. He also mentions that Lenovo laptops even let you set the charge (as a percentage, not a voltage) if you want to play with these settings yourself.

This is a problem not just for laptops, but also for cell phones, plug-in cars, or any device that uses a battery. I'm certainly not a battery expert, but it seems to me that there is a better solution out there.

Most devices using an expensive battery have some amount of processing power and some amount of long-term memory (flash drive, hard drive, etc). Laptop, Cell Phone, and Vehicles certainly fall in to this category. If the device was able to predict roughly how long it would be used before the next recharge, then it would be able to charge to the lowest voltage required to stay alive until the next recharge.

Humans are creatures of habit, we often keep roughly the same schedule from day to day or week to week. If the device kept a history of these habits, it should be able to predict usage. For example, storing data like:

Plug in timestamp
Unplug timestamp
Running out of juice timestamp
Day of week, time of day
which user is logged in, or how much they weigh on the driver seat sensor
ip address the device is allocated to (or nearby wireless APs)
GPS location
applications that were run

Using a little bit of simple machine learning, the software could predict how much capacity is needed for the next unplug and chage accordingly. Thus if the laptop is always plugged in at a desk except on the weekend, a low voltage charge could be maintained and then ramped up all the way saturday morning. Or if the car is used for short trips to/from work, but on Friday night is driven to the next city for happy hour with friends, you can keep the voltage high for happy hour and low for the commute. If the device sees a completely new scenario (suddenly turned on in Japan at 3am on a different network), then it might switch temporarily to a high voltage/capacity until enough data comes in to know what to expect in this new scenario.

This approach would maximize both battery life and capacity while keeping the user blissfully unaware.

My take on Buzz

2010-02-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

Imagine that to read this blog, you had to first sign into your Blogger account. And that to read a Wikipedia article, you first had to sign into your Wikipedia account. And, when you want to read your email from your AOL friends, you have to first sign into your AOL account, but to read your email from GMail friends required first signing into your GMail account. And imagine this was the case everywhere. You could even take this further and imagine that to read CNN, you first had to load the CNN browser.

To various degrees this is the current state of microblogging services (or whatever you call them). I can't read my friend's Facebook updates in google reader. I can't read the Boston Big Picture in Twitter. Even if my friends wire up their accounts so that their tweets end up in Facebook, my Facebook replies don't appear in their Twitter stream. It's a big bucket of suckage.

As a user, I don't care about how the electricity gets to my house, but I really really care that all my appliances can use that electricity, not just the ones that PG&E made. So I care that someone else cares about the how and standardizes this. As a publisher, I want to be able to pick my publishing platforms - maybe more than just one (Flickr+Twitter+Blogger) - based on how well their features meet my style. I don't want to have to choose my platform based on where my readers might be. As a reader, I want to pick my reader application(s), like Google Reader, Bloglines, or Facebook, but only have to pick one or maybe two and to pick them based on features and usefulness to me, not based on where the people I'm interested in reading publish their content.

Switch gears. Google Buzz launched last week. We've been trialling it internally at Google for some time now, but I had pretty much tuned it out. It was just one more social network with mostly inconsequential status updates of which I was overwhelmed with already. Now though, I realize that I had duped myself. Buzz is not necessarily just another walled garden (although, there is still that risk).

Time out. I am an employee of Google. I don't work on Buzz, heck I have less to do with it at the time of writing this than most Google employees having largely ignored it for so long. The opinions in this post, as well as elsewhere in this blog, are my own and not those of my employer. Seriously. Nuff Said.

Buzz could be a move to a more open standard for microblogging. This ReadWriteWeb article on how Buzz's API supports Open Data Standards says it better than I. I spent some time in the last few days reading up on PubSubHubBub, Salmon, WebFinger, etc. I'm no expert, but it's exciting. Whether Buzz succeeds or not matters little to me, but if this kind of open social networking standard takes off, I think we're all going to be a little bit saner in managing our digital lives.

Swoopo and stable equilibriums

2010-02-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

If you've never heard of swoopo.com, it's an "auction" site that allows you to bid on items in 1c increments. Usually the items sell for much much less than they are worth. For example, this 1oz gold bar (worth around $1,400) sold for $216.98. The trick is that you can only bid exactly 1c more than the last bid and simply making a bid costs you $0.60. So, 21,698 bids were made on that gold bar by various people which cost them over $13,018 in total. The winner spent almost $700 in bids themselves. Most people who play this game are losing lots of money.

A similar (simpler) game is described as an auction for a $20 bill. The rule is that you pay your most recent bid, regardless of whether or not you win. You can argue that it always makes sense for you to bid. Initially, you are bidding $1 for a $20 bill, how awesome is that? However your opponent in the auction can now bid $2 for a $20 bill, which he will definitely do - why wouldn't he? At some point you have bid $19 for this bill, but your opponent recently just bid $18. If he doesn't bid $20, he loses $18 - if he does bid $20 and wins, he comes out even. So bidding $20 seems like the right choice. Unfortunately now you lose $19 bid lost if you don't bid and you lose only $1 if you do bid (bid = $21, but you win $20). So it makes sense for you to actually bid $21 for a $20 bill. This continues forever with the risk that both participants bid hundreds of dollars for this $20 bill.

I was having a lunch conversation with some folks the other day who argued that the best choice at any turn is to always bid, but that this is a paradox because you will lose your shirt playing this game. I think the paradox is easily resolved. The thing that causes the paradox is the assumption that the best decision is to always bid, which seems on the surface to be the right strategy but in fact is not. If you assume this is the right strategy, this game has no stable nash equilibrium, but I claim that the game does in fact have such an equilibrium strategy.

Imagine your opponent in this game (simplification - the game is a 2 player version of the $20 auction) is one instance of a set of players in the universe of possible players. As such a player, there is a distribution of points in the auction where that player will stop bidding. The number of players that will make it to $1 is high, say 99%, the number of players that make it past $20 is probably somewhat low, and the number of players that make it to $1 million is probably nearly zero. As a result, you can evaluate at each point in the game what is the expected number of additional bids that you will have to make to gain the $20 bill. If this is greater than 10 bids (an increase of $20 in your bidding), then you should not bid. If it is less, then you should bid. Depending on the distribution, you may choose not to even play the game or you may likely choose to play up to a few dollars or so because some reasonable fraction of other players give up early. If you played enough such games, you would expect to come out non-negative however on some individual games you would expect to lose money. My guess is that the real distribution for a $20 auction in the world of opponents would be such that not bidding at all makes sense, but if you make it a $1 million auction, then I would guess that due to finite budgets of your average opponent, it would make sense to bid up to some reasonable number and give up.

Interestingly, there are some distributions that would suggest you should never stop bidding. For example if the probability that your opponent continues to bid decreases by 50% every time, then at any point in the game, you would expect to have to bid only 2 more times, meaning you should always keep bidding. However, this is fine as long as your estimate of the distribution is correct because the odds of your opponent bidding 10 more times are tiny (1 in 1024). So you are essentially betting on a fair coin toss repeatedly with a 1:10 payoff.

I have no idea what the distributions are for swoopo auctions. If someone has the dataset, it would be interesting to analyze it and figure out the optimal strategy and see if it ever makes sense to bid (maybe it does in some cases).

rel=canonical part two

2009-12-15T20:09:00.000-08:00

Google today officially announced support for cross-domain rel=canonicals. This is a very important step. I talked about rel=canonical when we announced it 10 months ago. This tweak will be very useful in a variety of cases. A few interesting ones:

Any place where you want to move your site to a new domain but can't control server headers. This can be really useful to help avoid lock in on free hosts for example.
Companies that register several domain names as landing pages for offline advertising, a practice often used for tracking performance of the campaign, can now keep users on the original domain but keep spiders going to the right place so Google doesn't end up with 10 copies of the site.
Syndicating content - if your syndication partner agrees - you can now make sure that your "link juice" flows back to the original article in Google.

I think we'll see lots of creative uses of this tweak in the future as we've seen with the original rel=canonical. Let's just hope those creative talents are used for the power of good.

Favorite Google Doodle: A fun chrome extension

2009-12-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

Google announced extensions for Chrome Web Browser today, a much awaited feature for many. Go try out a few. If you are looking for recommendations, one quirky fun little extension that I would recommend is the Favorite Google Doodle Extension. It lets you select your favorite Google Doodle logo from Google's doodling history and set it as the logo for your Google search page whenever Google isn't running a special logo for that day:

Unfortunately, today isn't the best day since Google is actually running a special logo today celebrating the cartoonist E.C. Sagar, the man behind Popeye the Sailor. However, if you install and choose a logo today, you'll see it on the search results page, and likely tomorrow (depending on whether or not there is a special logo running then too). I've set might to be this fancy scientific logo for now. I found some other of my favorites too:

I will admit that I'm undeniably biased as a friend of mine actually wrote this extension. If you like it, don't forget to rate it too.

Simple Simhashing

2009-10-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

A friend and coworker of mine, Ryan Moulton, just wrote a very nifty knol called "Simple Simhashing". If you like software algorithms, it is most certainly worth a read. Simple simhashing is an algorithm that allows you to take any "thing" and come up with a simhash that should be the same for two "things" in probability relative to how similar those to "things" are. The really nifty part is that the algorithm is completely local and the properties are provable in an easy to understand way. This algorithm is actually used at Google in a few places, although I'll leave it to you to guess how.

Blacksmithing in the San Francisco Bay Area

2009-08-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

For the last 5 weeks, ending yesterday, Cristin and I have been making a once-a-week journey to Oakland to take a introductory blacksmithing class at the Crucible. The Crucible (thecrucible.org) is a non-profit in Oakland which serves as a avenue for the industrial arts in the community. They tend to focus on alot of arts related to fire, hence the name.

The class teaches you several basic blacksmithing techniques as you create 4 projects over 5 weeks. You create a hook, which is looks like an enormous fishing hook, but designed to hang on a wall. You create a knife, or a shiv out of rebar. You create a spoon - the two week project. Finally you create a 2-pronged fork. And most people create two of each - one piece heating up in the forge while the other piece is being worked on. Here is a photo of some of the steps in the various projects:

There are a few other photos up on picasaweb of Cristin and I here: Blacksmithing Photos, but the most important photo is the one that resolves the "pics or it didn't happen" issue:

Cristin and I had a blast, so a small plug for these classes. Turns out that in a few weeks, they are running a special weekend "sampler": . They have morning and afternoon single session classes on both Saturday, Sep 19 and Sunday, Sep 20. It isn't cheap, but it isn't horrible either, $85/class. If you take two on the same day, you get $15 off the set. Cristin and I going to head up there on Saturday, Sep 19 for the whole day and if anyone else is interested in going, let me know.

The classes offered as samplers include:

Blacksmithing: undamental skills needed to forge steel and understand blacksmithing tools. Each students will walk away with a small finished project.
Glass Fusing: glass/heat interaction, glass cutting, fusing (combining colors), slumping (shaping glass into or over molds to create flat and dimensional forms), as well as a brief description of firing and annealing procedures.
Glass Flameworking: fundamentals of flameworking, and will cover a small variety of techniques like color pulling and applying, frit application, and marble making.
MIG Welding: Metal inert gas (MIG) welding, also known as wire-feed welding, falls between arc welding and TIG in the welding spectrum. Quieter and cleaner (and some say easier) than arc welding, MIG welding is typically used in production fabrication such as furniture making, light construction, and auto restoration. In this workshop you’ll learn the basics of MIG welding and plasma cutting.
Ceramics: no description online, but I think this is sculpting.
Jewelry: sawing, filing, sanding, soldering, texturing, annealing, stamping, polishing, safety, and design. Each student will walk away with one finished piece.
Sand Casting: Working with resin-bonded sand, you’ll learn the foundry basics as you build your own molds. As part of a casting team, you’ll have the exhilarating experience of pouring molten aluminum.
Resin Casting: Learn the secrets of plastic casting using flexible molds, just like the ones that professionals use for product development. You'll learn to make molds of found objects and use them to create plastic reproductions. Each student will walk away with one piece.

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

2009-08-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

Earlier this morning I gave a talk at SES San Jose on Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues. For those who couldn't make it to the conference or just want a copy of the slides I'm embedding them here:

Keep an eye on the Google Webmaster Youtube Channel. I going to try to see if I can record the presentation and have it up there as well for anyone who missed it.

Update (09/17/2009):

The re-recorded video is now up:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/duplicate-content-and-multiple-site.html

As well as a interview with Mike McDonald of WebProNews:
http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/09/17/canonical-tag-vs-301-redirect/

Join me at SES 2009 San Jose next Wednesday

2009-08-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

Next Wednesday morning, August 12, I'll be speaking at SES San Jose on Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues. Learn what happens when you have the same content appear on multiple pages or even sites. Find out if you are at risk of getting "penalized" or "banned" for having similar pages (hint: not likely). Learn a bit more about the new rel canonical tag, tried and true 301 redirects, and other great ways of helping search engines figure out what your site is all about.

Or just find me wandering around after the session, say hi, and hit me with any of your other burning search engine questions. I'm not as famous as Matt Cutts, so I might have a bit more time for a detailed discussion about all things search engine.

See you in San Jose.

Mileage Tax

2009-07-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

Last year around this time, I wrote a blog post suggesting we crank up the gas tax to $10/gallon while using the entire proceeds to give tax rebates to low income families. The reaction was generally plenty negative, although at least one person told me in person that he thought it might have some merit. No worries.

It turns out that there is a new idea for taxing vehicles on the horizon, one that is only recently possible due to the proliferation of inexpensive GPS technology. A tax based directly on mileage driven. I've found that very few people in the US have heard about this possibility, and most reject it at first glance without deeper consideration.

There was an interesting article last weekend in Reuters about Traffic jams in Manhattan. In it, the author posited that the average car driven into Manhattan on a weekday causes 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. Those delays are felt by individual drivers in terms of a few seconds, but across all of the drivers combined, the delays are very high. The article goes a bit further to claim that the average car has 1.97 people in it and the average per-car value of that lost time is $48.89/hour, so the societal cost of that average car being driven into Manhattan is as high as $160.

In major cities, many road networks have similar properties to a lesser scale than Manhattan. Today I drove through San Francisco with no intent to stop in the
city, but traffic slowed me down to a much lower speed than I was happy with. The traffic alone added at least 30 minutes to my journey. Ick.

A mileage tax at it's simplest adds a device to your car which tracks how many miles you've driven via GPS and charges you a tax based on this. There are obvious reasons why this initial idea would have people roll their eyes. The first is usually that a gas-tax has much the same affect and is cheaper to administer. The second is that it seems to penalize folks who drive more fuel efficient vehicles (or at least not penalize gas-guzzlers).

The important part is that a mileage tax can be far more complex than this. Instead of a flat tax per mile driven, the tax can vary based on where you are driving, what time, and the type of vehicle you drive (ie: a discount applied to lower-emissions vehicles).

Also, a small premium can be charged for driving in San Francisco during rush hour. By charging say $1 to drive through San Francisco at lunch time, those willing to pay will have a shorter, faster trip because others are incented to use alternatives and get off the road. There would be no need for your unit to communicate where it was and when (violating your privacy), it would simply need to have rules for different areas and calculate the tax internally.

A variable rate mileage tax could also nicely solve the problem of toll roads. Toll roads in the US today are often built with the argument that state X shouldn't have to pay for the road that people in state Y are going to make use of for free. Simply collecting the tolls has a cost though. WSDOT did a study in 2007 (See Toll Roads Mean Billions in Extra Costs for Motorists) that indicated for every $100 in revenue raised by toll roads, there was an additional $22 overhead in collecting the tolls themselves. This also doesn't include the drivers' lost time.

A mileage tax isn't a theoretical idea that can't be easily implemented in practice either, it is already in use in some places. Last year Holland passed a law that will phase in a mileage tax over several years with variable rate pricing (See: Road Pricing). In 2006, Oregon recruited 299 drivers for a year-long trial of a mileage tax (See: Oregon's Successful Mileage Tax Experiment).

Obama has however said he is not interested. However, this may become a looming issue over time. As fuel efficiency increases and drivers react to higher gas prices, transportation budgets have been feeling serious shortfalls. It is politically difficult to pass or raise new taxes, which makes regularly updating the gas tax to match the transportation budgets sporadic at best. The time hasn't come, but perhaps it someday will.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

2009-07-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

I recall a high school physics class where my teacher had us watch a clip from Speed 2. The basic plot of this movie, if you've never seen it, is that a cruise liner is taken over by some madman who has rigged the controls such that the cruise liner is on an irreversible collision course, initially with an oil tanker. Later, the cruise liner is redirected and actually runs ashore at full speed into a coastal town. As the ship runs ashore, it's speed drops and you see cut scenes of the speedometer slowly decreasing as the ship plows through a pier, a road, and some buildings. All the while you get long clips of destruction below the ship and the passengers getting thrown around the deck violently.

In physics class however, we pulled out stopwatches. We had to time the boat from the moment it hit shore to the point it stopped moving. Every speedometer cut scene, we'd note both the time and the current speed of the boat. Then we plotted acceleration. The acceleration was obviously uneven. Worse yet, it was tiny. Cruise liners don't move all that fast to begin with, and this scene was horribly drawn out for cinematic effect. We determined that rather than the passengers getting flung across the deck of the ship, they should have instead been sitting on the deck sipping martinis with no worry over spilling a drop.

It was a fun exercise. At the time, it was also a great excuse to watch a movie in class. That physics teacher was Tom Rogers, one of the standout teachers in my personal education. He runs a website, Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, where he reviews movies from a solely physics standpoint - sound in space, exploding cars, exploding bullets. It's all there. Including a rant about the new Star Trek movie, which I personally did not enjoy much. He's been interviewed on NPR and has a book out all about movie physics. Definitely a fun way to waste a bit of time.