Mike's ramblings

New cancer treatment is ingenious and simple

MW — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:42:46 +0000

The idea behind a new treatment of cancer is so simple one might ask why it hasn’t been thought of before. Doctors find out which immune cells in the patient kill the cancer cells and populate them in vitro. In the patient those are usually too few (at some stages of cancer only a few hundred) to be able to cure itself.

After reinjecting billions of those cells the patient magically cures himself. The smart idea behind it is, that only the body’s own systems can reach each and every cell. Cancer can spread throughout the body and build so called metastases which are almost impossible to remove by surgery. By injecting the body’s own cells the treatment is much more gentle than chemo therapy.

There are already several patients who have been cured by this method and have lived cancer-free for the last two years. Of course because the progeny of the cells is very laborious the treatment is also expensive.

Read

Firefox shoots itself in the foot with bad communication…

MW — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:07:07 +0000

Firefox wanted to get the world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours today with the release of Firefox 3.0. It would have been a quite good marketing ploy, but they kind of ruined it for some people because they didn’t communicate at what time they would publish Firefox 3.0. Europeans, Asians and everyone else east of the US just assumed that it would start on their July 17. On the SpreadFirefox forums there are lots of angry voices, even some that say they will download it this weekend instead of today.

Firefox will still get the Guinness World Record, because they’re the first to “try”. If you still want to download Firefox 3 today (like me :D) you can do so starting 10 AM PDT here.

YouTube experimenting with ‘interactive videos’

MW — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:29:09 +0000

I just stumbled upon this video on YouTube, which contains links, clickable objects, speech bubbles and text as an overlay. It is announced as the first interactive video. Now we know why YouTube rolled out their new player.

It seems that this points in the direction of new advertising opportunities. They probably want to enable sponsors to tag objects like a watch or a car and display advertising when people hover over it. For example if an actor is wearing an IWC watch, they could point to an online shop selling this watch when someone is hovering over it.

There are already several other companies working on this. E.g. Innovid (mentioned here) or Asterpix (mentioned here).

Big Oil is non-profit?!

MW — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:07:40 +0000

AutoblogGreen has found an awesome video from Stephen Colbert’s show ‘The Colbert Report’. At the same time it is really funny (I really like his show) and shows how misleading the ad campaigns of the oil companies are. They split up how the money you pay for gas (in this case one dollar) is spent on their side. Profit is nowhere to be seen…

I’m flabbergasted…

MW — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:34:36 +0000

Today I stumbled across this photo on Panoramio and somehow I was flabbergasted. Not because it is a pretty picture, which it is, but because one can clearly see on the Google Map, that the mark where the photo was supposed to be taken is accurate down to the meter.

When I saw that page I could envision a future in which we just sit at home and visit places by clicking on a Google Map and it shows us a complete tour with videos and photos of everything. Admittedly not the most interesting thing from a social standpoint, but it shows us how far technology has progressed.

Does this page mean anything to you or does it leave you untouched?

How much power is behind the net’s top sites?

MW — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:16:44 +0000

At the recent MySQL Conference & Expo there was a very interesting panel called “Scaling MySQL - Up or Out?” where people from some of the internet’s top sites gave quite a good insight into their setup of MySQL and sometimes also some nice tidbits about their storage and web server setup. Sheeri Cabral made a video that is really worth watching and that I’ve uploaded to Google Video. (The original can be found here.)

The raw numbers are below the fold and courtesy of Keith Murphy, Venu Anuganti and Ronald Bradford.

The sites’ and their Alexa rank (in parentheses):

(1317) Monty Taylor - MySQL
(905) Matt Ingenthron - Sun
(39) John Allspaw - Flickr
(13) Frank mash - Fotolog
(9) Domas Mituzas - Wikipedia
(6) Jeff Rothschild - Facebook
(2) Paul Tuckfield - YouTube

	How many servers	Number of DBAs	How many web servers	Number of caching servers	Version of MySQL	Language, platform	Operating System
MySQL	1 M, 3 S	1/10	2	2	5.1.23	Perl,php and bash	Linux fedora
Sun	2 clustered, 2 individual	1.5	160+	8	5.0.21	Lots of stuff (java mostly)	Open Solaris
Flickr	166	At present 0	244	14	5.0.51	Php and some Java	Linux
Fotolog	140 databases on 37 instances	10 instances a DBA	70	40 ( 2 on each, 80 total)	4.11 and 4.4	Php, 90% Java	Solaris 10
Wikipedia	20	None, but everybody is kind of a�? DBA	70+200	40 ( 2 on each, 80 total)	�?	Php, c++, python	Fedora / Ubuntu
Facebook	30000 (1800 db servers)	2	1200	805	5.0.44 with relay log corruption patch	Php, python, c++ and enlang	Fedora / RHEL
Youtube	I canâ�?��?�t say	3	I canâ�?��?�t say	I canâ�?��?�t say	5.0.24	python	SuSE 9

CHANGE: Yes we can

MW — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:24:07 +0000

I am quite excited these days, because of YouTube comments like this one:

ninunaia

Let’s face it, the US economy is in a tailspin. We had ZERO national debt when Bush took office, now we are in a recession and over 9 trillion in debt, all from this war sucking us dry. Terrorists must love that! It’s like we are crippling ourselves for them. McCain is more of the Bush economy & Hillary is pro-war. I’m a Republican but voting Democrat this year (Obama) because I love America. The US is in trouble. We need change.

It belongs to the “Yes We Can Song by will.i.am” on YouTube and shows very good what is happening all across America. Barack Obama manages to gather many supporters even among very atypical groups for a liberal presidential candidate like him. Reports of Republicans and white conservatives voting make this palpable on national TV or the Internet.

Only November 4 will show if there really will be some change happening or if the Democrats blew their chance of taking the office by offering a woman / a black guy under 50 to the voter. Is America ready?

Kombikraftwerk: field test for going 100% renewable

MW — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 13:31:26 +0000

Researchers from the German university of Kassel have linked together several wind, solar, biogas and hydro power plants to explore the possibility of satisfying Germany’s electricity needs only from renewable sources. The problem they are trying to solve is that wind and sun can not be controlled.

If the power from these plants would go into the grid without any precautionary measurements they could take out the whole system. There have to be mechanisms to react to too much or not enough power going into a grid. With the addition of storage through hydro plants and controllable biogas plants, these problems seem to be solved. The researchers say their study shows, that Germany could be powered by 100% of renewable energy.

Why Nanosolar can make a difference

MW — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:28:57 +0000

Nanosolar a company started by German founder Martin Roscheisen recently shipped its first CIGS solar panels. They have developed a technique to print their light active ink onto all kinds of materials. The thin-film panels produced this way come out at price of $1/watt for a total installation cost of around $2/watt. This makes the technique comparable to coal energy (which costs about $2.10/watt)!

In this price included is a nice margin for Nanosolar. They report that the costs to produce the panels are around 40 cents/watt. These numbers are amazing. What is even better is the fact that this company is already mass-producing these panels. If they continue to drive down the costs, we can soon cover all kinds of surfaces with these panels. These are truly exciting times in my opinion.

Defensio vs. Akismet for Wordpress spam deletion

MW — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:29:10 +0000

Today I’ve installed Defensio because the spam was getting a little bit too much to deal with by hand. I chose Defensio over Akismet mainly because I did not want to create a Wordpress.com account to get an API key.

To use Defensio you can register on their site to get a free API key. The installation is as easy as it could be. I did not run into any problems. I’ll see over time how good it is doing its job.

Does anyone have any numbers for comparison of the two competitors?