Aehso’s Output

[Update: See comments on this post and my followup post before signing up for this service!]

Yesterday I was on the phone to Vodafone “Customer Care” to inquire about their mobile data rate plans. The response I got when I told the rep that I wanted to send/receive email by using my mobile phone as a bluetooth modem was priceless: “That would be very expensive. You really don’t want to do that”.

It is nice when service reps tell you what you do or don’t want isn’t it?

Of course with the pricing plans Vodafone had it would indeed have been prohibitively expensive so he was trying to help. But yet Vodafone were offering USB 3G modems for a flat rate (5Gb cap) a month. So why couldn’t I just use my existing handset instead? Could he explain the price difference? I’ll let you guess the answer.

Clearly I wasn’t the only person to ask this question - or maybe I was and I have far more clout than I thought Later that morning Vodafone announced a flat-rate plan for data access from mobile handsets - 500Mb for EUR9.99 per month for post-pay customers, EUR0.99 per day for pre-pay customers. [Update: see comments below and my followup post - this plan does not allow use of isp.vodafone.ie gateway]. You couldn’t replace your home broadband connection with it but if you are a bit of a road warrior (e.g. N770/N800 users or if you have a laptop and occasionally leave your house at weekends/evenings) then it might be of interest. Don’t even think of using it abroad though - those foreign bits are so different they cost way more to move around.

I suppose you can only strangle the market for so long with exorbitant pricing before the regulators start sniffing around. Of course this plan makes the current O2/3/Meteor data plan offerings pale in comparison so I suspect within a few weeks they will announce either an identical price plan or a plan that effectively costs the same amount per Mb per month - <cough>oligopoly</cough>. Watch this space.

BTW, for OS X users out there here are modem scripts and settings a variety of handsets as a bluetooth modems with OS X. I’ve used the SonyEricsson scripts and they work beautifully. If only the service was as free…

Cuong Do, one of the original YouTube engineers, gave a great talk (50+ minutes but well worth it) at Google’s recent Seattle Conference on Scalability.  Some takeway thoughts:

• Pre Google, YouTube had 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software engineers, 2 feature developers, 2 network enginers and 1 DBA.  Yowza! talk about a productive team!
• Python is fast enough.  In their small team, development speed was as important as execution speed.  I’m confident the same applies for Ruby on Rails too (this was a primary consideration for our choosing RoR instead of Java for our new nooked platform).
• MySQL replication works, to the point when replication of writes starts to significantly impact reads from the replicas.  Once you hit that point start working at night to develop an alternative middle tier that relies on partitioning the data into multiple shards.  You work on the alternative middle tier at night because you’ll spend all day trying to keep the replicas up to speed with the master. Map incoming requests to the correct shard by doing a user id lookup on a dedicated table (in a heavily cached local database) to redirect requests to the correct shard.

Of course they now get to play with all of Google’s in-house toys (MapReduce, GFS etc) so doubt if he gives another presentation next year it’ll probably be a very different one.

Speaking of MapReduce, I see that Ruby has an implementation - Starfish.  Cool.

Ronan pointed me to an interesting Wired blog entry on Brad Fitzpatrick’s social graph problem. The social graph problem requires many of solutions that Dion’s Dream River needs so I was going to just comment that it will take a long time for any of this to happen (thankfully Brads essay openly calls this out).

Then I read that Brad might be joining Google. So I’ve changed my comment to “it might happen just a little bit sooner”.  This is just the type of problem that the folks at Google love to try solve…

It looks like Web2Ireland Week will now also be hosting the previously mentioned FOWA Dublin road trip alongside their Web2Ireland DemoBar event at Ely HQ (on Hanover Quay).

It’ll be a busy evening!

You know you’re getting old when the CD turns 25 (years old that is!).

Wow. I have fond memories of pestering my folks to buy a microwave sized CD player back in the mid 80s. All we used it for was listening to Brothers In Arms and classical CDs in all their digital glory. At least we could listen though - according to Wikipedia:

This was also the first album to sell one million copies in the CD format. Indeed, when the disc was released, it was said that more people owned a copy of the CD than owned CD players.

What were they doing? Maybe they were trying to jam it onto their turntables. Interestingly, this kind of reminds me of the current situation with iPods - I’d bet money that not all iPod owners have a computer.

Not too often an unconference like this arrives on my doorstep so I’m heading to MashupCamp Dublin in Trinity College on Sept 12-13th.

Coincidently, FOWA Dublin is happening on the evening of the 13th so I’ll pop into that too as I am off to FOWA London in October. They have an amazing lineup, as ever…

Update: Here’s the FOWA Dublin Event Page for all you Facebook users…

I need to clear out the attic as our spare room is being converted into a part-time home office. It’s an annual cycle, I throw out/donate stuff and move other stuff from the spare room into the attic. So Paul Graham’s Stuff really did resonate - in fact I know it’ll resonate with anyone living in a small unit (anything built in an Irish town or city in the past ten years). I like his point that people will take services over goods any day. Perhaps thats why the product based software business is dying a death.

I really don’t think I have much stuff! Maybe I have lots of small stuff, I dunno…

Heh, OASIS have formed six technical committees to “simplify SOA application development”. According to OASIS this makes sense because:

“They’re simplifying something very complex — and something that’s made up of very distinct components. They need BPEL experts to work on the BPEL part, Java experts to work on the Java part, etc.,” Geyer said in an e-mail. “Trying to put people with such different skill sets and interests into one committee — and get quorums for meetings and approvals on drafts — would slow things down. I think we’ll see results much faster with six groups working in parallel.”

Six committees, working on interrelated specifications in parallel and not a reference implementation or compatability test suite in sight. This is bordering on the sublime but apparently a lot of people want this the SCA beast to live. Why exactly is beyond me.

Speaking of implementations, does anybody know what the heck really happened in the Tuscany project that caused the Fabric3 fork? I mean, it must have been pretty bad to fork a project that was backed by both IBM and BEA.

(via Tim Bray’s ongoing)

If you are a MacBook Pro user on the road (sans mouse) you no longer need to reach for the ctrl key to right click. Just go to the Keyboard and Mouse preferences panel and check the box for Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click and voila!

Not as crazy as it sounds, but when you are designing something new, you sometimes can do worse than start by working backwards. Werner Vogels recently wrote how Amazon use this process to help their small teams produce services that customers (internal or external) want:

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the faq) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about is fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.

Given the recent bounce back in Amazon’s commercial performance and the quality of their Amazon Web Services suite, working backwards is clearly, err, working well for them.

Update: The AWS blog has announced the beta release of yet another monster web service, the Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS).