Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
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Being 100% rational…
…I just pre-ordered the new Radio Head album for £1.00. I don’t think the set-your-own-price scheme is going to work at scale.
Jeff Barr on S3/EC2/SQS
I attended a workshop/presentation by Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr yesterday at RUG-B, and thought I’d share some “insider” info about AWS that is not so easy to come by on the web.
- Amazon currently has 260k developer accounts in their network. More than I thought.
- Hierarchical filesystems is inherently hard to simulate on s3 as it’s a fully distributed system (no global locks, among other things). So we might not get satisfactory performance out of those abstraction layers anytime soon. Instead, Barr suggests, we should start thinking about new, web-savvy mass storage architectures. ElasticDrive and Nirvanix are intersting players to watch.
- Although Barr did not mention a specific release date, I think we should expect a european S3 datacenter very soon. That is good news since s3 performance in Europe is currently rather poor. Currently S3 runs on a couple of data centers (or rings, actually) in the U.S.
- We will have to take care of CDN integration ourselves for now, but there might also be support for that in S3 in the future.
- We can expect more flexible EC2 configurations in the future. Both smaller and larger VM:s will be possible.
- A “placement”-API will enable admins to place servers either very close to one another (same rack, for speed) or very far apart (for stability/security) in the future. Very cool.
- There’s a nifty Firefox extension for controlling EC2 instances built by the EC2 team.
Latest Spotify beta has permalinks
And they look fairly good, too. Here’s a link to a song of mine.
SoundCloud, Berlin, Etc
Ok, so it’s official.
I’m done with engineering studies at the Institute of Technology.
I’m done with the Trustmojo research project.
I’m moving to Berlin.
I’m starting a new company in music sharing.
Yes, I’m beginning a new life.
Google better than iTunes, AllOfMp3, P2P
So, I just had to find the mp3 of the absolutely beautiful ballad sung by Caetano Veloso in Almodovar’s motion picture “Talk To Her”. Here’s the heartbreaking scene I’m talking about.
Ok, so I go on to iTunes. Nope, not available, only a strange orchestral version. Then on to AllOfMp3. Ah they have it! But “credit cards are currently disabled”. Hmm, wonder why that is? Haha…
Then I remember a blog post about finding mp3:s with Google. So I type in:
intitle:"index.of" (mp3|mp4|avi) cucurrucucu.paloma
And voila, there it is in pristine quality for your listening pleasure (and here are the lyrics). Thanks Google.
Wable
Here’s a fun project by some friends of mine at KTH. It’s basically an autonomous little cube that you can put somewhere near a wifi network. The cube can be configured so that it listens to a profile that you configure on the web. The profile contains four web feeds of your choice (e.g. Jaiku (Presence), Plazes (Movement), Flickr (Output), Del.icio.us (Input)). The cube will automatically reflect your activity using a physical bar chart. Pretty cool! Even cooler is that—if I’m not remembering incorrectly—the total cost of the components in this device is less than EUR300. That includes servos, wifi, chipsets to read the data, plastics etc. Here’s a video that shows Wable in action.
I can has real fake watch?
Yes. I can has it. In fact I just boughted it. I went for the classic Stanislaus, designed by Linda Kostowski. They get nerd points for 1) the laser-cutting and 2) the engraved thinglink. Beautiful! And u can gets one too, I lols.
Plazes Rebooted!
New version is up! Looking good, more comments will follow shortly, now need sleep. Tomorrow I’m taking a long, relaxing trainride to Reboot. See you there!
Call for Papers: Chaos Communication Camp 2007
The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers, builders, and makers organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). The camp provides a relaxed atmosphere for free exchange of technical, social, and political ideas. Discuss, sunbathe, and enjoy camping with some of the most interesting people you might ever meet. And all that with internet, power, an abundance of weird self-made gadgets, and people willing to explain them to you, right next to your tent.
Sounds great. Hope to be there!