Life by Bits & Numbers

I’ve seen this video by Seth Godin, who is without any doubt a great thinker and visioner. This presentation by Seth, besides being very informational and interesting is quite extraordinary as well. I can not remember when I’ve seen a better presentation lately. Great usage of visuals and associations!

The presentation made me think about people that are successful and people who are not. And this is absolutely true – successful people ship. I’ve known this for all this time, but this simple 3 words “slogan” so to say never formulated in my head. Intuitively I always felt this but after this presentation it just formed.

Borrowing analogy from Math, shipping is a required condition but not satisfactory, meaning that just shipping you will not necessarily make successful, but if you DO NOT ship you will most definitely NOT be successful.

Again, very inspiring presentation that may be an eye opener for some. Enjoy!

Today many people that will open their gmail will be faced with the dialog about Google buzz. This is a new service from Google that in a sense makes your gmail inbox into twitter like account. But it is more than twitter like account. It includes conversations and embeddings from other sites like Picasa, Flickr, Youtube etc…

The interesting question marks that raised in my head are:

1. Is Google trying to compete with huge success of Twitter? (They are not trying to compete per se, they want the realtime information that’s available on Twitter and is not (yet???) available to Google.
2. Is this a step forward to Google Wave?

Maybe it’s actually both 1 and 2 and something else that we can not yet see in the big picture

Google Buzz is also available on Mobile:

And here’s the announcement of Google Buzz on the official Google blog

This is more of a personal notes for myself but I am sure others will find it useful.

Apache:

/usr/local/apache/logs/error_log

All exceptions caught by httpd, along with standard error output form CGI applications are logged here.  The first place you should look when httpd crashes, or you incur errors when accessing a website.

/usr/local/apache/logs/suexec_log

Contains auditing information reported by suexec each time a CGI applicaiton is executed.  If you receive an internal server error, with no relevant information being reported to the Apache error_log, check here for potential suexec policy violations.

Domain specific access logs are located here:

/usr/local/apache/domlogs/

PHP

To find out which php.ini is used for PHP configuration (to save you frustration of editing a non active php.ini) find it with the following simple command:
php -i | grep php.ini

where -i switch is used to give you PHP information (obviously). To see other useful switches run

php -h

to locate where php is use:

which php

(but you already knew this – right ?   )

*** Some of these tips are applicable not only to CentOS and cPanel configuration.

I wonder how many people have noticed the icon change for the new Firefox 3.5? It has been changed. The change is not very significant, but it was significant enough for me to take notice (with a significant delay though).

So here we go, old and new icons side by side:

The old and the new (respectively left to to right) side by side

The old and then the new one – larger versions

Find the differences

Microsoft can very well loose the portable space completely. It already practically lost the mobile phones war. Although this happened not due to being able to support ARM processors, but due to the fact that mobile phone can not be efficiently powered by an operating system designed to be used on a desktop.

There are rumors that Microsoft is hoping to make a big splash in the Netbooks space. Netbooks are ultra small and portable laptops which are mainly intended to be used for internet – browsing/email/messaging and possibly light office tasks on the go. Those hopes however might just fall apart very easy with proliferation of Netbooks powered by ARM processors. Same processors that power most of our mobile phones.

“Inventec, a Taiwanese company that makes laptops on behalf of several of the world’s best-known PC brand names, is developing up to four Snapdragon laptop models for customers, said Mark Hirsch, vice president for marketing at the company.” They will showcase one of the concept laptops at the Computex in Taipei. The reference laptop is  intended to demonstrate the possibilities of the platform uses a 1 GHz Snapdragon CPU. It has a 1,024 by 600 pixel resolution screen, a 64GB flash disk and integrated 3G wireless. And it only weighs about 800 grams – quite impressive for ~10″ laptop.

Those specs clearly show that you get quite a useful package which is extremely light and portable, plus you can usually go for more than 6 hours with a typical network usage. Not like current WiFi connectivity, integrated 3G wireless promises everywhere connectivity easily accessible at speeds comparable to those you will get on a weak WiFi link.

All of the above clearly makes the Netbooks attractive productivity devices on the go and for small tasks and my guess is that we will see a lot of those small laptops coming very soon and which is more important many of them will be powered by ARM processors. Since Microsoft does not currently support ARM processors, they will not be able to compete with other OSes in this space. There were rumors that Windows 7 will support ARM architectures, but it was not officially confirmed yet.

Many Netbooks are coming out powered by flavors of Ubuntu linux or recently reworked Android operating systems. Being targeted at embedded devices and open source – Android is an ideal choice for underpowered, small devices.

The final word of proliferation of Netbooks will probably remain after WiMAX. If the Netbooks can support WiMAX better and it gets sufficiently widespread, more and more people will choose Netbook over traditional laptop, especially when the Netbooks can be 2-3 times as cheap as laptops and people that do not need the processing power but rather need battery life and better connectivity will choose Netbook over a laptop in a heartbeat.

So, what is essentially ad aggregation network you might wonder. You certainly know ad network businesses. Even if you think you don’t, you encounter them everyday. One of the largest ad networks is the Google Adsense. Another example of huge ad network is DoubleClick, well, Google owns this one as well.

Publishers can sign up with an advertising network, place a snippet of code on their website, ad supported desktop application, or recently added mobile applications on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Once the appropriate code snippet has been placed, the ads will start to flow to your visitors/users. You don’t have to worry virtually about anything except how to drive more traffic to you website/application and optimize the ads to give you best revenue. And that in fact makes a lot of sense to the publishers, since worrying about those two is quite enough to begin with and should be the only concern of the developer and/or publisher. Using advertising network relieves you from worries about where to get advertisers, how to bill them, implement an advertising platform so that you can track what is going on with the ads  etc… etc…

Let’s take a glimpse into the history of online advertising. (All said, also applies to software advertising as well, but online advertising accounts for such a large portion of the “computerized” advertising, that I will just mention “online” advertising).

Since the appearance of online advertising, certain companies understood that being the mediators between the publishers and advertisers is very solid and profitable business model and many companies made big utilizing this business model and still continue to make great profit out of this business.

Those advertising platform companies did not appear right away. There was a considerable amount of time when advertisers and publishers will “manually” find one another and negotiate rates. The usual business incentive quite unsurprising applied here as well. If you were a small publisher, it was up to you to try and find advertisers to sustain you online business model. However if you were reasonably large publisher, advertisers will line up for available space on your website.

You can imagine what a pain it can be to find an advertiser if you are a small web publisher. You would have to spend considerable amount of time solving this problem, instead of worying about improving your publishing media. This deficit was identified when the problem become large enough to be noticeable and to be profitable. Companies started to aggregate advertisers and publishers and act as a mediator (or the middle man) usually in highly transparent manner for both advertisers and publishers.

When you concentrate on doing one thing, you would usually do it much better than if you would be concentrating on doing several things.  Since those mediator businesses were concerned just about one task, they could offer much reacher experience both to publishers and advertisers, suplying advanced management and statistics tools. Advertisers were getting tools to make their campaigns target more specific audience and publishers in turn could receive much better revenue for the traffic.

Now we getting to the present where online advertising seems to be outgrowing the current model and requiring additional layer of aggregation. That’s where the ad aggregation and mediation networks come into play. Those networks do what ad networks did in the past. They aggregate advertisers and publishers, but instead of direct aggregatio, those mediator networks aggregate another ad networks. Those are essentially meta ad networks.

It would be interesting to see how successful those meta networks will become with time. Right now it is too soon to tell.

1) If you understand it and can prove it, then send it to a journal of mathematics.
2) If you understand it, but can’t prove it, then send it to a physics journal.
3) If you can’t understand it, but can prove it, then send it to an economics journal.
4) If you can neither understand it nor prove it, then send it to a psychology journal.
5) If it attempts to make something important out of something trivial, then send it to a journal of education.
6) If it attempts to make something trivial out of some-thing important, send it to a journal of metaphysics.