The Bitt » The Bitt on Technology

Can we live to 125?

alex — Sat, 30 May 2009 22:10:27 +0000

I just got back from a great presentation by Daniel Kraft, MD at a METal breakfast(Ken Rutkowski’s breakfast group) about regenerative medicine.

It’s amazing what’s going on with stem cells, especially adult stem cells (where you get them from yourself) and cancer stem cells( the cells that seem to drive cancer cells). They are making so much progress.

If what they’re doing progresses at the rate he describes we are going to see some amazing breakthroughs in health care and longevity.

Blogging From An iPod

alex — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:41:55 +0000

I just installed WordPress on my iPod touch. The app seems great. I just wish there was a way to cut and paste on the touch. It would make it much more usefull.

Must have toy!

alex — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:27:25 +0000

Amazon S3 Service Level Argreement

alex — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 15:14:15 +0000

Amazon Web Service S3(Simple Storage Service) which allows you to store data on what they call the internet cloud now has a Service Level Argreement. The SLA was announced on the AWS blog.

…we commit to 99.9% uptime, measured on a monthly basis. If an S3 call fails (by returning a ServiceUnavailable or InternalError result) this counts against the uptime. If the resulting uptime is less than 99%, you can apply for a service credit of 25% of your total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99% but less than 99.9%, you can apply for a service credit of 10% of your S3 charges.
It's not 5 nines (99.999%) and it's not a lot of compensation if you lose important data, but at least it will provide AWS with the right incentives to keep the service up and running.

Good for Amazon. I hope they extend it to the Elastic Computing Cloud(EC2 is their virtual server service) as well.

Via TechMeme

Technorati Tags: AWS, S3, SLA, AmazonS3

Tiltviewer is very cool

alex — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 02:55:28 +0000

TiltViewer allows you to browse Flickr’s most interesting images in a 3D space.

Technorati Tags: tiltviewer, flickr

Amazon Fresh May Succeed Where Webvan Did Not

alex — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:19:39 +0000

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has a post about Amazon Fresh, which is Amazon’s entry into delivering fresh groceries to the home. It’s clear from the comments in the post and the comments from readers that people are skeptical.

Check out Amazon Fresh – a new invite only service from Amazon that looks eerily similar to the quintessential 90’s Internet flameout, Webvan.

Remember Webvan? So Does Amazon

It seems to be easy to bash the failures of that time period and to lump them all together as one great big set of bad ideas. And in my opinion, this would be the wrong call on home delivery of groceries. Webvan was a bloated over funded enterprise with ambitions to build a huge, huge company. It never made money and probably never would have given it’s cost structure.

However, Homegrocer, in which Amazon was a large investor, took a much more cost effective approach. Some one once told me that when WebVan bought HomeGrocer, some people had a meeting to discuss some aspect of the merger integration. One guy from HomeGrocer showed up and five people from Webvan showed up. The Webvan people introduced themselves and asked the HomeGrocer person what he did. His response was that he did what they did. One guy doing the work of 5, or maybe it was a situation of five people doing the work of one.

In any case, HomeGrocer was reported to be breakeven in a number of markets and if Amazon knows what its doing it has a chance to make this big idea work once and for all.

Why is your website slow? YSLOW has the answer

alex — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:48:48 +0000

I just picked up YSlow from Yahoo. It’s a Firefox plugin extension the Firebug addon for Firefox.

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. YSlow gives you:

* Performance report card
* HTTP/HTML summary
* List of components in the page
* Tools including JSLint

If you do any site development this is well worth getting. I found how my sites were performing and what was slowing them down. I have not had time to implement changes yet, but look forward to seeing how much I can speed up my site reponse time.

Twitter – the most recent way to waste time

alex — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:18:08 +0000

John Dvorak tries to find something redeeming about Twitter.

C’mon John, wasting time has a long past time. Twitter is just the most recent way to spend time doing useless stuff.

I hope it goes away, I’m already tired of people talking about Twitter.

Sites to check out

alex — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 19:24:11 +0000

Stickam.com – uStream competitor where you can broadcast your own show

techdirt.com – heard about it on Twim

Drobo.com – automated data storage

sitevista.com/cssvista/ – edit css for firefox and ie at the same time

Wow, this is stunning

alex — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:45:58 +0000