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My Holiday Project: A Twitter Search Engine Built on Windows Azure
I spent the last few days hacking on a side project that I thought some of my readers might find interesting; you can find it at http://hottieornottie.cloudapp.net
I had several goals when embarking on this project
- As my day job is working on activity feeds in Windows Live, I wanted to prototype various search experiences around searching a feed of our friends' activities.
- I wanted to build an application hosted on Windows Azure to learn more about the platform.
- I wanted to learn more about the Twitter's various APIs.
After a few days of hacking I'm glad to say I've achieved every goal I wanted to get out of this experiment. I'd like to thank Matt Cutts for the initial idea on how to implement this and Kevin Mark's for saving me from having to write a Twitter crawler by reminding me of Google's Social Graph API.
What it does and how it works
The search experiment provides four kinds of searches
-
The search functionality with no options checked is exactly the same as search.twitter.com
- Example query: search for "stackoverflow" on Twitter
-
Checking "Search Near Me" finds all tweets posted by people who are within 30 miles of your geographical location (requires JavaScript). Your geographical location is determined from your IP address while the geographical location of the tweets is determined from the location fields of the Twitter profiles of the authors. Nice way to find out what people in your area are thinking about local news.
- Example query: search for "stackoverflow" mentioned by Twitter users who live within 30 miles of Renton,WA
-
Checking 'Sort By Follower Count' is my attempt to jump on the authority based Twitter search bandwagon. I don't think it's very useful but it was easy to code. Follower counts are obtained via the Google Social Graph API.
-
Checking 'Limit to People I Follow' requires you to also specify your user name and then all search results are filtered to only return results from people you follow (requires JavaScript). This feature only works for a small subset of Twitter users that have been encountered by a crawler I wrote. The application is crawling Twitter friend lists as you read this and anyone I follow should already have their friend list crawled. If it doesn't work for you, check back in a few days. It's been slow going since Twitter puts a 100 request per hour cap on crawlers.
Developing on Windows Azure: Likes
After building a small scale application with Windows Azure, there are definitely a number of things I like about the experience. The number one thing I loved was the integrated deployment story with Visual Studio. I can build a regular ASP.NET application on my local machine that either used cloud or local storage resources and all it takes is a few mouse clicks to go from my code running on my machine to my code running on computers in Microsoft's data center either in a staging environment or in production. The fact that the data access APIs are all RESTful makes it super easy to go from pointing the app running on your machine to cloud storage or local storage on your machine simply by changing some base URIs in a configuration file.
Another aspect of Windows Azure that I thought was great is how easy it is to create background processing tasks. It was very straightforward to create a Web crawler that crawled Twitter to build a copy of its social graph by simply adding a "Worker Role" to my project. I've criticized Google App Engine in the past for not supporting the ability to create background tasks so it is nice to see this feature in Microsoft's platform as a service offering.
Developing on Windows Azure: Dislikes
The majority of my negative experiences were related to teething problems I'd associate with this being a technology preview that still needs polishing. I hit a rather frustrating bug where half the time I tried to run my application it would end up hanging and I'd have to try again after several minutes. There were also issues with the Visual Studio integration where removing or renaming parts of the project from the Visual Studio UI didn't modify all of the related configuration files so the app was in a broken state until I mended it by hand. Documentation was another place where there is still a lot of work to do. My favorite head scratching moment is that there is a x-ms-Metadata-ApproximateMessagesCount HTTP header which returns the approximate number of messages in the a queue. It is unclear whether "approximate" here refers to the fact that messages in the queue have an "invisibility period" between when they are popped from the queue but before they are deleted where they can't be accessed or whether it refers to some other heuristic that determines the size of the queue. Then there's the fact that the documentation says you need to have a partition key and row key for each entry you place in a table but doesn't really explain why or how you are supposed to pick these keys. In fact, the documentation currently makes it seem like the notion of partition keys is an example of unnecessarily surfacing implementation details of Windows Azure to developers in a way that leads to confusion and cargo cult programming.
One missing piece is the lack of good tools for debugging your application once it is running in the cloud. When it is running on your local machine there is a nice viewer to keep an eye on the log output from your application but once it is in the cloud, your only option is to have the logs dropped to some directory in the cloud and then run one of the code samples to access those logs from your local machine. Since this is a technology preview, it is expected that the tooling shouldn't be all there but it is a cumbersome process as it exists today. Besides accessing your debug output there is also seeing what data your application is actually creating, retrieving and otherwise manipulating in storage. You can use SQL Server Management Studio to look at your data in Table Storage on your local machine but there isn't a similar experience in the cloud. Neither blob nor queue storage have any off-the-shelf tools for inspecting their contents locally or in the cloud so developers have to write custom code by hand. Perhaps this is somewhere the developer community can step up with some Open Source tools (e.g. David Aiken's Windows Azure Online Log Reader) or perhaps some commercial vendors will do step in as they have in the case of Amazon's Web Services (e.g. RightScale)?
Outside of the polish issues and bugs, there was only one aspect of Windows Azure development I disliked; the structured data/relational schema development process. Windows Azure has a Table Storage API which provides a RESTful interface to a row-based data store similar in concept to Google's BigTable. Trying to program locally against this API is rather convoluted and requires writing your classes first then running some object<->relational translation tools on your assemblies. This is probably a consequence of not being a big believer the use of ORM tools so having to first write objects before I can access my DB seems backwards to me. This gripe may just be a matter of preference since a lot of folks who use Rails, Django and various other ORM technologies seem fine with having primarily an object facade over their databases.
Update: Early on in my testing I got a The requested operation is not implemented
on the specified resource error when trying out a batch query and incorrectly
concluded that the Table Storage API did not support complex OR queries. It turns
out that the problem was that I was doing a $filter
query using the tolower function. Once I took out the tolower() it
was straightforward to construct queries with a bunch of OR clauses so I could request
for multiple row keys at once.
I'll file this under "documentation issues" since there is a list of unsupported LINQ query operators and unsupported LINQ comparison operators but not a list of unsupported query expression functions in the Table Storage API documentation. Sorry about any confusion and thanks to Jamie Thomson for asking about this so I could clarify.
Besides the ORM issue, I felt that I was missing some storage capabilities when trying to build my application. One of the features I started building before going with the Google Social Graph API was a quick way to provide the follower counts for a batch of users. For example, I'd get 100 search results from the Twitter API and would then need to look up the follower counts of each user that showed up in the results for use in sorting. However there was no straightforward way to implement this lookup service in Windows Azure. Traditionally, I'd have used one of the following options
- Create a table of {user_id, follower_count} in a SQL database and then use batches of ugly select statements like SELECT FROM follower_tbl WHERE id=xxxx OR id=yyyy OR id=zzzz OR ….
- Create tuples of {user_id, follower_count} in an in-memory hash table like memcached and then do a bunch of fast hash table lookups to get the follower counts from each user >
Neither of these options is possible given the three data structures that Windows Azure gives you. It could be that these missing pieces are intended to be provided by SQL Data Services which I haven't taken a look at yet. If not, the lack of these pieces of functionality will be sticking point in the craw of developers making the switch from traditional Web development platforms.
Now
Playing: Geto
Boys - Gangsta
(Put Me Down)
Teamwork
A question I get asked frequently is how working in industry is different from working in academia. My answer from the beginning has been that the main difference is teamwork. While in academia there are collaborations among faculty and there are student teams working together, the work is still rather individual, as is the reward structure. In industry you cannot get anything done without teamwork. Products do not get build by individuals but by teams; definition, implementation, delivery and operation are all collaborative processes that have many people from many different disciplines working together.
As such the Information Week's Chief of the Year award cannot be my award. It is an award for all the Amazonians who in the past years have developed technologies and processes that are so innovative that they have defined a whole business landscape: first in ecommerce and now with Amazon Web Services they are defining Cloud Computing through the delivery of Infrastructure as a Service. Compared to the immense work that was needed to make all of this work, my involvement has been small.
A relentless focus on innovation by all Amazonians has made this possible: from new hardware development to the definition of new business models, from building ultra-reliable storage services to a massively scalable compute cloud, from pervasive monitoring and performance control to revolutionary efficient software architectures. At a scale and with reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness that is unparalleled in today's technology world. All these advances are based on 13 years of experience with building the world's most customer centric ecommerce operation, and as such the success of AWS is absolutely not the work of a single individual but the success of all Amazonians.
But this is only the beginning. We are intent on building the world's most customer-centric cloud computing operation and, as we have done with ecommerce, we will not accept the old norms of what must be done. We will always focus on what our customers need and work backwards from there. We will continue to innovate and roll out services and features that address the real needs of our customers.
It is still only Day One...
My Son on Halloween
It feels good to realize that I can tell him that he can grow up to be president with a straight face. Congratulations to Team Obama.
Now
Playing: Young
Jeezy - My
President (Feat. Nas)
Another Addition to the Family
At 4:58 AM this morning, Nathan Omotoyinbo Obasanjo became the newest addition to our family. He was a healthy 9 pounds 6 ounces and was born at the Eastside Birth Center in Bellevue. His journey into our home has been fraught with delays and some drama which I'll recount here for posterity.
- Tuesday – October 14th
- At around midnight his mother let me know that she'd been having contractions for the past few hours and was ready to call the midwives. We drove to the birthcenter and arrived sometime before 2 AM. We were met by the midwife on call (Loren Riccio) who was later joined by two interns (not sure if that's what they're called). We also called my mother-in-law and she joined us there about 30 minutes later. After a few hours and some time spent getting in and out of the tub (we planned to have a water birth) it became clear that my wife was either going through pre-labor or false labor and we were sent home at around 6AM. We got home and I slept for about three or four hours then had to rush into work because I was scheduled to give a talk on the platform we built to power a key feature in Windows Live's Wave 3 release at Microsoft. I got there on time, the presentation was well received and I got to chat with my management folks about some blog drama that blew up the previous night. When I scheduled the presentation, I'd assumed Nathan would already have been born since the midwives gave us a due date of October 7th. Thankfully, my wife's mom stayed with her at home so I didn't have to make the choice between leaving my wife by herself at home and giving the talk. Later that day we went in for our previously scheduled midwife appointment with Christine Thain. She suggested that we come in the next day if the labor didn't kick in that night.
- Wednesday - October 15th
- We actually went in to see Christine twice that day. We went in early in the morning and she gave us some herbs (Gossypium) that are supposed to encourage the onset of labor. So we had a delicious lunch at Qdoba and ran a bunch of errands before going back to see Christine later that evening. She checked Jenna's progress and it didn't look like the baby was ready to be born yet. At this point we started questioning whether we wanted to stay the course with a natural childbirth and wait possibly for another week before the baby was born or if we wanted to go to a hospital and have an induction of labor. To take our minds of the waiting game, we decided to watch Don't Mess with the Zohan as a lighthearted diversion to keep our spirits up. It didn't help much especially since the movie was awful. During the movie, Jenna started having contractions and after confirming that they seemed more productive than from Monday night we called the midwife and the mother-in-law then rushed to the birth center. Unfortunately, it turned out to be another false alarm. At this point we started feeling like the boy who cried wolf especially since we'd had the two interns get up out of bed twice during the past two days.
- Thursday - October 16th
- Around 5AM Jenna woke me up and told me that she'd been having contractions for the past hour. Since we'd already scheduled an early morning checkup with Christine for 8AM we didn't feel the need to call the birth center's emergency number. When we got to the birth center there was already someone else going through labor in the birth suite. So we had to have an office visit where we learned that these contractions weren't productive either. At this point we made the call that we'd go in to the hospital on Friday to have the baby induced and had Christine make an appointment. Later that day we were grocery shopping and we got a call from Christine. We decided to go in one more time to the birth center to see if we could get one last checkup before going to the hospital on Friday. When we got there the lady from the morning was still in labor almost eleven hours later. So we had another office visit and discussed the pros & cons of going to the hospital versus trying to wait out a natural birth. At the end of the talk we stuck with the decision to go to the hospital although that was dependent on there being available beds.
- Friday - October 17th
- At about 1:30 AM I'm awoken by my wife who's going through very painful contractions. After timing the contractions for a while we decide to go into the birth center. This time I don't call my mother-in-law until after we've arrived at the birth center and the progress of the labor was confirmed. I also send a text message to my mom telling her yet again that we're having the baby and this time it's for real. Nathan was born just over 2 hours after we arrived at the birth center. Later on we found out that the lady who'd been in the labor or the entirety of the previous day ended up being sent to the hospital and had her baby at around the same time Nathan was being born.
So far, our previous addition to the family has been getting along great with Nathan.
Now
Playing: Jadakiss - The
Champ Is Here
Is Bloglines On Life Support?
Bloglines stopped polling my feed over a week ago probably due to a temporary error in my feed. I've been trying to find a way to get them to re-enable my feed given that for the 1,670 subscribed to my feed on their service my blog hasn't been updated since October 3rd. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to contact the product team.
I sent a mail via the contact form but didn't get a response and their support forum is overrun with spam which leads me to believe it has been abandoned. Any ideas on how I can get Bloglines to start polling my feed again?
Now
Playing: Babyface - When
Can I See You
A Fool's Errand: Stabilizing House Prices
Yesterday there was a news article on MSNBC that claimed 1 in 6 now owe more on their mortgage then their property is worth. The article states
The relentless slide in home prices has left nearly one in six U.S. homeowners owing more on a mortgage than the home is worth, raising the possibility of a rise in defaults — the very misfortune that touched off the credit crisis last year. The result of homeowners being "underwater" is more pressure on an economy that is already in a downturn. No longer having equity in their homes makes people feel less rich and thus less inclined to shop at the mall.
And having more homeowners underwater is likely to mean more eventual foreclosures, because it is hard for borrowers in financial trouble to refinance or sell their homes and pay off their mortgage if their debt exceeds the home's value. A foreclosed home, in turn, tends to lower the value of other homes in its neighborhood.
…
Among people who bought within the past five years, it's worse: 29 percent are underwater on their mortgages, according to an estimate by real-estate Web site Zillow.com.
According to Zillow, our home is one of those that is currently "underwater" because it's estimated value has dropped $25,000 since we bought it according to their algorithms. Given that we bought our home last year I don't doubt that we are underwater and in fact I expect our home value to only go down further. This is because the disparity between median house values and median incomes is still fairly stark even with the current depreciation in the neighborhood.
Here's what I mean; according to Zillow the median household income in the area is about $46,000 while the median home price is around $345,000. This disparity is shocking when you apply some of the basic rules from the "old days" before we had the flood of easy credit which led up to the current crises. For argument's sake, let's assume that everyone that moves to the area actually pays the traditional 20% down payment even though the personal savings rate of the average American is in the negative. This means they need a mortgage of $276,000. Plugging that number into a simple mortgage calculator assuming a 30 year loan at 5.75% interest gives a monthly mortgage payment of over $1600.
Using the traditional debt-to-income ratio of 0.28 a person with $46,000 in gross income shouldn't get a mortgage that over $1100 because they are hard pressed to afford it. Using another metric, the authors of the Complete Idiot's Guide to Buying and Selling a Home argue that you shouldn't get a mortgage over 2 1/2 times your household income which still has us with around $150,000 being the appropriate size of a mortgage that someone that lives in my neighborhood can afford.
However you slice it even assuming a 20% down payment, the people in my neighborhood live in homes that they couldn't afford to get a legitimate mortgage on at today's prices. That is fundamentally broken.
Things get particularly clear when you look at the chart below and realize that house prices rose over $100,000 dollars in the past five years.
A lot of people have started talking about "stabilizing home prices" and "bailing out home owners" because of underwater mortgages. In truth, easy credit caused houses to become overpriced especially when you consider that house prices were rising at a much faster rate than wages. Despite the current drop, house prices are still unrealistic and will need to come down further. Trying to prevent that from happening is like trying to have our cake and eat it too. You just can't.
I expect that more banks will end up having to create programs like Bank of America's Nationwide Homeownership Retention for CountryWide Customers which will modify mortgage principals and interest rates downwards in a move that will end up costing them over $8.6 billion but will make it more likely that their customers can afford to pay their mortgages. I'm surprised that it took a class action lawsuit to get this to happen instead of common sense. Then again it is 8.6 BILLION dollars.
Now
Playing: 50
Cent - When
It Rains It Pours
It's Money in the Mattress Time
I logged in to my 401K account today and was greeted by the following message
Personal Rate of Return from 01/01/2008 to 10/06/2008 is -23.5%
Of course, it could have been worse, I could have had it all in the stock market.
I've been chatting with co-workers who've only posted single digit percentage loses (i.e. their 401K is down less than 10% this year) and been surprised that every single person in that position had hedged their bets by having a large chunk of their 401K as cash. I remember Joshua advising me to do this a couple of months ago when things started looking bad but I took it as paranoia, now I wish I had listened.
Of course, I'd still have the problem of having to trust the institution that was holding the cash like the guy from the MSNBC article excerpted below
Mani Behimehr, a home designer living in Tustin, Calif., isn't feeling reassured after what happened to WaMu and Wachovia. After he heard the news that WaMu had been seized and sold to JP Morgan, he rushed out to withdraw about $150,000 in savings and opened a new account at Wachovia only to learn about its sale to Citigroup two days later.
"I thought this is the strongest economy in the world; nothing like that happens in this country," said Behimehr, 46, who is originally from Iran.
At least I don't have to worry about living off of my 401(k) anytime soon.
Update: A commenter brought up that I should explain what a 401(k) account is for non-US readers. From wikipedia; in the United States of America, a 401(k) plan allows a worker to save for retirement while deferring income taxes on the saved money and earnings until withdrawal. The employee elects to have a portion of his or her wage paid directly, or "deferred," into his or her 401(k) account. In participant-directed plans (the most common option), the employee can select from a number of investment options, usually an assortment of mutual funds that emphasize stocks, bonds, money market investments, or some mix of the above.
Now
Playing: Abba - Money,
Money, Money
An Album for Each Year
What better way to pick up posting again than with following a meme. Nick Carr in Albums Going Steady describes the challenge to list "a favorite album for every year of your life." I actually do not have the problem described by Nick and others to really start with my birth year. The challenge has two restrictions: only one album per year and there can be no repeats of artists. I have added for myself the restriction that I should actually own the album, which restricts the set to choose from significantly and also makes for some peculiar choices.
Here is my list
1958: Jerry Lee Lewis, Great Balls of Fire
1959: Ray Charles, What I'd Say
1960: Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain
1961: Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers
1962: Booker T & MG, Green Onions
1963: James Brown, Live at the Apollo
1964: John Coltrane, Love Supreme
1965: Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisted
1966: Cream, Fresh Cream
1967: The Doors, The Doors
1968: Johnny Cash , At Folsom Prison
1969: Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed
1970: The Who, Live at Leads
1971: Marvin Gaye, What's going on
1972: Deep Purple, Made in Japan
1973: Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
1974: Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
1975: Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
1976: Eagles, Hotel California
1977: The Stranglers, Rattus Norvegicus
1978: Herman Brood and his Wild Romance, Shpritsz
1979: The Clash, London Calling
1980: AC/DC, Black in Black
1981: The Police, Ghost in the Machine
1982: Steel Pulse, True Democracy
1983: U2, Under a Blood Red Sky
1984: Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense
1985: John Cougar Mellencamp, Scarecrow
1986: Run DMC, Raising Hell
1987: Guns N' Roses, Appetite for Destruction
1988: Public Enemy, It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
1989: Eric Clapton, Journeyman
1990: Angelo Badalamenti, Twin Peaks Soundtrack
1991: Nirvana, Nervermind
1992: Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine
1993: Live, Throwing Copper
1994: Neil Young , Sleeps with Angels
1995: Garbage, Garbage
1996: James Cotton, Deep in the Blues
1997: Erykah Badu, Baduizm
1998: DMX, Flesh of my Flesh, Blood of my Blood
1999: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication
2000: Eminem, The Marshal Mathers LP
2001: The Strokes, Is This It
2002: Richard Locker, Jewish Cello Master Pieces
2003: Linkin Park, Meteora
2004: Green Day, American Idiot
2005: Fiona Apple , Extraordinary Machine
2006: Matisyahu, Youth
2007: Foo Fighters, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
The hardest part was leaving Albums out; Too many masterpieces in the 70's for example. But also some other era were difficult: I really wanted Linton Kwesi Johnson in there but every time he had formidable competition. Madness got beaten by AC/DC, Beastie Boys by Run DMC, Nirvana kept Metallica out, The Stranglers win it from Jonny Rotten every time,. Honorable mentions for Traffic, Apocalyptica, Counting Crows and Nine Inch Nails; they almost made it.
Indefinite Hiatus
I’ve been writing a personal weblog for almost seven years. It’s weird to go back and read some of the posts in my old kuro5hin diary such as my earlypostings about interning at Microsoft and see how much my perspectives have changed in some ways and stayed the same in others. Anyway…
Although I’ve found this weblog to be personally fulfilling, the time has come for me to put it aside for the time being. This will be the last post on http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog.
In addition, I’ll be cleaning up my Twitter and Facebook profiles by removing anyone who I haven’t personally met from my list of followers and friends respectively.
I will continue to work on and blog about RSS Bandit. I haven’t yet picked a location for a new blog for the project. However this shouldn’t impact subscribers to my RSS Bandit feed since it is already hosted on Feedburner and a redirect shouldn’t be noticeable.
Thanks for everything.
PS: See also The Year the Blog Died .
Now playing: Boyz II Men - End of the Road
Can Someone Update My Wikipedia Entry?
I was recently reading a blog post in response to one of my posts and noticed that the author used my wikipedia entry as the primary resource to figure out who I am. The only problem with that is my Wikipedia entry is pretty outdated and quite scanty. Since it is poor form to edit your own Wikipedia entry I am at a quandary.
My resume is slightly more up to date, it is primarily missing descriptions of the stuff I worked on at Microsoft last year. Thus I saw two choices. I could either change the “About Me” link on my blog to point to my resume or I could implore some kind soul in my readership to update my entry in Wikipeda. I decided to start with the latter and if that doesn’t work out, I’ll be updating the “About Me” link to point to my resume.
Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to update my Wikipedia entry (not vandalize
it 
).
Now playing: Ice Cube - Ghetto Vet
Congratulations to Justin Rudd
Justin Rudd writes in his blog post entited Your Attention Please
After 3 years and 3 months, I am leaving my position at Amazon.com on December 31st.
...
My next “gig” is one that I am extraordinarily excited about. I’m going to Microsoft to be part of the Live Labs team. This group really excites me because it gives me a chance to find new areas for Microsoft Live to get into, to expand on what Microsoft Live already has, work closely with Microsoft Research, etc. This is a job that really excites the tinkerer side of my brain. I can’t wait to get started.Many thanks to Dare Obasanjo for being my employee referral
Justin is my second official referral of someone I've "known" via reading their blog. I hope he ends up working at Microsoft a little longer than the last blog friend I referred. :)
I Signed Up for Twitter
I’m now at the point where I really, really, really want to blog but have too much going on at work and at home to take the time out to do it. To deal with this I’ve created a Twitter account. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/Carnage4Life.
Things I’ll eventually write about in my blog
- Amazon Simple DB
- A new release of RSS Bandit shipping this weekend
- Thoughts on integrating RSS Bandit and Google Reader based on information found from the pyrfeed documentation
- Expressiveness of Python vs. C# 3.0
In the meantime, you can get my thoughts on various topics in 140 characters or less from Twitter.
PS: I’m amazed at how obnoxious Twitter is about collecting the password to your GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc account so it can spam your friends. At first glance, it looked as if it wouldn’t even let me use the service until I gave up those passwords. This crap has gotten out of hand.
PPS: Anyone got decent recommendations for a Twitter client that works on Vista and XP?
Now playing: N.W.A. - Real N*ggaz Don't Die
Trash the Dress
A few months ago, Jenna and I found out about the Trash the Dress blog which features photo shots from wedding pictures taken in non-traditional locations. The term "trash the dress" is supposed to refer to the fact that the wedding dress is usually trashed at the end of the shoot.
Yesterday we met up with Cheryl Jones from In A Frame Photograpy and proceeded to destroy the Jenna's wedding dress while getting some good pictures out of the process. Below are a couple of pics from the shoot. Click on them to see more pics from Cheryl's blog post.
Now playing: Wyclef Jean - Sweetest Girl (feat. Akon, Lil Wayne & Niia)
Songs About Cars
[Scene: A married couple listening to Prince’s Little Red Corvette while driving back from the grocery store]
DARE: You know what? I think this song is a metaphor for sex.
JENNA: All songs about cars are metaphors for sex.
DARE: True.
JENNA: Well, except for Throws Some D’s…that song is actually about putting rims on your car.
DARE: Perhaps it is the exception that proves the rule?
Now playing: Prince - Little Red Corvette
Wedding Day Pictures
I’ve finally gotten around to uploading a couple of pictures from our wedding day in Las Vegas. Below are a few of the pictures I liked the most. Click on them to see more pics.
|
Wedding Favors |
Guess Where? |
|
Bride, Maid of Honor and Mom |
Groom, Best Man and the Non-Conformist |
|
It was a really nice day |
Holding hands |
The photographers took several hundred pictures and we’ve sifted through less than
half of them. Since it’s taken us so long just to pick out this two dozen or
so pictures I though if we waited much longer I’d be posting the wedding pics on around
our first or second anniversary.
Now playing: Jay-Z - What More Can I Say
New Addition to the Family
Before we got married, Jenna and I talked about pets and both agreed we didn’t want any. We didn’t want some animal that would urinate on the carpet, need to be taken outside for walks where I’d have to pick up it’s excrement, and that would create an additional inconvenience every time we decided to go out of town.
I’m sure you know where this is going…
We pick him up next week. Since I’m so against the idea, I get to name him. So far I’m torn between “Socks” and “Buster” both of which my wife thinks are horrible names for a dog. Any suggestions?
Now playing: Snoop Doggy Dogg - Doggy Dogg World
Wedding Weekend and Honeymoon Pictures
Jenna has uploaded pictures from our wedding weekend in Las Vegas and our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta to her Windows Live space. Below are a couple of entry points into the photo stream.
|
Signing the marriage licence |
The blushing bride |
|
On the way to the after party |
One of the many amazing sunsets we saw in Mexico |
|
We got to release baby turtles into the ocean |
Nothing beats a pool with a beach view |
These are the pictures that we took ourselves. The pics from the professionals capturing the wedding day and reception will show up in a couple of weeks.
Now playing: Jagged Edge - Let's Get Married (remix) (feat. Run DMC)
Weird Dream I Had Last Night
I dreamt I bought an iPhone. It was one of those dreams that seems so real you wake up thinking it happened. I finally realized it was a dream after I found my old phone plugged into its charger and not a brand new phone.
How weird is that?
Did I Tick Off 214 People Last Weekend?
According to my Feedburner stats it seems I lost about 214 subscribers using Google Reader between Saturday June 16th and Sunday June 17th. This seems like a fairly significant number of readers to unsubscribe from my blog on a weekend especially since I don't think I posted anything particularly controversial relative to my regular posts.
I was wondering if any other Feedburner users noticed a similar dip in their subscribers numbers via Google Reader over the weekend or whether it's just a coincidence that I happened to lose so many regular readers at once?
Define: Servant
Yesterday I got a reminder that I've been gone from Nigeria a bit too long. I posted the following photograph and caption to my Nigeria 2007 Trip Photo Set on Flickr
One of the servants sitting down on the bed of his one room apartment.
You can see the entire apartment in this shot.
This photo and caption caused a bunch of outrage on certain Nigerian blogs leading to posts like A Presidential Servant and OBJ's Cribs as well as an angry comment on Flickr condemning me for calling the person in the picture "a servant". The person in the picture is a member of the domestic staff in my father's private home (not the presidential villa which is owned and staffed by the Nigerian government) who's responsible for serving guests, cooking and cleaning. The common term for this kind of job in Nigeria is houseboy. However since this term has been taken over by the gay community to mean something totally different (don't go to http://www.houseboy.com) I went for a non-ambiguous term that most of my readers would understand. From the answers.com definition for servant
ser·vant (sûr'vənt)
n.
- One who is privately employed to perform domestic services.
- One who is publicly employed to perform services, as for a government.
- One who expresses submission, recognizance, or debt to another: your obedient servant.
[Middle English, from Old French, from present participle of servir, to serve. See serve.]
What I forgot is that calling someone a "servant" is a derogatory term in Nigeria. I remember hearing the phrase I'm not your servant more times than I can count when growing up. So I've edited the caption and replaced "servant" with "member of my dad's domestic staff". I hope my Nigerian readers appreciate this change.
It's weird to experience culture clash when you're clashing with the culture you were raised in.
Pictures from My Trip to Nigeria
I've uploaded the pictures from my trip to Nigeria to Flickr. You can find them in my Nigeria Trip 2007 photoset. Below are a couple of entry points into the photo stream
My sister Bunmi and my brother Oba's wife Cynthia dancing at my dad's seventieth birthday party |
Nigeria's president (my dad) casts his vote in the presidential elections |
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A close up of the giraffe that lives in the back yard of the presidential villa |
A potrait of my dad from his days in the military |
What Should I Read on my Flight to Nigeria?
I'm traveling to Nigeria next week to belatedly celebrate my dad's seventieth birthday and I'm looking for suggestions on what I should read on the trip. It usually takes about 24 hours of traveling for me to get back home; 8 hours flying to London, 10 hour lay over and another 6 hours to Abuja. I usually go through 2 or 3 of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books on my trip but that often isn't enough. The last time I was back home, I also read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the time before that I read Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Both books were interesting and I'm considering reading their sequels (i.e. Blink and Anansi Boys) on this trip.
However I recently stumbled on a list of the 50 most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy works of the last fifty years and I'm considering getting one or two books from that list. Oh yeah, and then there's Jeff Atwood's recommended reading list of books about software development which has a few entries that caught my eye as well.
Given that you now know my taste in in-flight reading material, what books would you recommend gentle reader?
Wikipedia is a Giant Joke
Today I was taking a look at my referer logs and stumbled upon a post entitled TechCrunch Resolution on Wikipedia by Jonathan Stokes which contains the following anecdote
A Brief History
The edit war was prompted by the now famous scandal in which Microsoft paid a Wikipedian to favorably edit Microsoft articles on Wikipedia. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch covered the Microsoft story in a post that was largely sympathetic.
Perceiving unfairness in the issue, Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo, aka Carnage4Life, retaliated against TechCrunch by adding an extensive criticism section to Wikipedia’s TechCrunch article. He then wrote about his “experiment” on his blog, 25HoursaDay.com.
Ensuing Uproar
Michael Arrington was not happy to be slandered by a Microsoft employee, in response to Microsoft coverage. Obasanjo expressed surprise at Arrington’s response, but did not apologize. I blogged this chapter of the Microsoft controversy.
Judging from his blog comments, Dare does not seem to have a high respect for Wikipedia. He has previously violated Wikipedia rules by anonymously writing his own Dare Obasanjo article on Wikipedia. Humorously, it appears to include inside jokes with other Microsoft employees, such as:
Dare has lunch once a month with Don Box to rinse the SOAP off of Don while Don simultaneously attempts to lather up Dare.
Edit War
With traffic pouring into Wikipeda through TechCrunch and Digg, an all-out edit war ensued between long-time Wikipedians and anonymous vandals. The vandals began attacking the userpages of Wikipedians trying to protect the TechCrunch article. It finally escalated to a point where this anti-TechCrunch user was banned for repeatedly blocking out user pages with disturbing death threats.
Resolution
Wikidemo came to the rescue by establishing a Wikipedia Mediation. She invited all editors involved to the discussion, even going so far as to invite me on this blog, and Dare Obasanjo on his blog.
Anthony cfc handled the mediation. Notably, none of the controversial IP’s showed up to state their case. With help from Anthony cfcComputerjoe, we have now restored the Wikipedia TechCrunch article, and hopefully made a few minor improvements as well. and
In the process, I earned my first Wikipedia Barnstar for Civility from Anthony cfc. Kind of neat to see Wikipedia in action.
Some days the Daily Show just writes itself. I'm crapping myself in amusement at how seriously these people take this nonsense. I am especially amused by all the bits in red font since they are either borderline libel or just straight up hilarious. And I thought Mike Arrington emailing folks at Microsoft trying to get me in trouble after I apologized on his blog was the most absurd turn this story would take.
It's like Nick Carr wrote in his post Essjay's world, Wikipedia seems to be full of the kind of people who used to play Dungeons & Dragons back in the day and now have difficulty separating the real world from the fantasy world they've created in their heads.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Obasanjo_Wikipedia_is_a_Giant_Joke';Wikipedia: Who's Your Daddy?
One of the links referenced in my recent posting about Wikipedia led me to reread the Wikipedia entry for "Dare Obasanjo". It seems there is still an outstanding issue with my entry according to folks on the Talk page because there isn't a non-blog source (i.e. mainstream media) that verifies that my dad is Olusegun Obasanjo.
For some reason it irritates me that I have a Wikipedia entry with a giant banner that claims I'm lying about my parenthood.Given that I'll be back home in a few weeks to belatedly celebrate my dad's seventieth birthday, I wonder if any Wikipedia savvy folks can point out what kind of "evidence" usually satisfies the bureaucrats on that site. Will a photograph of us together do the trick (if so I already have a few at home I can scan and upload to Flickr)? Will it have to be a photograph printed in a newspaper? Or is the only way that banner comes off is if there is a Nigerian newspaper webpage on the Internet that says he's my dad.
I need to see what strings I have to pull to get my name cleared.
Trackback Spam
My blog has been slow all day due to an unending flood of trackback spam. I've set up my IIS rules to reject requests from the IP address ranges the attacks are coming from but it seems that this hasn't been enough to prevent the trackback spam from making my blog unusable.
It looks like I should invest in a router with a built in firewall as my next step. Any ideas to prevent this from happening again are welcome.
Upcoming Outage
My website is going to be down for a few days as I make some changes. While I'm gone you can check out some of these blogs instead
- Jeff Atwood - Programmer Geek
- Omar Shahine - Microsoft Geek
- Danah Boyd - Social Software Geek
- Scott Adams - Funny Geek
- Chris Kelly - Liberal Geek
I'll see y'all this weekend.