Tobi Waves

I have known it for a about a year. SciFi has not renewed its commitment to Farscape which essentially meant the end of the show. I am sure none of the folks at SciFi who made these decisions had watched the show. How else could it be that they killed the single most captivating, intelligent, humorous, sexy, thrilling, emotional and realistic sci-fi show ever conceived. Almost every episode I watched left me tingling all over, ideally wondering how they were able to come up with these great episodes over and over again.

It's almost a year since the cancellation, the Farscape fan-base still seems to be going strong at (www.savefarscape.co ...) plotting away on a strategy to get the show back on the air. Never loose hope.

Today I also went to the website of SciFi wondering what they were doing regarding Farscape. And indeed, they have this page "Farscape Memories" with articles from different actors remembering their time shooting the series. What hypocrisy first they pull the plug on the show and then they act all bleary eyed.

If I was rich, I mean real rich, I would just order a few more years of Farscape from the Creature Shop ... I guess I should not have gone into OpenSource, but rather have turned commercial at an early age, sucking in big bucks during the Internet Bubble then I could do more than keeping my fingers crossed for another network picking up the show again.

The other night I went to see "Wilbur wants to kill himself" (xrl.us ...) a movie about a guy, his brother, a women kid living in some Scottish town. The guy has a book shop, falls in love with the women and the brother tried to kill himself. The movie is by Lone Scherfig a Danish writer/director who was quite successful with the movie Italian for Beginners. I loved the story and the acting and above all the Scottish accent.

The strangest thing happened to me a few minutes into the film. When Alice (the women) entered the scene for the first time. She looks exactly like a friend of mine. I am quite sure it was not here, because she does not speak with a Scottish accent, and she is not an actress. Never the less I kept comparing her and Alice all through out the film. How would she act in a similar situation? And just to make it more complex, Alice is just a role, played by Shirley Henderson (xrl.us ...) but written by Sherfig, so how can it have any bearing on my friends behavior, or do looks influence how people behave, did Sherfig write the part of Alice for Shirley? Are Alice and my friend twins separated a birth?

Well it was a wired experience, but definitely a great movie. Go watch it!

I admit, I am a soap opera junkie. I just love watching them. My current favorite is The West Wing written by Aaron Sorkin (en2.wikipedia.org ...). Tonight I made it through the final episode of the first season. This time the outlook is great, as the show is till running in the US, now in its fifth season.

The West Wing is about people working in the White House for the President. It's also about the President himself. President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen is a liberal Democrats dream. What a contrast to the current reality. An American friend told me recently that she finds it rather disturbing to watch the show, seeing what the reality could also be. Michael Moor even nominates Bartlet for President, along with Oprah in his latest book.

I am watching the West Wing on DVD, there was also the 15 minutes Making Of feature on one of the disk. There the actors talk about their parts and some bits of the sets are shown. Hearing the actors talk was odd. They were so different from the roles they play in the show. Not only did they talk differently, but also their body language was altered. I have never noticed something like this before in such a show. The characters in the West Wing make a very authentic impression on me, much more than the actors themselves actually. At least as far as the story line and the dialogs are concerned this has to be credited to Aaron Sorkin. Maybe Michael Moor should be nominating Aron Sorkin along with Oprah and Bartlet, someone has to write their lines after all.

A Talk by Urs Hölzel, Vice President for Technology,

About Google

Mission: TO organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful,

An international company: 250% traffic from outside US

Engine has 4 Billion pages in index

Profitable since q1/2001

23 Office Location Worldwide.

15k boxes, several TB disk storage

There are over 1000 queries a seconds on dec 25th, 2am.

Engineering Offices in the US, Zurich and Bangalore

About the Web

Static web 167 TB in 11 Giga Pages, but dynamic websize 92 PB. (Estimates)

1 in 4 hosts on the net run a webserver.

Problem: All data, users, hosts grow exponentially. This means the problem of finding useful information grows exponentially too which makes for interesting problems.

Google Infrastructure

A high reliable system based on low cost comodity hardware. Redundancy has to be built into the software and hardware. Monitoring, repair and maintain these boxes is a prime problem.

The Google Filesystem GFS

Stripe files across many boxes and replicate them on multiple servers.

Components: Master - keeps directory and plans file layout, ChunkServer - hold the data. Clients - use the data. (Chunksize is 64 MB. Data is cached on client once retrieved. SOSP'03 (www.cs.rochester.edu ...) )

10+ Clusters of 1000+ boxes.

350 TB Filesystem

How to be a Search Engine

Crawling: Recursive Process. Problem: dynamic pages, slow servers, management of the link list, session ids in the URL, how to prioritize the URLs, being nice to the web servers, detection of duplicates, avoiding traps, actively fill forms to pull "hidden" contents, figure out when the page needs to be re-crawled.

Indexing: Words by document and position in the document. One Terra Words in the index.

Ranking: Hard problem. All traditional assumptions on searching like long, coherent, high quality documents are not valid for web documents. Googles idea is to define a PageRank for figuring the importance of the page. The PageRank of a page is the sum of PageRanks of other pages pointing to this page. A page contributes its PageRank divided by number of out-links to each of its target pages. In reality it is more complex. Google has about 100 factors in its real PageRank function like font size, color, proximity to other words.

Serving: Partition the data to different servers and have each solve a sub problem of each query. Query goes to Google Webserver, it queries Index Farm, accesses the Doc Farm for the real data. Additional services from Add Server and Spelling Server. IEEE Micro, 2003 has more on the structure (www.computer.org ...) .

Advertising: Find the best add, relevant to the query. This is a very important problem as this is the main source of revenue. Only show an add which has a chance to be clicked on, if the click-through is low, the add will be dropped. Advertisers only pay for adds actually clicked.

Google Playground

There is lots of data and computing infrastructure at Google. Google pays people who spend their time on figuring new ways to analyze and present this data: (labs.google.co ...)

In the good old times, when men were still men and computer virus writers were still technically brilliant hackers. Viruses used the uncountable holes in Microsofts ubiquitous Outlook eMail software to spread.

But even then, generally the rule was simple. If you don't want to be infected, don't run any code you don't know where it's coming from. If you have Outlook, make sure it's patched and properly configured. In Unix circles, people made fun of the whole situation by sending out mails which claimed to be a solidarity Virus, calling upon the Unix User to copy this mail to all addresses in his address book, to emulate a virus, as a gesture of solidarity with the Windows crowd.

Now, a few years later, Outlook has matured to the point that there have been no major holes for months. Never the less, eMail viruses still crop up and spread. Virus writer started to attack the users mind directly, by writing messages into the body of the virus email with the purpose of confusing the user into clicking the virus attachment, forgetting all the good advice they got. Fortunately the anti-virus software gets updated so quickly, that viruses are normally contained quickly.

Today though, mark the date, the whole matter entered an all new stage. I got the first virus which was contained in a password protected zip file. The password was contained in the accompanying email, so it is easy for a human to unpack, but anti virus software has no chance as it can not decrypt the zip file containing the virus. As a concept this sounds fine, but what totally kills me is that it seems to work. Since this morning, I get an increasing number of encrypted zip file viruses. There must actually be people who get this virus, unzip it using the supplied password and then run the thing in order to get infected.

I wonder how many people would hang themselves if they got a rope in the mail. Warden make sure all the cells are locked.