Visiting San Francisco

During the first summers in the Bay Area, there was a steady stream of visitors from Europe stopping by, traveling through the golden state. The couch. The floor. The empty second bedroom. One weekend, we must have had four couples sleeping over. Mandatory of course was a visit and tour of San Francisco. I got pretty good at knowing the city and build out a little tour. (Time permitting, I will plot this on a Google Map. In the meantime, I'll start adding directions and tidbits in this post.


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My little tour of San Francisco - driving directions
(still work in progress - visit back)

1. We enter San Francisco using highway 280. Keep going straight onto Junpero Serra Blvd (as opposed to crossing over the city to the bay side of San Francisco).
   
2. Follow Brotherhood Way towards the coast. (You'll make a hairpin turn at the point Hwy 280 ends)
3. Make left on Lake Merced Blvd and a right on John Muir Drv. You'll drive around Lake Merced, driving along the Olympic Club golf course.
4. Join Skyline Blvd shortly to make a left onto the Great Hwy (aka Ocean Beach).
   
1. You'll pass the San Francisco zoo on your right.
   
2. You'll pass 'doggy' as you look into Sloat.
   
3. Stop at the Beach Chalet for a sampler of their beer and read the story of Golden Gate Park downstairs in the Beach Chalet.
4. You'll see naked surfer butts getting into their wet suits on Ocean Beach. (Watch out for the Ocean Beach rip curl.)
5. Dutch heritage with the windmills at the entrance of Golden Gate Park
6. Stop at the Cliff house. You can overlook the first Spanish defenses of San Francisco
5. Coming through the turn onto Point Lobos Avenue, make a left onto El Camino Del Mar to get a great view of the Golden Gate bridge. (Better ones still coming up)
6. Turn back onto Point Lobos Avenue (= Geary)
7. Turn Left onto 34th Avenue to enter the Ledion of Honor Dr. You're among the San Francisco public golf course.
   
1. On top of the hill is the Palace of the Legion of Honor.
   
2. As you pass it Palace, you'll come across one of the better place to take a picture of the Golden Gate bridge. Watch out for angry golfers, if you decide to capture both the greens and the bridge. Since recent, there is at the end of the golf course and little vista point for tourists.
   
8. Continuing, you enter Sea Cliff, a very affluent neighborhood. Robin Williams calls/called this home.
   
9. Get onto Lincoln. Visit Baker Beach by making a left on Bowley st. Note that the far end of Baker Beach is a nude beach.
   
10. Continue on Lincoln, pass under highway 101 and make a left either to the Golden Gate Vista Point and/or onto Marine Drive to Fort Point. On the return from Fort Point, stop for a picnic at Crissy Fields, formerly the San Francisco airport and now restored to marsh land and a nice beach. This is also a great place to windsurf (for seriously experienced windsurfers as the water is quiet choppy near the bridge. Worse is the current in case you rip your sail.)
11. Continue back on Mason St. Near the merge with the Marina Blvd, you can visit the Palace of Fine Arts, as well as the Exploratorium The Lagoon near the Palace of Fine Arts is a great place for pictures. Also the San Francisco yacht club is nice to walk around. This area of town is called, the Marina.
    
12. At the end of Marina Blvd, when it turns into Laguna street, vist Fort Mason. You can climb the hill and end up on Van Ness Ave, or just drive around Fort Mason, via Bay Street, to end up Van Ness.
    
1. Visit the Acquatic Park
2. Visit the Cannery on Beach St
3. Observe the Hyde Street cable car turn around in old manual style.
   
13. [To be continued]
    

Technorati: San Francisco, California

New window of opportunity

Since a few weeks, I moved to a new office: one with a new window of opportunity. A pretty nice place, on the west side of the building. In front of my office are a few couches to hang out. Here are a few pictures:


Right in front of my office, at about 300-400 meter is another big office tower (McAfee). To the left, is a distant view of the San Jose skyline. The San Jose international airport is in between, so I see airplanes take off and land throughout the day.

On the right side (behind my monitor) is a view of Highway 101 and the Great America Parkway/Bowers off ramp. I typically close my blinds a bit. First of all, to dim the sunlight behind my monitor. Secondly, the traffic can be distracting. At the other hand, watching the slow traffic during the afternoon commute is entertaining. In the distant are the mountains of Cupertino.


The view during the night is impressive. I wonder how the view must be at level 9, where a new startup, Code Green Networks, recently moved in.

Sign of the times: meet me in Second Life

ABC News Nightline ends its broadcast with a little piece called Sign of the Times. A little interesting tidbit how things are changes. I got a Sign of the Times when reading the latest post on the Amazon Webservices Blog.

"PS - ..., yes I am still posting, evangelizing, and so forth. In fact I will be doing a presentation in Second Life on Tuesday night at a place called Info Island. If you are in Second Life and want to see me speak, please come by the open air auditorium at 5 PM. More info here."

Evangelism on steriods!

NetBeans

Over the last weeks, I have used Eclipse, Netbeans and Microsoft Visual Studio for my simple C, C++, Java and XML schema projects. May I stress simple.

Though Netbeans is the de facto IDE at Sun, many in Solaris land appear to be primarily vi and emacs users. Even though the Sun Studio compilers had a visual front end, few used it. On June 28th, Netbeans released a C/C++ development pack for Netbeans (aka CND) for download in Beta. Since then a second Beta added gdb debugging support.

I've come to like Netbeans a lot. It is now my primary IDE, although on occasion because of customer issues, I use Visual C++.

In Netbeans, things overall just work! Ok, in fairness, I did have to file a few minor bugs. However, I 've been impressed by the Netbeans community. Specifically by the response to those bugs or RFEs. Give CND it a try!

PS - You might also want to check out some interesting posts about Netbeans (versus Eclipse and others) from earlier this year: The Register ; Evans

Technorati: Netbeans

The new Google Reader

Last week, Google launched a new version of the Google Reader. For a long time, NetNewsWire was my RSS reader of choice. Unfortunately, my computer environment goes beyond MacOS X, so I wanted something online. I decided to give Google Reader a try for a few weeks and really liked it. Some of the flaws have been fixed in the update of last week. Here's a short list what sold me on Google Reader:

1. It's a web application, accesible from different hardware and operating systems.
   
2. Add clips to your website. The little left side pane 'Interesting Bits I read' is automatically generated from articles I read in Google Reader. All I have to do is label a particular article with a tag and it automatically shows up on the left side of my blog. Very nice.
   
3. Automatic feed discovery: just type in the URl and Google Reader will explore the site for available feeds
4. Tags: allow you organize feeds, as well as individual articles
5. Easy reading: (ajax-style) scrolling through your articles; keyboard shortcuts; read per tag; read starred articles
   

Other features (such as list view, a la Gmail; or the email button) are nice additional features. I haven't used them very much.

Saas Infrastructure, an update

A few months ago, I wrote about how building a platform for Software as a Service is all about the data platform. Since then, a lot has changed. I thought it might be worthwhile to summarize some of the interesting evolutions:

Sun: as I left Sun on June 9th, Sun had recently launched officially the Sun Grid Compute Utility in the U.S. at $1/CPU hour. In essence, compute power on a network cable, available in the 'cloud'. The offering was targetted at a specific set of compute intensive, and more importantly, data limited, applications. Since input and output data needed to be uploaded in a zip file, the Sun Grid Compute Utility has a narrow target audience. To familiarize yourself with the Sun Grid Compute Utility, try to run the sample application, if you can get it to run. On opening day, it was in trouble and unaccesible. Today, the Podcast your page with the Sun Grid isn't cooperating either: Due to overwhelming response to the free Podcast applications the service is currently busy. Please try your request later or Register for an account to login in to the Sun Grid to access the Cepstral text to speech sample job. Hardly an On-Demand application. Still, the biggest limitation of the Sun Grid is the non-existence of a storage and data platform. (And the lack of a developer environment, like the Google Code Hosting, see further.)

Salesforce.com (and the AppExchange) are on cloud 9. The company is doing financially (stock: CRM) great with 500K paying customers and a recent jump in stock price of 19% in a day. Also the AppExchange appears to attrack more and more developers. Interesting to note are:

• The AppExchange OEM edition (press release): an AppExchange beyond CRM. In geek terms, the center of the AppExchange is no longer the CRM database schema. BYOS, bring your own schema. Salesforce.com is opening their infrastructure (aka data platform) to other applications (even if it were a competing CRM app?). The AppExchange OEM edition is a logical step and highly strategic. Wow!
  
• The AppExchange went international and offers a second site, the Japan AppExchange, in the local language.
• Salesforce Online User community
  

Amazon has surprised me the most. While they already had launched the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), in recent months other key infrastructure building blocks have complemented the offering:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) : Sun Grid, are you ready for a real competitor, who undestands on-demand platforms quiet well? and offers it at $0.10/instance hour?
  
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) : messaging on demand.
  

It is however not clear who is using this building blocks or what markets Amazon is targetting.

Google has been releasing several applications on-demand, including a spreadsheet and a word processor and appears to be busy integrating several services. On the on-demand infrastructure front, worthwhile to mention:

• Google Code, Project hosting: a place for developers to host their code and develop, a la Sourceforge. (Or what a Sun Grid Developer Utility could be.)
  
• Google Checkout could eventually offer a billing system, like Paypal has become for many other sites (i.e. the Sun Grid)

I haven't kept much track of what Ebay is doing.

All and all, it remains a recurring theme: it is not he who has the biggest computer who will win in the Saas world, but he who holds the data. Software-as-a-service, it is about the Data Platform!

Technorati: Saas Google Amazon Salesforce.com Sun Microsystems

Meet the dentist

A dentist office in Belgium is little Taj Mahal (were Shah Jahan a dentist). The office is squeeky clean, marble floors, spectacular cabinets and the latest chair and drills. Cleaning your teeth is a pleasant experience where a special tool does all the work.

My experiences with dentists in California has been quiet different. The offices have nowhere the same look and feel: often with carpet, the dentist chair could be easily from the 70's. I've rinsed afterwards at a kitchen sink. My first dentist was a husband and wife office. Everyone was very friendly. But when it was time to clean my teeth, the metal scraper from the middle ages came out. Since both were from Teheran, I thought, their training must have prepared them to practice dentistry in every situation, even when no drills or electricity was around. Teeth cleaning was overall unpleasant.

So I switched and I called 1-800-dentist (from the commercial on television). This is a free dentist referral service. My new dentist was more of a car salesman than a dentist. After evaluating my teeth, he concluded quickly I needed a new crown. He went into his side office, and started tapping on his calculator. A bit later he came out and told me: "The procedure normally costs $xyz, but after taking the insurance into account it would be $xy. However, if I were willing to agree to the new crown procedure today, and only for today, it would be $y." Hold on a second. Next up would be a pitch about upgrades, I guess. So, I thanked him and left his office. Oh yeh, again teeth cleaning was done via the metal scraper. By now, I was convinced this was the common practice. I went back to my first dentist. But I had seen nothing yet.

A few days ago, I took my son to a pediatric dentist. The waiting room is wonderfully decorated in a Hawaian theme. There are three reception islands. They were well prepared: they greeted my son my name and asked him who he had brought along with him. This is all about him. After we watched a bit of Dora the Explorer on television, we were invited by the Patient Counseler. Her job was to make the kids feel at ease and answer if we had any questions. She explained him what to expect next. She also took a picture to hang at the wall of smilling kids, and if there were no cavities, he would join the no-cavity club and could win prizes. Then, she invited us to meet the dentist. The room had six modern chairs in two rows. There were four more in offices along the side, for more involved procedures. Everything continued in the Hawaian theme. There were about six dentists, overseen by two head dentists. Each kid gets a wireless headset to listen to the cartoons, playing on six televisions in the ceiling! It was amazing. Prior to the visit, we completed a form with personal info: his favorite colors, movies, etc. When he got stickers, they were the ones of the cartoon he likes. The balloon was in green with a black ribbon, to match his new tootbrush, and in his favorite color. You can not make this stuff up. But I got to tell you: it was the best customer service of any dentist I've visited. And they make the kids love the dentist. My son asked the next day, if we could go and visit again.

Early detection, early response

Several months ago, Larry Brilliant was named Executive Director of the Google Foundation. I had never heard of Larry Brilliant. Google watchers headlined: “Grateful Dead doctor to head the Google Foundation”. So, they hired a hippie. It wasn’t until I watched the presentation of Larry Brilliant at TED, that I understood why he was an excellent choice to preside over some of the Google monies.

Download this talk: Audio (MP3) | Video (MP4)

More TEDTalks: TEDTalks website | iTunes (audio) | iTunes (video)

TEDPrize winner Larry Brilliant is an epidemiologist who presided over the last case of Smallpox on the planet. He also founded the Seva Foundation, which works to reverse cases of blindness, and co-founded several technology start-ups, including the legendary online community, The Well. He was recently named Executive Director of the Google Foundation. In this talk, he explains in fascinating detail the key behind the successful WHO campaign to eradicate Smallpox, and then unveils his TEDPrize wish: to build a global system that detects each new disease or disaster as it emerges or occurs. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 26:34)

Another great series of well-doing is the three part interview of Charlie Rose with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, following Buffet's $31Billion gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Charlie Rose - Warren Buffett: The Man - Part One in a Three Part Series (Part 2 and 3 can also be found at video.google.com).

Technorati: Google TED Larry Brilliant Warren Buffett

breydel.blogspot.com as a graph

Today, I came across an interesting way to look at websites: websites as a graph. Here's a way the HTML of http://breydel.blogspot.com looks like. (Other graphs can be find at flickr tag websitesasgraph.)

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Attitude Control

I've been several weeks in my new job, when an email about attitude control arrives in my inbox. Great, after merely a few weeks and unbeknown to me, I apparently have rubbed somebody the wrong way. Week 2 coincided with the annual company offsite and retreat (this year to the Chaminade in Santa Cruz) with all the families. So, I got to know and interact with everybody in the company. However, my day to day interactions are with a small team of about ten people. Who was it?

Upon reading the email, my fears subdued and I was convinced it was a typo and should have been altitude control. Wrong again. When I consulted the reference book for the project I am currently working on, attitude control system or attitude determination and control system (ADCS) stabilizes a spacecraft and orients it in desired directions during the mission.

Pew, no attitude control required. I am still the quiet lamb I used to be. Baaaah Baah