Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 2nd April 2009

Tracking UK Liberal Indecency. The mashup I’ve been waiting for: Tom Hume used the Guardian Content API to track swearword usage over time. # 4:44 pm

Google uncloaks once-secret server. Instead of a data centre wide UPS and redundant power supplies, each Google server has its own 12V battery. They live in standard shipping containers, each holding 1,160 servers. # 10:47 am

We advise startups to launch when they’ve added a quantum of utility: when there is at least some set of users who would be excited to hear about it, because they can now do something they couldn’t do before.

Paul Graham # 10:43 am

Heap Dump Analysis. Using jmap to dump the JVM’s memory to disk, then analysing it using the visualvm GUI tool. # 10:34 am

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (via) Hadoop as a service. Basically a web based GUI around Hadoop—you could roll this yourself on EC2 but for a small markup on regular EC2 prices you get to avoid the extra work setting everything up. Data processing scripts can be written in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++ and are loaded in to S3 before firing off the job. # 10:25 am

On the ground at the G20 protests. Roo Reynolds got trapped in the square mile. # 8:06 am