Some notes and thoughts on Websites ( which may be back in fashion once the social media bubble bubble burps, I mean bursts)
0) Write Great Content. Do not write in haste. Do not revise in haste. Publish and share url only at a time when you think it will lead to views.
1) Design-Benchmarking Beauty
Bad Artists borrow, Great Artists Steal- Continue reading “Making your website cool”
Stuff I like from Google Plus meme- animated GIFS are just one of them-
OK, this was fun to put together — love how active the Googlers are on this platform! Please feel free to add anyone I missed and share this. Circle the ones that most interest you based on what they do, or circle them all as I did 🙂
Co-Founders
+Sergey Brin
+Larry Page
VPs/Senior VPs
+Vic Gundotra (Engineering)
+Bradley Horowitz (Product Management)
+Jeff Huber (Commerce & Local)
+Marissa Mayer (Local, Maps & Location Services)
Community Managers
+Brian Rose
+Toby Stein
+Natalie Villalobos
Product Managers
+Anish Acharya (Google+ Mobile)
+Shimrit Ben-Yair
+Frances Haugen (Google+ Profiles)
+Caroline McCarthy (Marketing)
+Jonathan McPhie
+Joe Rideout
+Punit Soni (Google+ Mobile)
Engineering Directors/Managers
+Chee Chew
+Dave Besbris
+Chris Millikin
Software Engineers
+Eric W. Barndollar (Google+)
+Andrew Bunner (Google+)
+David Byttow
+Eric Cattell (Social Graph Tech Lead)
+John Costigan (Google Profiles)
+Matt Cutts (Webspam)
+Pavan Desikan (Google+/Gmail)
+Kelly Ellis
+Trey Harris (Site Reliability)
+Griff Hazen
+Andy Hertzfeld
+Matt Keoshkerian
+Todd Knight
+Jean-Christophe Lilot
+Lan Liu
+Vincent Mo (Google+ Photos)
+Dobromir Montauk (Google+ Infrastructure)
+Stephen Ng (Gmail)
+Owen Prater
+Joseph Smarr (Technical)
+Martin Strauss
+Na Tang
+Yonatan Zunger (Social)
Consumer Operations Manager
+Michael Hermeston (Google+ Support)
Developer Advocates
+Chris Chabot (Developer Relations)
+Timothy Jordan
Designers
+Brett Lider (Product/User Experience)
+Jonathan Terleski (Google+)
+Charles Warren (User Experience Lead, Google Social)
Program Managers
+Julian Harris (Technical)
+Adam Lasnik (Google Map Maker)
Tech Lead Manager
+Natalie Glance (Google Shopping)
Test Engineer
+Erick Fejta (Tester for Google Storage)
Account Executive
+Dave Miller (Local & Education)
President, Enterprise
+Dave Girouard (Cloud Apps)
3. Jokes-
I have a friend on Facebook that seemed suicidal, said he was standing on a ledge….so I poked him
4.Google Squash
5.Social Media Explained
6. Google Plus slaps Facebook AND Troopers Googling for Droids
7. Why did Google Wave Fail
8. When Google+ is available to the public..
9. Evolution
10. Safe Tweeting
Special Mentions-
After resisting for two weeks I have decided to write a Google Plus review. This includes both the changed designed parameters, the invite growth features and all of the main sub-items and activities you can do in the G+ Stream, Share, Hang Out, Pictures, Circles.
Since I have 2500 people in my circles and I am in 91 circles
To keep it simple – I have noted the following 6 main sub-points.
1) Content Dissemination-
2) Online Professional Networking and 3) Online Personal Socializing
4) Spam Control / Malware /Phishing/Porn Protection
5) Time Cost versus Networking Benefit
————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
1) Content Dissemination-
Sharing is as simple as Facebook but the design makes it simpler.
Note G+ uses lower number of colors, bigger fonts, slightly bigger icons to reduce the appearance of clutter.
Contrast this
with this-
Interesting to see that G+ has four types of media to share- besides writing the status/micro-blog (unfettered by 140 characters). Note these show icons only with hover text to tell you what the icon stands for.
Photo,Video,URL,Location (which seems to be Twitter like in every share)
Facebook has 5 types of Sharing and note the slightly different order as well the fact that both icon and text make it slightly more cluttered- Status (which is redundant clearly ),Photo,Link,Video,Question
G+ thus lacks polls /questions features. It is much easier to share content on Facebook automatically as of now- but for G+ you need to share the URL privately though. There exist G+ meme-s already thanks to re-sharing in G+ plus which seems to be inspired by Tumblr (?).
In addition Google has made your Google Profile the number one SERP for searching your name, so there seem clear tied in benefits of SEO with content disseminated here.
G+ has sharing in circles whereas Facebook has only Everyone, Friends, Friends of Friends ,Customize. This makes G+ interface slightly better in tweaking the spread of content to targeted audience esp by Bloggers.
versus
2) Online Professional Networking and 3) Online Personal Socializing Organizing Contacts in Google Plus and seperate privacy controls make it easier to customize sharing without getting too complex. You can make as many circles and drag and drop very easily instead of manually clicking a dropdown box. Effectively speaking Facebook has just 4 kinds of circles and it does not distinguish between various types of friends which is great from philosophical point of view but not so goodn enforcing separateness between professional and personal networks. Note Facebook privacy settings are overwhelming despite the groovy data viz
4) Spam Control / Malware /Phishing/Porn Protection
Spam Control in Facebook versus in Google Plus- note the different options in Google Plus (including the ability to NOT reshare). I am not aware of more enhanced protection than the ones available for Gmail already. Spam is what really killed off a lot many social networks and the ability to control or reduce spam will be a critical design choice
5) Time Cost versus Networking Benefit
Linkedin has the lowest cost in time spent and networking done. If G+ adds a resume section for jobs, recruiters, and adds in Zynga games, the benefit from G+ will expand. As of now G+ is a minimal social network with minimalism as design ethos.
(Zynga would do well to partner with G+)
I have been watching for Revolution Analytics product almost since the inception of the company. It has managed to sail over storms, naysayers and critics with simple and effective strategy of launching good software, making good partnerships and keeping up media visibility with white papers, joint webinars, blogs, conferences and events.
However this is a listing of all technical contributions made by Revolution Analytics products to the #rstats project.
1) Useful Packages mostly in parallel processing or more efficient computing like
2) RevoScaler package to beat R’s memory problem (this is probably the best in my opinion as it is yet to be replicated by the open source version and is a clear cut reason for going in for the paid version)
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/enterprise-big-data.php
- Efficient XDF File Format designed to efficiently handle huge data sets.
- Data Step Functionality to quickly clean, transform, explore, and visualize huge data sets.
- Data selection functionality to store huge data sets out of memory, and select subsets of rows and columns for in-memory operation with all R functions.
- Visualize Large Data sets with line plots and histograms.
- Built-in Statistical Algorithms for direct analysis of huge data sets:
- Summary Statistics
- Linear Regression
- Logistic Regression
- Crosstabulation
- On-the-fly data transformations to include derived variables in models without writing new data files.
- Extend Existing Analyses by writing user- defined R functions to “chunk” through huge data sets.
- Direct import of fixed-format text data files and SAS data sets into .xdf format
3) RevoDeploy R for API based R solution – I somehow think this feature will get more important as time goes on but it seems a lower visibility offering right now.
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/enterprise-deployment.php
- Collection of Web services implemented as a RESTful API.
- JavaScript and Java client libraries, allowing users to easily build custom Web applications on top of R.
- .NET Client library — includes a COM interoperability to call R from VBA
- Management Console for securely administrating servers, scripts and users through HTTP and HTTPS.
- XML and JSON format for data exchange.
- Built-in security model for authenticated or anonymous invocation of R Scripts.
- Repository for storing R objects and R Script execution artifacts.
4) Revolutions IDE (or Productivity Environment) for a faster coding environment than command line. The GUI by Revolution Analytics is in the works. – Having used this- only the Code Snippets function is a clear differentiator from newer IDE and GUI. The code snippets is awesome though and even someone who doesnt know much R can get analysis set up quite fast and accurately.
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/enterprise-productivity.php
- Full-featured Visual Debugger for debugging R scripts, with call stack window and step-in, step-over, and step-out capability.
- Enhanced Script Editor with hover-over help, word completion, find-across-files capability, automatic syntax checking, bookmarks, and navigation buttons.
- Run Selection, Run to Line and Run to Cursor evaluation
- R Code Snippets to automatically generate fill-in-the-blank sections of R code with tooltip help.
- Object Browser showing available data and function objects (including those in packages), with context menus for plotting and editing data.
- Solution Explorer for organizing, viewing, adding, removing, rearranging, and sourcing R scripts.
- Customizable Workspace with dockable, floating, and tabbed tool windows.
- Version Control Plug-in available for the open source Subversion version control software.
Marketing contributions from Revolution Analytics-
1) Sponsoring R sessions and user meets
2) Evangelizing R at conferences and partnering with corporate partners including JasperSoft, Microsoft , IBM and others at http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/partners/
3) Helping with online initiatives like http://www.inside-r.org/ (which is curiously dormant and now largely superseded by R-Bloggers.com) and the syntax highlighting tool at http://www.inside-r.org/pretty-r. In addition Revolution has been proactive in reaching out to the community
4) Helping pioneer blogging about R and Twitter Hash tag discussions , and contributing to Stack Overflow discussions. Within a short while, #rstats online community has overtaken a lot more established names- partly due to decentralized nature of its working.
Did I miss something out? yes , they share their code by GPL.
Let me know by feedback
So dear G launched a whole new set of Products. Some thoughts-
1) Join up the Social Invite List here – it is called Google Plus. We hope it doesnt end up like Buzz http://www.google.com/buzz or Orkut https://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-api/?pli=1 or Plus One http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/ or Wave (email killer) http://googlewave.blogspot.com/
When the biggest cloud computing company in the world announces a phased rollout to a product- we wonder if they are really sure on launching the product rollout or just were in a hurry again.
Machine learning wont work with social , chaps. Well not everything in social. And the Google Social Blog forgot to write about it http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/
Well anyways, even Google Finance’s automated announcements feed failed to pick many of their own product launches (or it does in an automated manner depending on which time period you choose – yes still no social buttons up http://www.google.com/finance?q=google
BACK TO GOOGLE PLUS
https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleplus/
Thanks for stopping by.We’re still ironing out a few kinks in Google+, so it’s not quite ready for everyone to climb aboard. But, if you want, we’ll let you know the minute the doors are open for real. Cool? Cool.
Google+ Privacy Policy
2) Google Web Fonts- Great product, how and hey http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/ when do you plan to monetize uhm web fonts. Not that would be awesome. Not even a single ad on those pages- not even for philanthropy. or poor poets. or even Google Book Authors who self publish . Sound of silence….
http://www.google.com/webfonts/v2
3) Google Analytics gets some groove back. I really want to see much better integration of Google Apps and Google Analytics and Google Desktop search. Ditto for the interface. Enterprise software uses different fonts than retail software, dude. More fries, http://analytics.blogspot.com/ ?
Feature 1- Custom Reports for metrics I can slice and dice on my own
Feature 2 Awesome analytics for In-Page Analytics (beta feature) Beta is boring if overused. Try Theta maybe?
Feature 3 Daily Automated Alerts for Unusual Server /Traffic Activity
Feature 4 event Tracking is cool esp for understanding social media impact
It is still too early for mobile (in terms of traffic) as well as tablet analytics (?)
4) Angry Birds is still the best feature in Chrome (but there are lots others at http://chrome.blogspot.com/) and esp http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/06/working-with-chromes-file-browser.html
Try http://chrome.angrybirds.com/
There are ways to make software that are not evil. Very very disappointed at total lack of monetization of this chrome app. Not even a T Shirt for me to buy ad . sighs
Funny thing- the product manager forgot to take off Facebook like button or even add the +1 button or even the Tweet this button.
Quo Vadis ?
5) What do you love?
From http://www.sas.com/events/analytics/us/
The Analytics 2011 Conference Series combines the power of SAS’s M2010 Data Mining Conference and F2010 Business Forecasting Conference into one conference covering the latest trends and techniques in the field of analytics. Analytics 2011 Conference Series brings the brightest minds in the field of analytics together with hundreds of analytics practitioners. Join us as these leading conferences change names and locations. At Analytics 2011, you’ll learn through a series of case studies, technical presentations and hands-on training. If you are in the field of analytics, this is one conference you can’t afford to miss.
October 24-25, 2011
Grande Lakes Resort
Orlando, FL
message from Amazing Amazon’s cloud team- this will also help for #rstats users given that revolution Analytics full versions on RHEL.
—————————————————-
on-demand instances of Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for as little as $0.145 per instance hour. The offering combines the cost-effectiveness, scalability and flexibility of running in Amazon EC2 with the proven reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Highlights of the offering include:
For more information, please visit the Amazon EC2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux page.
which is
Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a dependable platform to deploy a broad range of applications. By running RHEL on EC2, you can leverage the cost effectiveness, scalability and flexibility of Amazon EC2, the proven reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and AWS premium support with back-line support from Red Hat.. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 is available in versions 5.5, 5.6, 6.0, and 6.1, both in 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides seamless integration with existing Amazon EC2 features including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic-Load Balancing, and Elastic IPs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances are available in multiple Availability Zones in all Regions.
Pay only for what you use with no long-term commitments and no minimum fee.
On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments.
| Standard Instances | Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
|---|---|
| Small (Default) | $0.145 per hour |
| Large | $0.40 per hour |
| Extra Large | $0.74 per hour |
| Micro Instances | Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
| Micro | $0.08 per hour |
| High-Memory Instances | Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
| Extra Large | $0.56 per hour |
| Double Extra Large | $1.06 per hour |
| Quadruple Extra Large | $2.10 per hour |
| High-CPU Instances | Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
| Medium | $0.23 per hour |
| Extra Large | $0.78 per hour |
| Cluster Compute Instances | Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
| Quadruple Extra Large | $1.70 per hour |
| Cluster GPU Instances | Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
| Quadruple Extra Large | $2.20 per hour |
Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours.
and
Instances of this family are well suited for most applications.
Small Instance – default*
1.7 GB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
160 GB instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: m1.small
Large Instance
7.5 GB memory
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m1.large
Extra Large Instance
15 GB memory
8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m1.xlarge
Instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.
Micro Instance
613 MB memory
Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts)
EBS storage only
32-bit or 64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Low
API name: t1.micro
Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.
High-Memory Extra Large Instance
17.1 GB of memory
6.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
420 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: m2.xlarge
High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance
34.2 GB of memory
13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m2.2xlarge
High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance
68.4 GB of memory
26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m2.4xlarge
Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.
High-CPU Medium Instance
1.7 GB of memory
5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
350 GB of instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: c1.medium
High-CPU Extra Large Instance
7 GB of memory
20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: c1.xlarge
Instances of this family provide proportionally high CPU resources with increased network performance and are well suited for High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.
Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large Instance
23 GB of memory
33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
API name: cc1.4xlarge
Instances of this family provide general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) with proportionally high CPU and increased network performance for applications benefitting from highly parallelized processing, including HPC, rendering and media processing applications. While Cluster Compute Instances provide the ability to create clusters of instances connected by a low latency, high throughput network, Cluster GPU Instances provide an additional option for applications that can benefit from the efficiency gains of the parallel computing power of GPUs over what can be achieved with traditional processors. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.
Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large Instance
22 GB of memory
33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
API name: cg1.4xlarge
To get started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2, perform the following steps:
The AWS Management Console is an easy tool to start and manage your instances. If you are looking for more details on launching an instance, a quick video tutorial on how to use Amazon EC2 with the AWS Management Console can be found here .
A full list of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AMIs can be found in the AWS AMI Catalog.
All customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 will receive access to repository updates from Red Hat. Moreover, AWS Premium support customers can contact AWS to get access to a support structure from both Amazon and Red Hat.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide.
also from Revolution Analytics- in case you want to #rstats in the cloud and thus kill all that talk of RAM dependency, slow R than other softwares (just increase the RAM above in the instances to keep it simple)
,or Revolution not being open enough
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/downloads/gpl-sources.php
Revolution Analytics uses an Open-Core Licensing model. We provide open- source R bundled with proprietary modules from Revolution Analytics that provide additional functionality for our users. Open-source R is distributed under the GNU Public License (version 2), and we make our software available under a commercial license.
Revolution Analytics respects the importance of open source licenses and has contributed code to the open source R project and will continue to do so. We have carefully reviewed our compliance with GPLv2 and have worked with Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper, the outside General Legal Counsel of the Open Source Initiative, to ensure that we fully comply with the obligations of the GPLv2.
For our Revolution R distribution, we may make some minor modifications to the R sources (the ChangeLog file lists all changes made). You can download these modified sources of open-source R under the terms of the GPLv2, using either the links below or those in the email sent to you when you download a specific version of Revolution R.
| Product | Version | Platform | Modified R Sources |
| Revolution R Community | 3.2 | Windows | R 2.10.1 |
| Revolution R Community | 3.2 | MacOS | R 2.10.1 |
| Revolution R Enterprise | 3.1.1 | RHEL | R 2.9.2 |
| Revolution R Enterprise | 4.0 | Windows | R 2.11.1 |
| Revolution R Enterprise | 4.0.1 | RHEL | R 2.11.1 |
| Revolution R Enterprise | 4.1.0 | Windows | R 2.11.1 |
| Revolution R Enterprise | 4.2 | Windows | R 2.11.1 |
| Revolution R Enterprise | 4.2 | RHEL | R 2.11.1 |
| Revolution R Enterprise | 4.3 | Windows & RHEL | R 2.12.2 |
DECISION STATS 