Category: NewsFeed

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Best Description of the Likely Cascading Failure That Took Out EC2

Let’s think of a failure mode here: Network congestion starts making your block storage environment think that it has lost mirrors, you begin to have resilvering happen, you begin to have file systems that don’t even know what they’re actually on start to groan in pain, your systems start thinking that you’ve lost drives so at every level from the infrastructure service all the way to “automated provisioning-burning-in-tossing-out” scripts start ramping up, programs start rebooting instances to fix the “problems” but they boot off of the same block storage environment.

You have a run on the bank. You have panic. Of kernels. Or language VMs. You have a loss of trust so you check and check and check and check but the checking causes more problems.

via On Cascading Failures and Amazon’s Elastic Block Store « Joyeur.

Closing in on 36 hours since this melt down began, Amazon has still not been able to restore all of the EC2 instances and EBS volumes that where knocked offline in the #SkynetMassacre. This article is the best explanation of what most likely happened. And the scary part is that it will happen again. And again.

Sadly, there is not a lot to do but try and build enough redundancy into your systems to survive this sort of thing. But it is likely that building that redundancy is going to bring about another melt down at some point. Guess I’ll just need to keep thinking about how to deal with this sort of thing.

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ABA Standards Review Committee To Hold Public Forum 4/2/11 On Accreditation Changes

[T]he ABA Standards Review Committee (SRC), the body that proposes changes to the law school accreditation standards for action by the ABA Council on Legal Education, is holding its next  public forum in Chicago during the morning of Saturday, April 2, 2011.   The SRC is actively considering issues concerning legal education broadly,  student learning outcomes,  faculty status, governance and security of position.

via Input needed: Newest SRC Accreditation Revisions & Chicago Meeting « Best Practices for Legal Education.

Be sure to visit the ABA SRC website for the latest drafts of the proposed changes to the accreditation standards. Look for the “Meeting Date: April 2-3, 2011” heading about half way down the page for the drafts as PDFs.

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The Report of Current Opinions: Santa Comes Early to the Open Law Movement

Public.Resource.Org will begin providing in 2011 a weekly release of the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP). The Report will initially consist of HTML of all slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government. The feed will be available for reuse without restriction under the Creative Commons CC-Zero License and will include full star pagination.This data is being obtained through an agreement with Fastcase, one of the leading legal information publishers. Fastcase will be providing us all opinions in a given week by the end of the following week. We will work with our partners in Law.Gov to perform initial post-processing of the raw HTML data, including such tasks as privacy audits, conversion to XHTML, and tagging for style, content, and metadata.

via The Report of Current Opinions – O\’Reilly Radar.

On Sunday Dec. 19 Carl Malamud made the startling announcement quoted above. And you did read it correctly: “The Report will initially consist of HTML of all slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government. ” To say that this is huge would be the understatement of the year.

From personal experience I can tell you that the “slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government” have never all been freely available in HTML before. Not even close. At best you could probably wrangle 75% of these opinions in PDF using a mountain of code to scrape sites and parse feeds. To have all this available as a single feed is a game changer.

As a researcher and builder of tools for legal research and education, having access to a single feed that contains all of this data is just the thing I’ve been looking for (and occasionally trying to build) for the past 15 or so years. I have no doubt that the availability of this feed will spark a flurry of development to use the data in new and interesting ways. I will certainly be incorporating it in the CALI tools I’m currently working on.

Of course there are a couple of caveats here. First, we haven’t seen the feed yet. It won’t be available for a few weeks, so right now I’m still just waiting to see what it will look like. Second, there are 2 “timeouts” built into this service, direct government involvement by July 1, 2011 and a general sunset of private sector activity in creating the feed at the end of 2012. The timeouts underscore the belief that providing free and open access to primary legal materials is a duty of the government, plain and simple. As citizens we are bound to follow the law and our government should be obligated to provide us with free and open access to that law.

I know I’m certainly looking forward to a new year that brings greater free and open access to the law. Thanks, Carl.

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Google eBooks: Hey Amazon, Look At Us?

Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world’s Duke Nukem Forever: vaporware for seven years, depending on how you count. Its actual emergence was like the birth of a unicorn. A mewling, misshapen, half-baked unicorn.

Google eBooks: Is That All There Is?.

So, yep, Google launched an eBookstore. It really is a direct shot across the bow of Amazon, but Google should have gone for something with a bigger caliber.  As this article notes it has taken Google a lllooonnnggg time to get here, but one does wonder if “here” moved in the meantime and Google some how missed it.

There are really good reasons to believe that Google’s only real competition is Amazon, after both sites are just trying to sell you stuff. The thing is, Amazon sells directly while Google sells through search. And the fact that Google wraps everything in search actually puts it at a disadvantage.

When I’m looking for information I go to Google. When I want to buy something I go to Amazon. But that isn’t what Google wants to tell advertisers. Google needs those big spenders to think that people are searching Google to buy stuff. Amazon, OTOH, is a big retail search engine. People really do buy stuff there, not click thorugh ads to somewhere else to buy.

Try this: search Google for Sony Televisions. One of the top sponsored links is right to Amazon. If you see this enough, that direct link to Amazon for stuff you want to buy, sooner or later it will occur to you to just go to Amazon to look for stuff to buy. Just skip Google. And I have to think that is Google’s worst nightmare. If folks go directly to Amazon to buy stuff without searching Google first, then that ad money is lost to Google.

So, back to the bookstore. The Google bookstore is an attempt to try and harness the stuff that Google does real well, crunch lots of data in interesting ways, and turn it into retail dollars spent on the Google site. That would show Amazon! Look we can sell stuff too! It is a gamble though since retailing (even ebooks) is really different than search. But who knows, maybe some day a search for Sony Televisions will return a big “Buy Now” button taht takes you right to Google Checkout.

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Finding Spam on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

At this point, Amazon Mechanical Turk has reached the mainstream. Pretty much everyone knows about the concept. Post small tasks online, pay people cents, and get thousands of micro-tasks completed.
Unfortunately, this resulted in some unfortunate trends. Anyone who frequents just a little bit the market will notice the tremendous number of spammy HITs. (HIT = a task posted for completion in the market; stands for Human Intelligence Task.) Test if the ads in my website work”. “Create a Twitter account and follow me”. “Like my YouTube video”. “Download this app”. “Write a positive review on Yelp”. A seemingly endless amount of spam HITs come to the market, mainly with the purpose of spamming “social media” metrics.

via Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% spam. – A Computer Scientist in a Business School.

Article points out that spammers tend to pay too much and only assign one HIT per request. Comments reveal that workers on MT can be relatively sophisticated in detecting spam, often wary of requests that seem too good to be true. So, if you’re thinking about using Mechanical Turk to get some work done, keep in mind that the request should offer a reasonable fee and include multiple HITs.

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Getting jQuery Right From The Start

jQuery has changed the way we write Javascript by abstracting out much of the painful cross-browser implementation details that used to plague developers, but to use it correctly still requires a little knowledge about what’s going on under the hood. In this post we’ll take a good look at jQuery’s selectors and how to use them efficiently.

Wealthfront Engineering: jQuery the Right Way.

One of the best explanations of how jQuery works and how to use it properly I’ve seen. Best part is the inclusion of things that will actually slow jQuery down, resulting in a poor experience for your visitors, coupled with faster alternatives.

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Google’s Book Count Not Really a Book Count Per Se

But the problem with Googles count, as is clear from the GBS count post itself, is that GBSs metadata collection is a riddled with errors of every sort. Or, as linguist and GBS critic Goeff Nunberg put it last year in a blog post, Googles metadata is “train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.”

via Googles count of 130 million books is probably bunk.

Good article pointing out the problems with 130,000,000 books number  put out in a Google blog post last week. The bottom line is that the number represents Google’s best guess at a count of what it considers books based on flawed and incomplete meta data records it has on hand. As relayed to us by a software engineer.

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U of IL Library Project Archives Computer Games

Sometime this August, librarians at the University of Illinois will finish archiving over a dozen famous computer games, then step back to consider where to go next with their project. These programs go back over four decades, and include a 1993 version of Doom, various editions of Warcraft, and even MIT’s Spacewar! circa 1962.

Ars Technica – Saving “virtual worlds” from extinction.

Now this is the sort of digital preservation I could get into. It will interesting to see how they solve all the issues around hardware dependency that comes with these old games, “[W]hat we’re trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game.” Big job for librarians. Seems like figuring out how to keep copies of digital texts around should be a walk in the park after this.

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Sen. Ted Kennedy’s FBI Files Released Just in Time for Beach Reading Season

Edward “Ted” Moore Kennedy served as U.S. senator for the state of Massachusetts from November 7, 1962 until his death. He was a long-time leader in the Democratic Party and candidate for that party’s presidential nomination. During his senate tenure, Kennedy served in several senior leadership positions, including stints as the chair of the Judiciary Committee, the Labor and Human Resource Committee, and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Edward “Ted” M Kennedy – Federal Bureau of Investigation – Freedom of Information Privacy Act.

Most of the files cover “FBI investigation of threats of violence and other extortion claims against Senator Kennedy and other public officials”. The files are in PDF format, scans of type written pages mostly. Hopefully someone will take it and do something useful like make it searchable.

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Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials

Now there are 195 volunteers across the country working on federal and state level inventory projects, as it is now a full-fledged activity of the American Association of Law Libraries.  This project marries very nicely with AALL’s continued leadership and advocacy on  topics ranging from permanent public access to authentication to official status of online legal materials.   Much of this work draws and builds upon the fine work of the AALL Electronic Legal Information Access and Citation Committee.

National Inventory of Legal Materials – Bits and Pieces « Legal Research Plus.

Article provides updates on what is going on with the NILM. There is a round table discussion of NILM scheduled for 6/25/10 at CALIcon.