startups, technology and fishing

Alan Steele just tagged me to write 7 songs I like and then tag 7 people I know to do the same - kind of a blog chain letter. I don’t actually know 7 bloggers - and yes, I don’t get out much at all - in fact I’m pretty much an uber nerd who just fishes and writes code and both don’t require much interaction with humans. But I’ll give it a shot….

I’m tagging Jason Goldberg, Tony Wright, Joe Heitzeberg (can’t remember your blog url) and the Shy Guevaras (Sergio specifically!).

Please note that the first song has explicit lyrics and is not safe for work or kids.

1. NWA - Straight outta Compton

This is the original gangsta rap song. Pretty much launched the entire genre. The album has special meaning to me. I was in high school in 1991 in South Africa during apartheid. The school I was in was a private one and therefore one of the very few multi-racial schools in the country. A black friend (Natasha) was into NWA and black culture at the time and gave me a tape of their music. We used to spend hours having political debates at school. I ended up dating her friend (Claudette) and a white boy dating a black girl in apartheid South Africa was an interesting time of my life. This album captures that time.

2. Pearl Jam - Alive (Ten album)

Right after high school I joined a band doing half covers and half originals. We used to gig to a packed room at the local lifesaving club in Milnerton. The first gig we ever did was at the University of Cape Town and I was scared shitless. We covered Alive and it has an almost 2 minute guitar solo at the end that I totally pulled off. Good times!

3. Mother Love Bone - Come Bite the Apple

I left South Africa when I was 23 and went to live in London for 5 years. I was working for Credit Suisse after 6 months for about 1.5 years and living in Canary Wharf. I would walk to work with a Sony Minidisc player (where did they go?!) and listen to this song repeatedly whenever I was having a bad day and it would cheer me up. The lead guitar work in this song is just unbelievable - I love the whiny slow sound he gets. I never got into Mother Love Bone until after Andrew Wood died and it kills me that I’ll never see them live. Ah well - at least we have Pearl Jam.

4. Massive Attack - Three (from the protection album and City of Industry soundtrack)

My good friend Antonio Separovic has an eye for the artful and he told me one day that the movie City of Industry has the most amazing opening scene and soundtrack. I have slow moral and aesthetic reflexes, so it took me a while to catch on, but one day I was watching it for the 2nd time and it clicked. I was still living in London and Massive Attack had finally gone mainstream and the visuals and the song captured London beautifully even though it’s set in LA. Massive attack’s music reminds me of London and I had the pleasure of seeing them live at the London Arena.

5. Paul van Dyk’s Ministry of Sound session on friday night on Radio1 in London

There’s a session that Paul van Dyk did that was rebroadcast on Radio1 (who I worked for in 2003 but this was recorded in 2000 I think) and that my friend Marco Stichini and I used to listen to before a workout or a cycle to get psyched. It’s the most incredible 1 hour of Trance/Techno you’ll ever hear. It’s still floating around on the peer to peer file sharing networks today.

6. Rammstein - Du Hast

One night at 4am in 2004 after a rather harrowing experience (Atlanta - my friends know what I’m referring to) I walked into a bar in Table View in Cape Town and they were blasting Du Hast over this amazing sound system. I ended up drinking tequila with the barman and blowing off some steam. Du Hast captures that time.

7. Heart - Crazy on You

My amazing wife introduced me to Heart and the song Crazy on You is a great one for the stage I’m at in my life right now. Nancy Wilson’s guitar gives me chills and Anne Wilson is IMHO one of the best vocalists in the history of history. Heart came out of Bellevue, Washington and I’m very much into their music right now so I’ll have them as my 7th choice. Here’s the video of Crazy on You. There’s a 2 and a half minute acoustic guitar solo at the beginning. Enjoy!!

I was reminded again today of how incredibly important it is to team up with the right angels and how incredible the angels are that we teamed up with. One day when I’m not flying stealth I’ll write a book about this stuff. Until then you get the adventures of Ziggy my cat and other exciting stories.

Update: I noticed on my Feedjit that I got a bunch of visitors from CNN.com today. I think the blogs section below the story linked to this page at some point today.

Maybe using corn to produce gas for our cars isn’t such a great idea. Check out CNN’s headline today. Personally I’m pro-nuclear power - and ultimately using electricity from nuclear to power our cars. I grew up a few miles from a nuclear power station in South Africa and it was by far the cleanest industrial site around - compared to things like an oil refinery a few miles away that gave many kids down-wind from it asthma attacks. Sure radioactive waste is scary, but only because it doesn’t leave the power plant via a smokestack and go somewhere else so we can pretend it doesn’t exist. France has 59 nuclear reactors and they have so much power that they export it. We’re stuck back in the stone age digging up coal and pumping it into the air to make electricity - that is when our corporations aren’t gaming the power grid and providing rolling blackouts.

CNN) — Riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world’s attention, the head of an agency focused on global development said Monday.

Bangladeshi demonstrators chant slogans against high food prices during weekend protests.

“This is the world’s big story,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

“The finance ministers were in shock, almost in panic this weekend,” he said on CNN’s “American Morning,” in a reference to top economic officials who gathered in Washington. “There are riots all over the world in the poor countries … and, of course, our own poor are feeling it in the United States.”

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has said the surging costs could mean “seven lost years” in the fight against worldwide poverty.

“While many are worrying about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs, and it is getting more and more difficult every day,” Zoellick said late last week in a speech opening meetings with finance ministers.

[Thanks Sam for the idea for this entry] Ever heard of IP Anycasting? Thanks to my recent change from godaddy (frowny face and no link) to dnsmadeeasy (happy face and they get a link) I’m now using a DNS provider that provides anycasting. What is it and should you care?

IP Anycasting is assigning the same IP address to multiple instances of the same service on strategic points in the network. For example, if you are a DNS provider, you might have servers in New York, London and Los Angeles with the same IP address. Then when a surfer in San Diego (about 80 Miles South of Los Angeles) makes a request to your DNS system the server in Los Angeles answers and saves the network from having to route traffic to New York or London.

Anycasting is generally used to distribute load geographically and to mitigate the effect of distributed denial of service attacks. It’s been used by the F root server since November 2002 and has saved good ole F from getting taken down by several DDoS attacks.

I was using dnspark.net a couple of years ago and we had a few hours of down-time while they were hit by a DDoS attack - so it’s not as uncommon as you think. [They obviously don’t use anycasting]

Anycasting is suitable for DNS because DNS uses a connectionless session layer protocol called UDP. One packet is sent, a response is received and hey, if the response isn’t received the client just tries another DNS server. [This occurs in the vast majority of DNS queries. There are a small number of exceptions where DNS uses TCP.]

Anycasting is not ideally suited for TCP connections like web browser-server communication because TCP is connection oriented. For example, TCP requires a 3 way handshake to establish the connection. If the network topology changes and one packet is sent to the Los Angeles server and another is sent to New York it breaks TCP because the New York server doesn’t know about the session that Los Angeles has started establishing.

That’s the theory anyway, but if the network topology stays reasonably stable and you don’t mind a few sessions breaking when the topology does change then perhaps you’ll consider using Anycasting with your web servers. But don’t get too creative and launch a content delivery network. Akamai might sue you and they’ll probably win. They own patent No. 6,108,703 which covers a “global hosting system” in which “a base HTML document portion of a Web page is served from the Content Provider’s site while one or more embedded objects for the page are served from the hosting servers, preferably, those hosting servers near the client machine.” Akamai just won a case against competitor Limelight for violating that patent and the case is now heading to the appeal courts.

There are other protocols that are connectionless and therefore well suited for Anycasting like SNTP and SNMP but there isn’t much demand for these because they’re network management protocols and don’t experience the massive load that more public protocols like DNS, SMTP and HTTP get.

Deploying an anycast network is not something you’re likely to consider in the near future unless you’re eBay or Google, but outsourcing some of your services like DNS to an anycast provider is something that’s worked well for me and might work for you.

I had the great pleasure this morning of getting a surprise visit from Phil, Mark and Alan from Mergelab at our offices. We had an excellent chat and shared a little of what each of us is working on. It’s been great watching the rapid and early iterative approach they’ve taken to figuring out what business they’re in - many startups arrive at their C round still not knowing what they do - and it looks like they’ve hit on a very interesting space. They’re still in closed beta, but keep an eye on mergelab.com because they’re going public soon.

Our morning walk took us past two bald eagles sitting in a tall tree with no leaves so we had a great view. The NW Rocks!

Not to give widgets a bad name… (ours are FAST!!) but a friend is on the front page of Delicious and his facebook widget has just slowed his site to a crawl. It looks like badge.facebook.com is down right now.

Google has a Live Caucus Map in case you’re watching the Iowa caucuses this evening.

Saw this image on cnn.com this morning. It captures the essence of democracy. While I wonder if Barack knows what’s good for American business, I can’t help but like the guy.

I don’t get it.