Author Archives: Dan Rabin
Good talk on scaling data services
Werner Vogels of Amazon talks about availability and consistency at their kind of scale. What he says resonates with my experience from working at another big Web company.
¡Data Liberation, si!
Google [disclosure: a former employer] introduces the Data Liberation Front to ensure that all its services have simple data export functionality. Brad Fitzpatrick says: What does product liberation look like? Said simply, a liberated product is one which has built-in … Continue reading
Genome data at NCBI
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (U.S.) has a nice online viewer for the genomes of many organisms, including Homo sapiens. The human genome has just over 3 billion base pairs in about 25 thousand genes. This is a large … Continue reading
Making public data APIs is a business now
Jon Udell blogs about a company that builds interfaces to public-sector data. Udell points out, quite rightly, that “Give us the data†is an easy slogan to chant. And there’s no doubt that much good will come from poking through … Continue reading
New York City government seeks data miners
Sewell Chan and Patrick McGeehan report today in the New York Times that the New York City government is out to make its piles of public data actually usable: In what is planned to become an annual competition known as … Continue reading
Disk drive reliability in detail
I tend to get abstract and philosophical about data here, and it’s good to have have an occasional splash in the cold water of how the stuff gets stored. Jon Elerath’s article on hard disk reliability in the June 2009 … Continue reading
The two cultures
Jon Stokes has an excellent description of the two contrasting philosophies of information management in his comparison of the Palm Pre and the iPhone. He names the two approaches “structure-and-browse” and “collect-and-query”. I feel like I’ve been groping for these … Continue reading
OpenStreetMap constructs maps from GPS tracks!
Sources and uses of digital information are in-scope for this blog, and a great example just showed up in my RSS reader today. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-like project to build a world map using contributed GPS tracks [OpenGeoData pointed me … Continue reading