Category Archives: Other

Stephen Few’s “Bricks”

Stephen Few has introduced “bricks” as a possibly clearer method for geospatial analysis. I think the 9-block version is an excellent idea. Here are my thoughts.

  • One could say that the area of the shapes can’t easily be compared. I don’t think a bar-chart-style comparison even applies here. I can’t ask my preattentive mind, but I felt that I instantly understood the relative size of the 9-square bricks without any regard to arrangement.
  • Given my sense of how I perceived the 9-square bricks, the profiles of each shape could be made more distinctive, especially those in sequence. There’s no need for one side to remain flat. Similarly, why should 3 be a linear extension of 2?
  • I don’t see any problem with color shading, or any need for interior lines in the 9-square brick, and less so with more distinctive shapes.
  • I don’t think overlapping bricks are an issue either. And I’m quite sure it’s not a problem if the bricks are semi-transparent. Semi-transparent bubbles are easy to distinguish when overlapped, and so would semi-transparent bricks. Distinguishing shapes would be easier if the outline of each brick was intensified.

So, I’m suggesting that this makes the most sense as a shaded, semi-transparent, darkened-outline collection of 9 distinctive brick shapes.

I was distracted by the 81-square version. I found a fire truck, a capitol building, a hotel and and tugboat in seconds. The subconscious shape association added a real challenge to comparing the sizes.

The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet

As someone in charge of DDoS mitigation at one of the Internet giants emailed me this weekend: “I’ve often said we don’t have to prepare for the largest-possible attack, we just have to prepare for the largest attack the Internet can send without causing massive collateral damage to others. It looks like you’ve reached that point, so… congratulations!”

The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet

HP’s Continued Decline

Want more evidence of how HP is doing? Read this article about HP’s cloud efforts. It calls out SLAs as a key differentiator. In their eyes, the reason customers will pick HP over Amazon is a number on a contract. I wanted to cry.

Protection by SLA is no protection at all. Every competent cloud architect gets this. They expect failure, design for it, and cause failure as a method of testing. Good architecture renders the SLA irrelevant. Good cloud providers will get involved in their customers’ architecture, primarily to ensure customer satisfaction with the results, but also to avoid paying out unnecessarily under an SLA. In that sense, I guess a good SLA would serve to motivate the cloud provider, but that’s a different discussion.

Anyway, out comes Gartner’s assessment to say that HP’s SLA is hardly better than Amazon’s. So now what have you got? Hewlett and Packard are on permanent grave rotation.

There Is No Desktop. Only Mobile.

“…through the last quarter, I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones. And we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products. And so I think iPad, it’s a profound product.”

Tim Cook, Apple CEO