Dr. Chucks Blog

I am totally geeked to be here at Google IO. My main interest is in the Google Application Engine followed by the OpenID and OpenAuth stuff.
The coolest announcement is that AppEngine is now wide open for business – anyone can get an account.
It is amazing how open things are – it is so open that things seem unfinished at times – it is like we just showed up inside of a companies’ R/D lab and are a fly on the wall. I am sure there are many things that Google has in the works that we are not hearing about – but those things they are telling us about are their “trunk” of ideas. We are supposed to dive in and be part of it and evolve it. (whatever it is). It is OK that thinks feels like version 0.9 sometimes – hey some of my favourite software never got past version 0.9!
The people here are surprisingly serious – this is not a geek fest.
App Engine is awsome – it will cost money but a base level account will remain free – basically they are giving everyone a simple dr-chuck.com site – a place to experiment and develop their software and content. Think of this as an ultimate personal portfolio where you can make your own software to augment your portfolio.
The AppEngine is based on Google’s BigTable – a really fast hash/array/shard data store – it is an extremely fast object store – not a relational database.
Probably the coolest thing about App Engine and the talks that I went to is that it is all bout speed and scalability. They want you to write applications that use a small amount of resources – and that scale beautifully and so you don’t get nailed with CPU charges.
I have not been in a crowd so obsessed with speed and scalability since the Supercomputing crowd in the mid 1990’s – when I wrote my HPC book for O”Reilly – it is refreshing to listen to folks talk about how to write kick-arse software – not just easy software – but the great thing is that it is also pretty easy – you just have to avoid doing any filtering in memory! Hmmm – sounds like http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-13584.
I ran into Chase Phillips of NCSA/NEES project and Nicola Monat-Phillips from NYU – but have not yet run into Casey Dunn – and Casey is easy to spot unless of course he changed his hair style.
Off to the party tonight and open bar – more tomorrow.
Update: I ran into Casey Dunn and David Mills (of Angel) at the evening party.

So, I am chilling in Edinburgh this week – I was asked to serve on the Science Advisory Board of the National eScience Centre (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/) in Edinburgh. I love the eScience center because it is a neural cross-disciplinary place where it is not about a single science or field – where all fields meet on neutral turf – I have learned much from the people I have met and friends I have made during my six visits to the NESC in the past 4 years. Now I am on their advisory board – Sweet!
But NESC is not what this story is about.
After the day long board meeting, most of the participants scattered to the airport and their hotels – a four of us including Malcolm Atkinson decided to get a pint (or two) at the Royal Oak – Malcolm’s favourite pub – it is on a side street off Bridge street about a mile from downtown and the train station.
Here is a link to a map showing the Royal Oak on Infirmary Street in Edinburgh
It is smaller on the inside than on the outside – it is about 16-feet by 16-feet and we were four guys having a pint and one other person who looked like a street person getting warmed up (perhaps earlier he had been sitting on a park bench…). The place could only hold about 18-20 people max. A guy walked in and started talking at the bar. Malcolm noticed my eyes get really wide and asked me “what is the matter” – I stammered “I think I know that guy” – who was about 4 feet away but had not even looked at me because he was trying to find out if the bar was serving food. He was wearing weird glasses so I was a bit confused. But his accent was right and everything else about him looked right.
Apparently the bar was not serving food so this guy started to bolt out the door because he had a group of people waiting on the street for him – again he was not looking at me because he was so focused on getting food for his entourage.
Before he got out the door – I took a risk and shouted “Hey Tony – is that you???”. My eScience pals were confused – we had just been talking about Tony Hey (a UK eScience legend – picture at the right) – so they thought that somehow I had seen Tony Hey. Tony Hey *is* on the Science Advisory Board but he could not make it because he was busy at Microsoft – so it would be weird for Tony Hey to not make the meeting and yet come all the way from Redmond, Washington to have a pint at the Royal Oak.

But it was *not* Tony Hey it was none other than Sakai’s own Tony Atkins (aka Dr. Collab) – sporting his new glasses (see photo) that he recently had to get to take his UK drivers test.
It turns out Tony and his family was on vacation from Stornaway in Edinburgh. We laughed and hugged and took a picture – and then Tony had to scoot because his whole family was pretty hungry. We said that we would see each other again in Paris.
With me 3000 miles from home and Tony 150 miles from home and given that I am only in Edinburgh for 36 hours and Tony was only likely here for a day or so – and that the bar is pretty far away from downtown – and on a side street – it will be pretty hard to top this “small world” story.
I only regret that the Sakaiger was not with me to say hi to Tony! Sakaiger was back at my hotel room.

SO I am in Edinburgh to visit the eScience Center (one of my favorite places). The trip was pretty cool – I got upgraded to business class on United – mad props to them. But this story is about something else.
- The hotel has free networking – but not WiFi
- I have a Mac Air with no wired network port
- I had not bought the $10.00 USB Ethernet adapter (because I am stupid)
So here I am at a hotel and not able to connect to a free network. That is a tiny bit ironic but mostly sad.
The ironic bits are what happened next…
Irony #1: I walk around for a while asking various Internet cafes if they have USB Ethernet (knowing that this is very rare) and finally one tells me there is an Apple store *1 block away from my hotel* and if I had made a left turn out of the hotel – I would have walked right past it.
Irony #2: I get to the Apple store right before close and walk in thinking my problems are over. The guy says he is all out of Apple USB Ethernet adapters – there is not much call for them – but strangely today three people came into the store and bought his stock completely out.
So close and yet so far – Ironic.
Tomorrow at the meeting – I bet I will see a bunch of Mac Airs sporting nifty new USB Ethernets – I was the latest one to arrive. So I lost.
Here I am at a Wifi Cafe.

I took Brent and one of his friends to Speed Racer last night. I liked it a lot. Originally, I figured that I owed the Wachowski brothers a look at the movie given how much I enjoyed the Matrix series. I even sprung for the iMAX version of the Movie at a cost of an extra four bucks per person.
I really liked the movie – I never got the feel that it was a video game. I felt the editing was outstanding and they almost never spent too much time on a SFX shot or fight scene. The neat thing was the strong character development and strong plot line – for me it felt as though the plot revealed itself nicely – just enough to keep you on the edge of your seat abut the *characters* – not about the SFX.
The plot layers many common themes – hidden identity, evil manipulative business types, the little guy fighting for truth, justice and the car racing way. There was romance – Trixie is very very pretty and well played – she is the perfect live Anime girl – her eyes are so big one wonders if it were special effects.
All the characters were well cast and while there was always a temptation to go over the top with the characters – they did not go over the top – to the extent when the evil businessman gives his expected speech – you want to listen to see *how* it will turn out so that evil and greed always triumph. Everything in the movie had a little tiny twist and additional layers to avoid the cliches that would have been so easy to fall in to.
In a sense, the Wachowski brothers know that great writing is the bedrock of film making and great editing is what brings it all together. For me – I was pleased with all aspects of this film.
I have a couple of nitpicks on editing and pacing – I thought that the rally sequences should have been edited a bit tighter – the fact that the good guys pretty much did the same thing to several sets of bad guys in the desert bit – this could have been shortened and focused. The two main fight scenes (in the hotel and at the pass) also felt a bit repetitive.
Some of the break through cool bits – I loved the parking scene and how the background turns to hearts – they do this several times where the background fades to some graphical representation of emotion or feeling – very cool. I particularly liked the graphics when you looked at the crowd from the wining podium at the end – it was like a form of new-age impressionist painting that captures the essence of something without fine detail. Instead of representing reality – they represent how we remember reality.
My overall rating is that it was worth the iMax price – I truly enjoyed it.

Deb Balzhiser Morton was preparing for a presentation at an upcoming conference and started an interesting discussion in the Pedagogy group. The following slightly edited excerpt of her questions triggered me to try to clarify some aspects of openness.
I’m presenting at the Computers & Writing conference next week: