Malletrivia

Official pontificating on Live Mesh

I have a post up on the datacenter architecture of the services behind Live Mesh, over at our official blog.

Technorati tag: LiveMesh

What is the sound of one Mesh clapping ?

While reading some of the coverage about Live Mesh, I came across this:

"Can Mesh support Twitter streams orchestrated by identity mapping via affinities and abstracted to devices across OS, mobile, and corporate divides via Silverlight?"

Try as I might, I really have no idea what that question means. I think it might be a koan. Now I just have to wait for the moment of enlightenment generated by pondering it.

We're live !

Live Mesh, the product I've been working on for the last 2 years is live ! I'm sitting in a conference room at work switching between watching the performance of our systems, reading the news and blog posts that have sprung into existence in the last 20 minutes ie since it was officially unveiled at 9pm PDT, and watching Mesh-related tweets [via Tweetscan]. It's pretty damn cool.

Some links for your convenience:

- The official blog post
- TechCrunch coverage
- CNet coverage
- Some more official coverage, including overview videos etc

... and so on.

Update: my favorite phrase in the coverage so far comes from the NYT article: "Live Mesh’s logo is a Tolkienesque graphical ring...". Yeeesss, Live Mesh is our preciousss ...

"I will shatter your feeble sports records with my invincible Iron Leg Technique !"

Almost exactly 3 years ago, I wrote about a family setting records in competitive taekwondo, namely the Lopez siblings from Texas. Well, they continue to set records: three of them are on the taekwondo team for the 2008 Olympics, and they'll be coached by their brother. So all 4 siblings are going to the Olympics.

Oh, and Steven Lopez *still* hasn't lost a match.

I mean, damn.

Drug dealers abhor a vacuum

We had a couple of brief, shining, glorious days of hope when we heard last weekend that the local version of Nino Brown had finally been arrested and evicted. The sun came out, birds were singing and no shady characters were parking next to our house for 10 minutes, dumping a year's worth of fast-food and malt liquor containers on the street, and then driving away with their drug of choice.

Alas, our joy was short-lived. Somebody else has taken up the niche in the ecosystem that was occupied by the old dealer, except that the new one apparently operates in a more mobile fashion: instead of dealing out of a house, he walks around the neighborhood all day, handing out "candy". In retrospective marketing-speak, I suppose it was naive to consider that an area with such high brand-name recognition and concentration of consumers would not immediately draw a willing supplier. 

I suppose the upside is that we should still see a net reduction in undesirables on our street because now they have to find a moving target.

[And the nerd in me wonders whether, if you assume that people on average drive 20-30mph, the average block in our area is about 50 yards etc, there's some optimum speed and route that he can walk in order to minimize the amount of time his customers need to find him.]