Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Whenever I sign on to AIM, AOL keeps adding two AIM bots called “MovieFone” and “ShoppingBuddy” to a new “AIM Bots” group of my instant messenger. They also send you this system message:

(15:37:03) AOL System Msg: AIM added a new AIM Bots group to your Buddy List.
(15:37:07) AOL System Msg: Send IMs to moviefone and shoppingbuddy for great holiday flicks and gift ideas. (To remove ‘em, just right-click and delete! Learn More)

They have a site for the new creatures. Interestingly, when you remove them, they continue to spam you:

(15:41:28) AOL System Msg: The following bots are no longer available and have been removed from your buddy list: shoppingbuddy. To find out more about bots, go to aimtoday.aol.com/aimbots

It seems AOL has gotten spammy here with my contacts list. From now on it will be an add/remove arms race:

I even tried talking to the movie bot. It wasn’t very smart:

(15:43:41) liten fugl: hi
(15:43:41) MovieFone: Hi there. I’m the new MovieFone bot! I can find movies for you anywhere in the country in a fraction of second. All you have to do is give me part of the title, an actor or director’s name. I can also send you alerts when your favorite films are opening. Type privacy anytime to review the policy. Type any movie you want to see or menu to get going.

======= Movie of the Week =======
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Movie Site
(15:43:48) liten fugl: menu
(15:43:49) MovieFone: Main Menu
Select a number or just ask me about any film, actor or director and I’ll search for you.

1 - Find Movies Now
2 - Set Up Movie Alerts
3 - The First 5
4 - New Releases
5 - Games

======= Movie of the Week =======
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Movie Site
(15:43:53) liten fugl: 1
(15:43:54) MovieFone: - Find movies now
Select an option or just type a movie or artist name at any time:

1 - By Name
2 - By Cast / Director
3 - By Genre
4 - By Theater or Zip

Or you can just ask any time:
Example: Star Wars [DLP, Captions, etc.]
Example: Sup with Johnny Depp
Example: Tim Burton
Example: Horror flicks this Friday?
Example: Tomorrow’s showtimes for [your film]

======= Movie of the Week =======
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Movie Site
(15:44:11) liten fugl: Star Wars near 14853
(15:44:11) MovieFone:
- Movies for Today
1 -P- Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
2 -P- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Type # next to movie to see showtimes, M to go back to the Main Menu or anything else to search again.

P=Past, N=New, S=Soon, F=Future

(15:44:17) liten fugl: 1
(15:44:17) MovieFone: Enter a valid 5 digit zip-code.

(15:44:22) liten fugl: 14853
(15:44:22) MovieFone: Not valid 5 digit zipcode. Would you like to try again?

Y - Yes
N - No

======= Movie of the Week =======
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Movie Site
(15:44:27) liten fugl: n

Don’t book yourself with so many interviews and crazy flights back and forth from NYC that you can’t actually make them all because you’re too exhausted to wake up in time for your 5:30 taxi to the airport. Respect your body a little, and take it easy. Even if you can’t interview everywhere at once, it’s a lot better than missing a scheduled interview and having to write them a desperately apologetic email:

The fact that you’re getting this email from me means that something has gone pretty wrong–I missed my flight!! This has never happened to me before, so I dread writing you the email, but you need to know so you can do damage control. I am so terribly sorry–I placed demands on my body I couldn’t handle with my schedule.

Apologies,
Elliott C. Bäck

Professionally, I suppose these things happen and my recruiter will probably have expected it to happen again to someone this season, but I really wish it wasn’t me. This is such a freak accident and I feel really terrible about it…

With the failed launch of Google Analytics and its inability to deliver immediate statistics and tracking uniformly across the blogosphere, I thought I’d bring out a few big no-nos we can all learn from.

First, don’t touch paying customers. If you roll out a free system and a pay system with identical functionality, the service agreements must be different. Free customers have no expectation to 100% reliability, so create a special network just for them. You can redirect them when they login, for example.

Second, don’t deliver a batchy service. You should be able to handle realtime traffic and analysis. Even if your backend is batchy, it should update with a high level of regularity. Real time data demands a real time system.

Third, support an infinite number of users. There’s nothing worse than closing off signup because you’re overwhelmed, or seeing a “too many connections” error message. There should be no restriction on the number of users that can register for an use your new web service, because you built it to scale. Just add more machines, right?

Fourth, support bursty traffic. You know when you launch something very cool, especially if you’re a big company (Google, Microsoft) that you will need to deal with a huge surge of interest at launch. So you should probably have a special pool of company-wide product launch machines that you can utilize until the spike is over.

Fifth, be reliable. By this I mean that if you provide any kind of data-gathering service, it cannot go down. If you’re tracking my advertising dollars, my website statistics, or some other fact, you must continue gathering and recording that data unless the earth ends. You can fail to analyse or process it and queue it up for the future if absolutely needed, but you may not destroy my data.

Sixth, make it easy. Your software should be able to partition the problem into parts that can solved by many machines in parallel. Your software should allow you to task new machines instantly and get them up and running with the rest of the cluster with no hassle. Your software should detect and correct for machines that go down automatically. Your software should detect and repurpose new machines to do their work. Your software should leverage the end-user as much as possible to save load on your servers.

If companies paid more attention to scaling considerations, they wouldn’t suffer such embarrassing product launches. There’s no point in hype if when we all look at you, there’s nothing there.

My most recent music project is a little bit more ambitious and stranger than usual. I guess it’s a kind of noise piece, called Waking Phoenix:

Waking Phoenix.mp3

The idea here was to imagine the synergy between a sun-bird and waking up for the morning sunset. At the first part, the sun is rising, slowly, and brilliantly to an incredible heat. Then, the firebird wakes up in a rage of feathers and hot hot flame, cooling down when he realizes it’s morning, and slowly surveys the rest of the sunrise. So, from this sort of few frames of an image in my mind I tried to visualize a piece and produce it. We’ll see how it turns out.

People want me to come to places for interviews, want me to eat lunch with them, want me to do work for them, etc. Well, the way it works is as follows:

1) Go to my public calendar: elliottback.planzo.com/
2) Find a spot where there is no time
3) Email me and suggest we do activity x then

Unfortunately, there are many days already there that are double booked, and in another five years, will probably be triple booked or something crazy. Unless you’re one of my select elite who I will give freely of my time, you’ll just have to work the system.

I’m just too busy these days.