Hertz Mustang Shelby GT-H for sale!

The retail price for the Shelby GT-H is € 45000.-

More information on Hertz website

While trying to figure out what was new in the Spotify catalog since last time, I realized that as a newcomer there seems to be absolutely no way to see what is available in the catalog without downloading the rich client. I found that fairly surprising as the content is nowhere to be seen on the website, no promotion, no teasing. You need to download the rich client. Period.

By accident I found the Metadata API (If you manage to find it by browsing their website, tell me where because it sure isn’t obvious). So I was just experimenting with Google App Engine.. that was the ideal tiny project to try the Python version. So here we go, there is a very simple interface available at spotify-search.appspot.com.

The Spotify Metadata API is extremely limited, so there is not that many possibilities to implement something advanced, but it was the ideal small project to get an idea of the Python version of Google App Engine. Barely a couple lines of code and it makes use of the memcached, urlfetch, the Django template engine and cElementTree. The CSS is based on the Yahoo! YUI one.

I’ll extend it in the next couple of days as soon as I have more time in my hands.

Note: Google App Engine seems to have some reliability issues as it has been throwing 500 errors all day across the planet including in the admin console, so do not be surprised if you get something like that when you use the service.

I didn’t test yet all features of the API such as image transformation or XMPP, but focused mostly on the datastore. Luck or not the datastore seems to be plagued by latency issues. While you are supposed to deal with some degrees of failure when using cloud services, the current situation seems beyond normal and probably a bit challenging for real applications. Messages in the forums clearly indicate the status is worse than what the official status shows or we’re all unlucky. I’d be really curious to hear about production behaviors not too tainted by marketing pitch.

As of now, there is large amount of failures due to timeout, should it be when reading small or writing even the smallest entities. For writes, the Task Queue can help alleviate failure issues.Your mileage may vary, as the tasks are all URL based you will still need a bit more work than you would likely expect instead of just handling a simple datastore put in your code, but all in all the ‘retry until it’s ok’ implementation of the task queue can really be helpful. This is of course assuming you can live in most cases with delayed writes.

For read, this is a bit more problematic. Given the latency of the datastore for get and the failure rate, it does not seem doable to solely rely on it, even for the simplest personal CRUD application. Assuming you had just a todo list app, it would be kind of frustrating to save your entry about 10 times before it is saved and can be displayed in the list of entries. So no matter what, using the memcache API as much as possible seems to be a must, not for performance reason but simply because it is more reliable than the datastore. (one could argue this is a performance issue).

Despite these shortcomings, I’m favorably impressed with the Google AppEngine Java SDK, it works really well, the API is well done and is easy to use. Integration in Jetbrains IDEA 9.0 is pretty convenient.

Deployment is a breeze as well though it could do with a bit more polished error feedback, you can have a syntax error in your cron jobs which will go unnoticed in local deployment but upload to production will fail with a totally vague and irrelevant message. Also expect some large behavior differences however with the local datastore as it is much more flexible in term of what you can store. Typically, you can persist tens of thousand entities at once in local in a very fast put operation, but it is limited to 500 entities in production and the delay can be significant and will timeout. The infrastructure is not simulated either, so long running queries are not canceled in local like they tend to be in production. Overall while the local datastore is not exactly fast, the latency in production is at least an order of magnitude worse, so this something to get used to.

Bulk loading (or lack of that is) in the Java API is a bit of annoyance and you need to do it using the Python one.. which means you need to duplicate your models in both languages. It is manageable but not terribly attractive at the moment so I hope they will introduce it sooner rather than later.

That being said, I find myself more and more frustrated at the Java web framework landscape compared to the simplicity of doing it in Python. There sure is a lot of unnecessary complexity for simple things in the Java web environment those days. The thing that I still appreciate most compared to Python is the quality of the tools available for development and that as soon as you need to do something relatively complex, you will likely find a mostly solid existing solution for it.

So next step was to actually access the cdrom..which did not work, it was not mounted automatically and fstab ended up with 2 cdroms (not sure why) with /media/cdrom0 mapped to /dev/scd1 and /media/cdrom1 to /dev/scd0.

In addition, booting the instance, vmware complained about the floppy disk not accessible even though it was the usual default ‘autodetect’, and it seems to cascade into the entire disappearance of cdrom devices…oh well.

I kinda took a shot in the dark and modified fstab to keep only /media/cdrom0 mapped to /dev/scd0, manual mount..miracle I could see something.. then proceeded to reinstall vmware tools and I can now see shared folders… and all seems to be going well…for now.

• Google – because I use it for searching information constantly, as well as GMail, Documents, Maps and News on a daily basis
• Flickr – A nice place to share photos but also to look for inspiration.
• LinkedIn – I’m absolutely terrible at keeping contacts with people, LinkedIn changed this radically for me as it makes the contact information all accessible in one place with an incentive to update it.
• TripIt – In the same area, a regular complaint from family and friends is to know where and when I’m going to some places, with TripIt, it made it substantially easier as it will broadcast the information automatically.
• Amazon – Most of the books I buy are from this place.
• Wetpixel – To keep in touch with what’s happening in underwater photography land
• ScubaStore/DiveInn – I tend to buy most of my underwater gear online if I can. Fast and reliable service.
• InfoQ – The portal I regularly visit to get some tech news update. Agile articles are a bit overwhelming in the last couple of years though.
• Wikipedia – So convenient to read complete information about a topic in a digestible format.
• dpreview – To keep an eye on photography-related news
• TED – Because some things are worth spreading

I would have loved to have this from people from a much diverse background (ie non-technical), but the sinae qua non condition is that this person actually has a blog, so I do have to fallback to technical people on this one:
Emmanuel, Geir, Leo, Sylvain, Torsten

On a personal note, I owe a big thank you to Christophe Bisciglia from Cloudera.

Dell did not follow up with any of my emails regarding cancellation and refund but apparently managed to find a unit god knows how and shipped it to me in a week time. I suspect it looks better in the quarterly report to have a return than a canceled order.

I got it yesterday afternoon. In a normal situation I would have simply returned it, but the fact it was started to be equally a mission to order a Lenovo W500 in the Netherlands (shop says delivered in 2-3 days… a week later received an email saying it is not available, that it is too difficult to get and that I can choose a ’similar’ system), I just gave up and decided to try my luck with the Dell M4400 I originally ordered. I looked eventually at the HP 8530w but wasn’t convinced… I even considered a MacBook Pro so that says something…

I’m quite pleased with the laptop for now, even though when I opened the box, I wondered if the keyboard was fitted by a monkey at the factory, as it wasn’t even done properly. The WUXGA 1920×1200 RGB LED screen is really nice and it’s appreciated for photos though it will need a bit of calibration. On the negative side, the Intel Wifi 5300 AGN seems to create havoc with my old Linksys WRT54G router which just dies consistently after several minutes of video call with Skype so I suspect I will spend a bit of time digging deeper in the settings.

Fingers crossed.. let’s see how this laptop holds in the upcoming weeks.

Now is install time of all applications before traveling.

The next day I receive an email:

I’ve spoken to our Escalation manager, we would like to the exact status of the order before we act.
We are able to inform you tomorrow.

It takes them obviously so much time to figure out the status, that they need 48h to craft that simple email, I can already tell them the status… It wasn’t not delivered in a timely manner. A week later, I didn’t receive any news.

I’m sending again an email early friday…no reply. I’m calling the sales person. There’s only a voicemail. I’m calling his manager, there’s only a voicemail. Apparently nobody works on friday at Dell NL. I dropped a message making clear I’m starting to be really fed up by this lack of professionalism.

Monday has passed without any sort of information, today has been a week since I cancelled and asked for a refund. Way to go Dell !

The fact the Dell was so sturdy and I did not have any problem with it kind of influenced my decision to continue with Dell, so I was looking at something a bit more up-to-date, so my choice settled on Dell Precision M4400 which seemed to have reasonable reviews..wasn’t perfect by any mean, but it looked pretty much acceptable.

So I went to Dell Netherlands website and started to configure my laptop…just to realize that it was impossible to select the LED screen I wanted against the 2CCFL one since the webcam and LCD cover were incompatible with it and impossible to deselect. So .. fall back to phone call and do the configuration on the phone… a bit of a lenghty process, I receive the configuration via email, doublecheck and fix some mistakes… all in all it took about 3h and it’s the next day… and I wait to receive the payment instructions.. which I do immediately (bank transfer).. and this is yet another day.. and to next week.

So for an order placed on July 23 (thursday), it is effective on July 27 (monday) and the target delivery date is set to August 13. Uh…well, that’s no fast delivery is it ? Too bad, as I will be in Indonesia starting from the 13th.. so hopefully it will be arriving a couple of days before.

On August 9, I receive an email stating the delivery date is pushed to August 20.

On August 16, I receive an email stating the delivery date is pushed to September 18

On September 15, I impatiently wait for this laptop to arrive so that I can book my flight to New York..I have a friend on Skype who is joking that by the way it looks I will still be waiting for my laptop in January, which for some reasons makes me check the order status on Dell website…to realize it doesn’t display September 18, but October 26 ! All hell break lose and I’m calling customer service to have a nice lady in India who recites her text saying that there is a huge demand, etc etc… well thank you very much, I immediately write a mail to the sales manager I had on the phone as well as his manager saying I want to immediately cancel the order and get a refund within 48h. In the meantime, I go to a Dutch online shop and order a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 to (hopefully) be shipped within 2-3 days.

On September 16, I receive an email stating the delivery date is pushed to October 26. As I don’t have acknowledgment of reception, of my cancellation..I call the sales manager.. who tell me it has been escalated to the escalation manager and seem surprised I didn’t get any call yet…well sure enough by the end of the day, I still didn’t get any call back from the escalation manager.

So in the end, I’m far from being impressed with Dell and you can bet I won’t exactly run to place another order near time soon…and I’m still waiting for my money back.

One of the nice thing about diving is that it gives you the privilege to see what most people do not see. The ocean covering 75% of our planet means that there are numerous species that are still unknown to science and behavior of marine life still brings its share of novelties. It is not something that should be of any surprise given how limited can be the time of observation underwater for a human, but still something that we tend to forget.

Doing underwater photography also clearly makes you discover yet another world which are the colors that one cannot see underwater. Typically, white appears bluish at the surface and past 5m red starts to look dark sometimes appearing entirely black. Usage of strobes underwater brings to our eyes a world full of intense colors.

A few weeks ago, I was diving in Anilao in the Philippines with a group of friends, all of us doing underwater photography as a hobby and we were able to observe an extremely rare behavior: a lizardfish attempting to eat a frogfish. While for the casual reader this may sound relatively boring, one has to know that frogfish are particular to underwater photographers as they are a subject of choice due to their particular feature: the first dorsal spine is modified as a fishing lure to attract prey.. and they have unique ‘facial’ characteristics. Moreover, observing predatory behavior underwater is also pretty rare in itself for the reason mentioned earlier.

The particularity about this event was the reaction of the frogfish which self-inflated in a defensive behavior and put the lizardfish with quite a mouthful. While this behavior was known by science, it has apparently never been observed widely nor even photographed. I stayed more than 30min around the lizardfish that did a couple of quick release/catch to try different angles without much success, the frogfish was still alive and ‘breathing’.

In a communication with Theodore W. Pietsch, professor and curator of fishes at the University of Washington (who recently published a paper following the discovery of a new specie of frogfish), he suggested to me that those pictures may well be the first to show this behavior and he was kind enough to quote the portion of his book Frogfishes of the world related to body inflation:

Numerous authors have commented on the ability of frogfishes to expand their stomachs enormously by swallowing large quantities of air or water, an adaptation usually attributed only to the pufferfishes (families Diodontidae and Tetraodontidae), a few filefishes (genus Brachaluteres, family Balistidae; see Clark and Gohar, 1953:46, fig. 12), and swell sharks (genus Cephaloscyllium, family Scyliorhinidae). The capacity to “expand their bellies like a balloon”; was first recognized by Marcgrave (1648:150) and later confirmed by Commerson (ca. 1770; MSS 889, 891), Cuvier (1817b:422), Swainson (1838:202), Valenciennes (1837:389), Gunther (1861:184), and a host of twentieth-century authors including Jordan and Sindo (1902:367), Gregory (1933:388), Gordon (1938:20), Schmitt (in Longley and Hildebrand, 1941:304, 305), Barbour (1942:31), Schmitt and Longley (in Schultz, 1957:52), Bohlke and Chaplin (1968:714, 718), Randall (1968:291), and Halstead (1978:354). In the most significant of these many reports, Gordon (1938:20) wrote that Histrio histrio sometimes “uses the quick gulping technique for self-defense. If it is attacked by a larger fish,. . . [it] throws open its jaws, swallows water as it is on the point of being devoured, and instantly pumps itself up to an unexpected size. Thus the swallower is forced to cough up the swallowee.” In summary, a survey of the literature strongly suggests that body inflation is an often-used defensive response in frogfishes, functioning to ward off potential predators or to defend a feeding or shelter site from intra- and interspecific competitors.

It is true that at least some species of frogfishes (Antennarius striatus, A. hispidus, A. ocellatus, A. radiosus, and Histrio histrio) inflate themselves with air when removed from the water, but initiating this response nearly always takes a considerable amount of poking and manipulation on the part of the experimenter. Furthermore, in all of our 14 years of experience in maintaining living antennariids in laboratory aquaria, often harassing the animals beyond what might be expected under natural circumstances, we have not witnessed a single case of body inflation due to swallowing water. Thus we conclude that reports of frogfishes that have inflated themselves with water-filled stomachs, if not false, describe something that occurs very infrequently in nature and is perhaps an ability confined to H. histrio. We also conclude that observations of inflation by swallowing large quantities of air have all resulted from human removal of frogfishes from their natural medium.

Gunther (1861:184) went further than most by suggesting that body inflation provides a mechanism for dispersal: frogfishes are “enabled, by filling the spacious stomach with air, to sustain themselves on the surface of the water. . . . They are therefore found in the open sea as well as near the coasts, and being bad swimmers, are driven with the currents into which they happen to fall.” Jordan and Sindo (1902:367), in apparent reference to Gunther (1861), added that they are “therefore widely dispersed by the currents of the sea.” Although some antennariids, particularly Histrio histrio, may drift on the surface in an inflated state for short distances, it seems very unlikely that geographic distributions have been altered substantially in this way.

In addition, as confirmed by Rachel Arnold from the University of Washington, this frogfish is also a specie is yet to be described. As it is, it seems to be at this time relatively common to a particular area where we have been diving in Anilao as I have had pictures of about a dozen different one of various patterns and colors such as the grey one on the left. More will be available on Flickr in the next couple of days as I continue to go through all the shots taken during this period.