Brain Lint

Beware LED christmas lights by Phillips - they have an annoying 60Hz flicker!
I decided to do the power saving or environmentally conscious thing and buy LED christmas lights to decorate the apartment this year. We picked up a 60 “bulb” set by Phillips for $12 and once they were up it was immediately noticeable that they flicker at a rate just low enough to be perceptible. It should be obvious to anyone that has taken the most basic of electrical engineering courses that AC current flows in two directions, and diodes only let current flow one way, so the LEDs will be dark half the time. Any useable LED set needs to have a rectifier to power the LEDs with DC current instead so they light up steadily.

I saw a review of them here (after the fact of course) and it indicates the flicker might have been fixed in this year’s model, but I can confirm its not.

So if you’re in the market for LED lights, look for some higher quality lights that give off steady light - the things last practically forever so it’s probably worth the investment.

I saw on nytimes.com today “I.B.M. to Push ‘Cloud Computing,’ Using Data From Afar“. The idea is to make it easier to process large volumes of data using centralized computing capacity in the “cloud”. Despite having several hundred phds working on this, they’re offering the exact same software (Hadoop) and vaunted “google programming model” as you can already use, (at 10 cents per server-hour) on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

When you’re out innovated and out maneuvered in bringing a (open source) technology to market by a book company, its no wonder your stock price is basically stagnant.

I recently had the opportunity to use Amazon EC2 to process ~35 gigs of log files for someone and it was quite easy, costing me about $15 in data transfer and CPU time fees, and I bet it would have been cheaper/faster if I’d taken the time to use something like hadoop.

Andrew Sullivan writes a great article “Goodbye To All That” in this months Atlantic painting 2008 Presidential election as the continuation of the Boomer-generation’s civil war that started with Vietnam and lumbers forward even now, and more importantly how Obama can bridge that bitter divide (claiming more republicans would vote for him than any other democrat) and rebrand America.

There’s also a follow up interview with the author.

A recent NYT op-ed mentions this article too.