wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

A shameless plug for my employer. Come work for the Personalization team (or the P13N team as it’s known internally to give it a wam fuzzy feeling) at Amazon.com

We do really cool stuff. Honest. Take a look at this presentation on “Front Line Internet Analytics at Amazon.com“. It’s from a talk my boss gave at the Emetrics 2004 summit recently.

July 22nd, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Listening to The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen in 20 minute segments during my daily commute to work. Pretty entertaining so far. I’d become a little bored by the previous audio book I’d been listening to in my car.

From a technical standpoint I liked the usability of the audio tapes. The beginning and end of each side is identified audibly. I’ve had frustrating experiences rewinding and switching sides with other audio books just to figure out which side I’m listening to. I’ve actually ended up listening to chapters out of order this way. An interesting experience, but probably not one intended by the author.

July 20th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

One line reviews of some films I’ve seen recently:

Before Sunset – 8/10. Sweet and funny. Go watch it even if you haven’t seen part one. Worth adding to my all time favorite movie list.

Sex and Lucia – 7/10. I liked it about as much as Y tu mamá también. Both start out strong and attempt a forceful ending which doesn’t quite work. Paz Vega, the female lead is certainly worth watching.

I, Robot, King Arthur, Spiderman – 4/10. Couldn’t tell them apart, except maybe for the female leads. Will anyone even remember these in a year’s time?

July 19th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I’m only two days behind the times… DOOM 3 has gone gold and expected on shelves on August 03. Well, my trigger finger has had enough time to heal. Bring on the fragging!

Good thing I got my PC out of storage. Now it’ll just be me, the bare walls and blood curling screams from my headphones.

July 16th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

So I signed up for a Broomball team yesterday. What is Broomball you ask?

The official description states: “Broomball is played indoors on an ice hockey rink or outdoors on frozen ponds or lakes with rules very similar to Ice Hockey. Players wear special padded sponge rubber shoes, use a ball which is sized somewhere between a soccer ball and slow pitch softball, and use specially designed manufactured brooms which are made of wood or aluminum. The goal like hockey is to put the ball in the opposing net, a net which is larger than a hockey net but much smaller than an outdoor soccer goal.”

I’m told that here we play a modified version of the game at our yearly company picnic. Our homegrown variant combines aspects of traditional broomball and soccer. We play on a grass field, use a larger rubber “exercise ball”, and have goal lines instead of nets. After you toss in a dash of bloodlust usually reserved for the likes of rugby and back-to-school shopping, a traditional yearly broken bone or two, and voila!

I could use a little skeletal readjustment, I guess. Long overdue.

July 15th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Attended the first lecture of a three part series on “Van Gogh to Mondrian” at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) last night. Extremely eye opening. My favorite painting in the many shown during the lecture was this one:

Wheat fields with crows (1890) by Vincent Van Gogh

I’m really looking forward to the other two lectures now.

July 13th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I went to see a rendition of Carmina Burana by Carl Orff at Benaroya Hall, the home of the Seattle Symphony.

The orchestra started off with Igor Stravinksy’s Firebird Suite before playing Carmina Burana. The former was good, the latter was excellent. The concert hall had superb acoustics, even in the cheap seats. Of course it turned out that I had heard parts of it before, but until now hadn’t ever realized what the original composition was. The opening was very similar to Vangelis’ 1492.

The choir was about 275 person strong. Somehow I’ve always liked performances with vocals better than pure instrumentals. All in all, a good use of a saturday afternoon. I’m happy I arrived in Seattle in time to catch the tail end of the classical music season.

Next: Lohengrin at the Seattle Opera.

July 12th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

So I’m re-reading an old classic: The Adrian Mole series by Sue Townsed. I last read the first three books in the series about 10 years ago. Surprisingly the books have still kept most of their charm.

Recommended if you’re in the mood for a cynical chuckle.

July 9th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Searching for the famed Dahlia Bakery on 4th Avenue, I came across an entry about it on the Seattle Bon Vivant blog.

July 6th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Idempotent
“adj. Acting as if used only once, even if used multiple times. This term is often used with respect to {C} header files, which contain common definitions and declarations to be included by several source files. If a header file is ever included twice during the same compilation (perhaps due to nested #include files), compilation errors can result unless the header file has protected itself against multiple inclusion; a header file so protected is said to be idempotent. The term can also be used to describe an initialization subroutine that is arranged to perform some critical action exactly once, even if the routine is called several times.”

“It is not always possible to determine when a server instance failed with respect to the work it was doing at the time of failure. For instance, if a server instance fails after handling a client request but before returning the response, there is no way to tell that the request was handled. A user that does not get a response retries, resulting in an additional request.

Failover for RMI objects requires that methods be idempotent. An idempotent method is one that can be repeated with no negative side-effects.”

I found a good discussion of making services idempotent and the reasons for doing so at RunOfTheMillBlog.

July 6th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Hiked down to the base of Snoqualmie Falls yesterday.

The falls seemed a little puny. They’re supposed to swell up during the winter season. Then again, the weather was perfect for a hike to the stream. The fresh water spray was very welcome after the heat.

July 6th, 2004 | | | Comments Off