Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

80 Legs
(Still in private beta)

80legs is a platform for running web-scale applications, or any application that requires fast access to data from across the entire Internet. We give developers access to the bandwidth and computing power of over 50,000 computers at prices anyone can afford. With 80legs, web-scale analyis is for everyone.

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I grew up using the command line. And then with the Mac, Windows and the Internet - it was gone.
But it's been coming back slowly.
I've been thinking about the "web command line" for a while.
Yes, Google Search is a web command line for years now, doing conversions and calculations (to name a few) and not just search.
And there's been some attempts to take this further, like yubnub.org
But recently the command line is creeping back in web's true style - unnoticed, uncoordinated, distributed. Slowly and surely.
It's in twitter where you use prefix characters to denote other users and topics in a text box inside your browser.
It's in blip.fm where you control broadcasting to other sites by a prefix exclamation mark in a text box inside your browser.
It's in aardvark where you interact with other users using text commands in the text box of your IM client.

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So, this guy Glenn Beck is live on Fox, interviewing this guy Robert Gellately, author of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.
Glenn Beck: So, when Lenin came to power through the 1917 revolution, he had all the heads of factories and businessmen killed, right?
Robert Gelatelly: Right.
GB: And, this is sort of like what president Obama is doing to the AIG execs now, right?
RG: Right.
And it goes on.

A little crazy in the head, aren't we?

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Get in touch: pasha at cohai dot co

Want to join me as partner in a cool new startup?
Get in touch: pasha at cohai dot co

Last night was Super Bowl 43. Alas, I am in a timezone that doesn't allow me to even care. But I love a good movie trailer, and a big bunch of them was released during the commercial breaks last night.

So here are four of them, in a biased order of ascending coolness:

1. G.I. Joe:

2. Terminator Salvation(sorry, no embed available)

3. Star Trek:

4. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen(better quality here than in YouTube)

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Update: this is the Google explanation (thanks Ofer).

While casually indulging in my favorite Saturday afternoon pass-time of Googling for... myself, I was rather surprised by the unusual results:

What? pashabitz.com may harm my computer? *My* computer? How? Wait. Every single result there seems to hold the power of hurting my computer. Do you have something against Pasha Bitz, Google? Or are you just trying to protect me from a severe case of Narcissism? And what happens when you do take the horrible risk and click the deadly link?

At my own risk?? Oh my. Will I be able to resist the temptation? Lets try something else:

Oh-ho. All of this is also extremely harmful for my precious innocent eyeballs and mind. What about Google itself?

Harmful again. Even Google itself! Reader, maps, google.co.uk. But wait, I am in Google right now. So how is this possible? Is it not self contradictory? Does it mean Godel was right? Is the universe about to collapse onto itself at this very moment? I was totally unprepared for this!

Luckily, I know some people working at Google. I examined the source code carefully and traced the problem to the following lines of code:

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Left: Rembrandt, A Scholar, 1631, Oil on canvas.
Right: Me, picture by Aviel Lazar, 2009.

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All I could think of for the first two minutes was...CSS! :)

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