• 10 drugs not to take while driving http://su.pr/5zeyED (via @flipvine) #

Hats off to Louis Gerbarg on his excellent write-up of how a Flash chip manages reads, writes, and most interestingly – deletes.  I have a relatively comprehensive understanding of how file systems work from classes back at CMU.  But back when I was taking those classes, Flash storage was basically non-existent in a file system context.  This post is definitely eye-opening and if you’re at all interested in how this stuff works, I highly recommend checking it out.  Here’s a quote that’ll get you interested in this stuff:

Okay, so lets assume for a second we have a 1MB flash device with 2 512KB blocks. This would be sold to the consumer as a 512KB flash drive, because some amount of the internal storage needs to be used for bookkeeping as we shall see.

And another quote:

Flash is a relatively complicated storage medium, and has its own view of the world. It works in terms of pages and blocks. Usually a page is the smallest amount of space you can reasonably read or write to a a flash chip (for our discussion, 4K), and a block is the smallest chunk of space you can erase at a time (for our discussion 128 blocks). With a fresh (unwritten block) all the bits are set to “1″, and during a write they can only be transition to “0.” That means in order to rewrite a page you must erase it first. This is a super important point, you can’t just go and erase a page of the flash, you need to erase the 128 contiguous pages contained in a whole block at a the same time.

And I thought tuning a filesystem to provide the best contiguous access to large files was interesting.  By comparison Flash garbage collection and bookkeeping algorithms must be fascinating.  In any case, I guess I’m just a little nostalgic reminiscing about CMU’s 15-412 Operating Systems course.

• RT @flipvine The Wingman (we’re bringing back the Wingman Song too) – flipvine http://su.pr/7px5oZ #

• RT @flipvine Do Buildings Dream of Brick-Shaped-Sheep? (this video will blow your mind) http://su.pr/1kKZEt #
• @mobileslate I thought it was Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? Dude, you for sure have to remember sixdegrees.com, that was back in CMU/R10 days in reply to mobileslate #
• Wow, this is weird, but watching Deer Hunter makes me miss Pittsburgh #

I was just pointed to an article where Jonathan Abrams pretty much claims that he invented friend requests and possibly even social networking.

He takes pride in his claim to inventing the idea of requesting and accepting friendships online. But because he’s been around it longer than anyone, he’s also getting sick of all the friend requests.

“I’m a little burned out, to be honest. I get maybe five friend requests on Facebook per day,” Abrams said over lunch in San Francisco recently. “I invented this stuff, and now I’m paying for it.”

Then because of the backlash on twitter about him being a pompous ass, he writes in to correct the context of his quote.

Twitter is now covered with embarrassing “Jonathan Abrams: I Invented This Stuff” headlines, which is a quote taken out of context and definitely a distortion of our discussion.  The part about my girlfriend is also a joke that is presented seriously and does not come across the way it should.

Honestly, please, now everybody is just going to think that Jonathan Abrams is a pompous ass and a cry-baby.  Take it like a man, everybody gets misquoted, at least have the decency to post an official reply somewhere and explain what you were trying to say, etc, etc.

And seriously, does nobody remember sixdegrees.com anymore? (quoted from wikipedia):

SixDegrees.com was a social network service website that lasted from 1997 to 2001 and was based on the Web of Contacts model of social networking.

Friendster.com was registered in 2002.  Unless, Jonathan means the whole Six Degrees pattent thing.

The U.S. patent, which was awarded June 27, is extremely general, and would seem to cover the activities of many other sites, especially those like LinkedIn that allow people to connect within a certain number of degrees of separation.

Naming Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, who has left the company, as inventor, the patent refers to a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”

…

Six Degrees of Separation, another failed social networking startup, had obtained a patent on social networking technology in 2001. It was bought at auction in 2003 by the founders of LinkedIn and Tribe.net.

Bah – the whole thing is ridiculous, but people sure do get whipped on twitter nowadays for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

As a side question, why does a commandline “whois friendster.com” return the following to me:

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

FRIENDSTER.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
FRIENDSTER.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
FRIENDSTER.COM

I guess whois info for friendster.com got hijacked by subdomain pollution?