Niall Kennedy

The perils and consequences of hot linking. Just because a link is live and safe today, doesn't mean it always will be. The following link is SFW, but in turn contains potentially NSFW links. http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/12/microsoft-copyright-photograp…

I'm a gnu/eff booster most of the time. However, it's worth looking at more of the details here: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2009/01/facebook-vs-power-ventures.ht… "Collecting Facebook usernames and passwords is at the heart of the dispute. Power.com impersonates a Facebook user after collecting their username and password." I would still side with power BUT a TOS that says "you can't give your password to third parties" is a bit different from "you can't use any automated processes at all".

Let's take a small step back here; just like the anti-Google sentiment that was about a few months back it seems is Facebooks turn to face the fire (mostly their fault). A lot of what they are doing is, at best, ethically unsound or, at worst, privacy invading. In this case I'd say (from initial reading) it sits on the scale slap bang in the middle of "a douchebag thing to do". But. It doesn't feel hypocritical because their argument is that their ToS attempt to deny users the right to access their accounts this way. The Email services, as far as I am aware, that FB scrape either explicitly allow or do not disallow such action. It seems "axe grinding" to bring that into the discussion. Notably this article does not appear to discuss or link to articles about the suit Facebook has filed [meta point: I hate that, it feels sneaky]. It appears (from research) that it is an long running dispute between Power and Facebook. They have also filed Trademark infringements and other stuff against them at the same time (no comment on the general legitimacy of such claims for the moment). I haven't fully digested all the information to have a complete opinion on this but... I think that this is part of Facebook trying to win the wider battle with Power.com, I'm not sure it reflects a deliberate move by them to try and turn ToS violations into criminal violations. However I am definitely in agreement with the EFF that if a potential side effect of any eventual ruling will bring in such…

Go for San Francisco: 1. Space The rents are actually in many cases less here than in other parts of the valley. (My office is $1 per s.f. per month!) A huge building boom is finishing up in the SOMA area of the City with hundreds (maybe 1000+) new apartments entering the market. This is good news for downward pressure on rental prices. 2. Convenience: Within walking distance of both my office and my apartment are countless restaurants, markets, office supplies, banks, etc etc. You can simply walk to what you need saving so much time over driving around on errands in rush hour traffic in the South Bay. There are countless take-out food restaurants open until late at night to keep you coding with a reasonable diet, with many delivering to your door. (Chinese takeout costs about $7 for a main item - roughly $10 for a meal) 3. Coolness: There are a lot of web companies in the city because it is such a great place to live. Attracting hackers to work for you may be easier here. Even the Large Corporate Web companies are setting up major operations in the City: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2007/01/15/st… http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/08/yahoo_leasing_san_fr… 4. Life Style: For those moments when you're not all-nightering on a problem, you have many options here: a. Sailing in the Bay b. Biking - across the Golden Gate and you are into nature in no time. c. Beach - Many beaches in the area d.…

Interestingly if I recall correctly a lot of the original talent for Chrome/Chromium originally worked at Mozilla and were poached by Google. [1] [1] https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html#team

I don't know the details, but Guido has written Mondrian, a code review system for use at Google - https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/11/google-mondrian.html - it was later replaced by something else, in a different language.

Had never heard of Haystack before. A few relevant links in case anyone is interested (It is the system powering facebook's photo storage infra): - https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Beaver.pdf - https://web.archive.org/web/20140906020211/https://www.facebook.com/no… (The note is not up anymore) - http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2009/04/facebook-haystack.html

But that's just rent. The apartments 2.4x mine appeared to be in worse neighborhoods with higher crime, worse schools, etc. than my current neighborhood. And commuting is expensive. I have a 10 minute bike ride right now, there's no way I could afford to live close enough to SV to bike to work. It's almost enough to erase the rest of the cost difference. http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/03/silicon-valley-commute-costs.…

Guido apparently wrote a web-based code review tool for Google: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/11/google-mondrian.html

The article by Niall Kennedy (a couple of links in) on facebook's new storage system, Haystack, and its implementation was pretty interesting. http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2009/04/facebook-haystack.html

Well, the release early and release often mantra still stands. Make something basic but that works well and get it out - tell people about it. Tell us about it. Take the feedback you get and if you agree adopt it and grow this way. Run a blog on your site and let people know about your plans. Have a read of this. I found it interesting: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/05/mark-fletcher-bloglines-oneli…

Mark Fletcher (founder of bloglines) gave a good talk which touched on this. Here's a transcription: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/05/mark-fletcher-bloglines-oneli…

There's some ways to get megs of storage on the client using Flash and other things (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2007/01/ajax-performance-loc… to store a few megs of content locally. I wonder why they didn't go with that, in order to avoid the plugin?

Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller. I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser. Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do. Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch: https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.html https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.

Some more bits on MOO: A mention by Niall Kennedy: http://www.niallkennedy.com/podcast/2007/03/moo-cards.html Suw Charman's notes on Richard Moross and Stefan Magdalinski's presentation at FOWA 07: http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/02/22/fowa_07_richard_moross_… FOWA's own page on Moross's appearance: http://www.futureofwebapps.com/pastevents.html, giving http://media.libsyn.com/media/carsonsystems/Richard_Moross_and_Stefan_… or http://www.futureofwebapps.com/presentations/richard_moross.pdf