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My Top 5 albums of 2012

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:55:41 -0800

Here are my top 5 thus far for 2012 (unordered), plus a bonus entry.

1. Fort Lean - 7” single

The best way to describe Fort Lean is to imagine a 90’s british pop vibe mixed with a classic american rock band from the late 70’s. Very spacey at times, with lots of highs and lows in front man’s Mitchell’s voice. Their new 7” single is inspiring and hopeful.

Image courtesy of biguglyyellowcouch.com

2. Bear in Heaven - ”I love you, it’s cool”

These guys have been around for a while and need no further introduction, their new record “I love you, it’s cool” is just pure dance gold.

Image courtesy of http://proflosers.files.wordpress.com/

3. Lower Dens - Nootropics

Baltimore based lower dens make some pretty dense electronic tracks with an eerie feel to them. Can’t wait for Nootropics to drop. In the meantime listen to their single Brains.

Image courtesy of http://www.gnomonsong.com/

4. You Won’t - Skeptic Goodbye

Pretty solid indie folk record. Reminiscent of the shins.

Image courtesy of http://youwont.bandcamp.com/

You can listen to their entire recorde here: http://youwont.bandcamp.com/

5. Yellow Ostrich - Strange Land

Yellow Ostrich is one of my favorite bands and their new album does not disappoint. It could very well be better than their debut album. Marathon Runner, Daughter, and I have no time for you are stand outs.

Although this album is from 2010, it’s worth mentioning since Port St. Willow is super underrated. Look for some new stuff soon.

Port St. Willow - Even//Wasteland (Mini Album)

Mysterious mini album including a 10 minute song. Overall pleasant harmonies.

Image courtesy of biguglyyellowcouch.com

http://portstwillow.bandcamp.com/

The time has come.

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:48:19 -0700

Today will be my last day at Zynga, as I’ll be leaving to embark on a new adventure. I’ll be starting a new company with my good friend Ben Bloch (Foodspotting)

The last year and few months at Zynga have served as a tremendous learning experience. The gratification of writing, and architecting code that is served to millions of people everyday is tremendous and I will forever be grateful to everyone at Zynga that enabled me to thrive in such an environment. As bitter-sweet, and difficult as it is, the time has come for me to leave Zynga, and build my own product. We have some excellent people on our side and are ready to jump in and execute.

It’s very clear that social, mobile location based applications are on the rise right now, and building a solution to a problem in that space is what we intend to do. What we are going to make is a dead simple social utility for organizing and participating in spontaneous events. It could be gathering friends for Sunday brunch, or organizing a nice bike ride along the Embarcadero. The point is that we are going to facilitate these types of gatherings, and solve a lot of inherent group communication problems. Of course this is only the foundation, and many more avenues will be explored once this basic system is in place and proven.

I am very excited, and passionate about getting to work on our product full time. Now that it has our full attention we will be able to put the best effort forward in quickly releasing a kick ass product and building out our company’s vision. Expect updates and announcements in the next coming months, including the name of our company and a better idea of when we will release our private alpha.

If you are interested in working with us, or being part of the private alpha, you can hit me up on twitter or email me for more information.

Wild Flag - Future Crimes

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:50:00 -0700

Yelle - Que Veux-Tu

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:59:06 -0700

Really catchy tune from these guys

TV On The Radio - Will do

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:37:25 -0700

Really loving this new single. Kind of forgot about them since “Return to Cookie Mountain”

Mother Mother - Oleander

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:28:12 -0700

Been listening to this one a lot lately.

Airwaves - Ride

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:32:52 -0800

Angus and Julia Stone - And The Boys

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:07:00 -0800

The lead up to the chorus on this song is pure gold

Modeselektor - The Dark Side of the Sun

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:36:00 -0800

A little older, but awesome nonetheless.

Baths - Aminals

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:34:00 -0800

The blogs has become a little stale, so I’m going to post one track a day. Let’s see how long I keep this up

Grubtastic

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:01:02 -0800

I’ve been living in San Francisco for about 9 months and discovered some great food spots in the city. I thought I’d share my list of favorites, in no particular order.

Indian Dosa (Mission)

Udapi Palace (Vegetarian, Mission)

Mexican

Taqueria El-Farolito (Best Burritos, Mission)

Taqueria Cancun (Mission)

Papalote (Mexican, mission)

French

Chez Maman (French Bistro, Potrero Hill)

Chapeau (Richmond)

L’ardoise (Castro)

Fleur de lys (French, Union Square)

La Folie (Russian Hill)

Bistro Aix(Marina)

Brunch

Plow (Potrero Hill)

Mission Beach Cafe (Mission)

The butler and the Chef (South Park/Soma)

Cafe Flor (Castro)

Polkers (Polk/Russian Hill)

Burmese

Burma Superstar (Richmond)

Italian Calzones (North Beach)

Ristobar(Marina)

Tomaso’s (North beach)

Vietnamese

Slanted Door(Ferry Building Embarcadero)

Pizza Victor’s Pizza(Polk)

Georgio’s (Richmond)

Little Star (Mission)

Delfina (Mission)

Brasseries

Bar Jules (Hayes Valley)

Absinthe (Hayes Valley)

Amelies (Wine/Cheese, Polk)

Seafood

Tadich Grill (Russian Hill)

Swan Oyster Depot (Best oysters, Polk)

Anywhere in fisherman’s warf..

Mediterranean

Foreign Cinema (California/Mediterranean inspired, mission)

Ti-Couz (Mediterranean, mission)

King of Falafel (Lower Divisedaro)

Aziza (Geary area)

Japanese

Halu(Richmond)

Tokyogogo(Mission)

Zushi Puzzle(North beach)

Sushi Rock (Polk)

Spanish/Tapas Zarzuela (Tapas, Russian Hill)

Cha Cha Cha’s (Mission)

Peruvian

La Mar Cebicheria Peruana (Embarcadero)

Coffee/Tea/Desserts/Bakeries

Bi-Rite Creamery (Best Ice-cream, Mission)

Ritual Roasters (Coffee, Mission)

Anthony’s Cookies (Best Cookies, Mission)

Mitchell’s (Ice Cream/Mission)

Four Barrel Coffee (Mission)

Steps of Rome(Deserts, North beach) Bob’s Donuts (Polk)

Tartine(French Pastries, Mission)

La Boulange (Pastries, Fillmore/Russian Hill /other various locations)

Samovar Tea Lounge at Hayes Valley

Blue Bottle Coffee (downtown..)

Enjoy :-)

Go Giants I guess…

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 13:54:37 -0700

Go Giants I guess…

Inkage?

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:57:04 -0700

Contemplating a tattoo. Something witty/geeky, but not sure what to get yet. I’ll be adding to this list but so far here are my choices in no particular order. Reply with any helpful suggestions :)

1. Hello World

2. Mushroom or turtle from super mario bros.

3. <img src=”tattoo.jpg” />

Stuff I want

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:42:00 -0800

Fireball Island (Purchasing on Ebay as I’m posting this)

Any of these madballs

New hotness

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:28:00 -0800

Hey guys,

Just wanted to inform you of a new project I’ve been working on with @Davidedicillo and @orical.

As you may or may not know, location based services are the hotness right now. Foursquare is one of them, and it’s gaining traction reminiscent of Twitter circa 2007. The idea is that you go around and check-in to different venues with an application that resides on your phone. As you do this, your friends can see what you are up to and choose to join you. The one problem is that check-ins are text based and you can’t drop a photo or video at that location. What if you want to show everyone this great beer you’re drinking as opposed to just describing it.

We aim to solve that by providing an iPhone application that allows people to check-in with a photo or video, in addition the app will show users all photos and videos dropped at a particular venue. The app is called SquarePik it’s built on top of our API and will be available shortly in the iTunes store for just $1.99

Let me know what you think. I’ll post some redemption codes here as soon as it drops in the store.

Menomena - Wet & Rusting

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:43:00 -0800

Found this tune courtesy of Marie Lucas.

Sort of feel like dipping myself in and out of water when I listen to this.

Best cheesy inspirational songs

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:25:20 -0800

Decided to bring in the weekend with some kick ass motivational tunes. I still can’t believe Ralph Macchio is 50!

Had this song in my head all day.

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:18:00 -0800

By far amongst the best lyrics in history.

Cassandra Messaging Tutorial - Part 1

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:27:00 -0800

I am currently working on developing the basic architectural components for a project me and my buddies are putting together. Since forming relationships via communication is going to be our core business, the internal messaging system needs to be built on something solid that can scale out horizontally without the need for replication. Enough about that, the goal is to show how how to build out a simple internal messaging system using Cassandra.

Before anyone goes on a rant about the fact that I am thinking scale here, I want to make one thing clear. Yes, it is way to early to think about ways to scale a service before even testing out the waters. I am fully aware of this fact, and I am in no way endorsing you to think that your service will eventually scale before even putting a minimum viable product out there. In fact, research has shown that it probably will never scale beyond a couple hundred thousand http requests a day and about the same amount of read/write storage transactions.

This is more of a learning experience for me and also an excuse to start getting in to some more in depth hacking on distributed data storage systems using Cassandra as a means to achieve this.

Loose Pre-requisite

You are using Rails for your front facing presentation layer. (Or are familiar with it)

Strict Pre-requisite

You have read this, and you know how to fire up an instance of Cassandra server running on at least 1 node. The aforementioned post is by far the best quick start guide I’ve found on Cassandra. Props to Evan Weaverfor writing it.

Mindset

Remember, unlike RDBMS’s you have to think carefully of modeling the data to suit your application. You can’t just model relationships and add indexes to support queries that will be needed as you progress. Therefore de-normalization is absolutely necessary. Just remember any college level DB course you had and do the exact opposite when it comes to data normalization.

Messaging System Supported Use Cases

1. A user should be able to compose a message and send it to another user.

2. A user should be able to view incoming messages via an inbox, ordered by most recent.

3. A user should be able to view outgoing messages, ordered by most recent first.

4. A user should be able to view a detailed message thread including any of it’s replies.

5. A user should be able to reply to a message thread.

* For the time being, a user will not be able to search through messages. Search will be implemented later, probably with lucene. Not sure on this yet, but will write about it when I decide to implement.

* This also doesn’t cover attaching objects such as virtual gifts and images to messages. I Will be covering this in a later post, but it’s pretty straight forward.

Step 1 - Data Model

I decided to stick with a simple construct and use a single ColumnFamily. There are many ways to do this, including using a multi column family to structure the data. But I chose to keep it as simple as possible to store and display messages.

I set up 1 main Keyspace for the project and 2 ColumnFamily’s for the messaging system. The Columnfamilys are ordered with the TimeUUIDType comparator since we want them ordered by time.

Contents ofstorage-conf.xml:

<Keyspace Name="MainProject">
<ColumnFamily CompareWith="TimeUUIDType" Name="Messages"/>
<ColumnFamily CompareWith="TimeUUIDType" Name="MessageReplies"/>
</Keyspace>

Messages - This will hold user ids as keys and associate a unique sortable column name with a JSON hash containing the message details.

MessageReplies - Messages ids as keys with an associative unique sortable column name containing a JSON hash that will hold reply details.

This modeling will easily allow us to list Messages for a given user as well as details and replies to a given message, if any are present.

Step 2 - Usage and examples

To illustrate usage, I’ll fire up a ruby interactive prompt, and populate/retrieve data. (just type ‘irb’ in your terminal to get a shell going)

require 'rubygems'

require 'cassandra'

include Cassandra:Constants

require 'rubygems'

Instantiate a Cassandra client object:

messages = Cassandra.new('MainProject')

A few insertions

Let’s assume Jennifer, user id 1200 is sending Emmanuel, user id 1120 a message. What we do, is insert the message once postfixing ‘_in’ to Emmanuel’s user id, and then once more postfixing ‘_out’ to Jennifer’s user id. These two will be our keys. (Remember that a user can view both an inbox and outbox of messages and there is no notion of easily querying over values, therefore redundancy in this case is good). Notice that we are doing two successive insertions so some level of transaction control is needed when this is put in to production code.

uuid = UUID.new

messages.insert(:Messages, '1120_in', {uuid=>'{"username":"Jennifer", "age":"24", "location":"Aventura Florida", "subject":"Hey there","body":"Cool profile. Drinks sometime?", "read":"0"}'})

messages.insert(:Messages, '1200_out', {uuid=>'{"username":"Emmanuel", "age":"26", "location":"Miami Florida", "subject":"Hey there", "body":"Cool profile. Drinks sometime?", "read":"0"}'})

Let’s insert another message to the same user, but this time from Natalie:

uuid = UUID.new

messages.insert(:Messages, '1120_in', {uuid=>'{"username":"Natalie", "age":"25", "location":"San Francisco CA", "subject":"Do you like Ninjas?", "body":"It might be a dumb question. Just wanted to know if you did :-)","read":"0"}'})

messages.insert(:Messages, '1320_out', {uuid=>'{"username":"Emmanuel", "age":"26", "location":"Miami FL", "subject":"Do you like Ninjas?", "body":"It might be a dumb question. Just wanted to know if you did :-)", "read":"0"}'})

So far we took care of use case #1. Next, let’s assume Emmanuel replied to Natalie’s message:

messages.insert(:MessageReplies, uuid, {UUID.new=>'{"username":"Emmanuel", "age":"26", "location":"Miami FL", "body":"I love Ninjas! OK we can officially go grab a drink now!"}'})

This takes care of use case #5. Next we’ll move on to cover the last 3 use cases via some basic retrieval operations.

And now for retrieval

Now I can easily retrieve all messages for a given user based on user id’s and a postfix of ‘_in’ or ‘out’. After that I can iterate over them and display messages however I want. This takes care of use cases #2, and #3.

For Emmanuel’s Inbox:

collection = messages.get(:Messages, '1120_in', :reversed=>'true').to_a

For Emmanuel’s Outbox:

collection = messages.get(:Messages, '1120_out', :reversed=>'true').to_a

Onto covering use case #4, let’s say you listed out a user’s messages on a page and upon clicking on an entry you want to display message details and replies, a sort of permalink for a message.

All we need now is the messages UUID, we can get this by calling to_guid, which will generate a readable representation of a Cassandra UUID.

For simplicity, let’s access Emmanuel’s first result, and get it’s message guid:

guid = collection[0].first.to_guid

Now you can use the guid to retrieve message details and any replies associated with it. We can make use of the only supported range query Cassandra has (Return a range of ids and limit the result set)

msg_details = messages.get(:Messages, '1120_in', :start=>UUID.new(guid), :count=>'1', :reversed=>'true').to_a

Last step is to retrieve all replies for this message, and to illustrate limiting the result set lets return 20 latest replies.

guid = msg_details.to_a.first[0].to_guid

replies = messages.get(:MessageReplies, guid, :count =>'20', :reversed=>'true').to_a

That’s pretty much it. I’ll respond to the comment thread if anything needs clarification.

Next post will be about adding attachments to the message structure, which is going to be fairly easy, given that the meat of the module is done.

Really re-thinking certain key things in my life for 2010....

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:39:00 -0800

Really re-thinking certain key things in my life for 2010. Embracing change.

Bear - The Antlers