Technical Details

• Made and designed to work seamlessly with the Apple iPhone.
• Will act as an extension cable, carrying both the stereo audio and microphone signals from your device.
• Allows the adapter to be used with stereo headphones that also have integrated microphone functionality
• Made with Nickel plated materials, 3.5mm 4-pole plug, 3.5mm 4-pole jack and a 10 cm (L)
• A perfect accessory for your NEW Apple iPhone.

Emphasis mine.

It arrived in an envelope containing a tiny ziplock back with no labeling (it’s barebones). When I hooked it up it seemed that audio quality wasn’t very good. I never bothered to check out the microphone. At that price it obviously didn’t make fiscal sense to return it as the postage costs about as much as it’s worth. So I decided to finish dissecting it.

From what I can tell it’s actually 3 wires. Each is a different color (red, copper, green) with some white strands in the core. The female jack has two prongs with one wire attached to each and the enclosure itself which seems like it’s the ground. My suspicion is that the audio is either combined or only one channel is used making it actually mono. The jacket I dissected was molded on so it was virtually impossible to remove the plastic without severing the thin wires in the process.

Here’s what the wire and the female jack (sideways on the bottom) look like:

Here’s the jack from the back side. I suck at photography and only have a P&S camera, so it’s a bit blurry:

I’m now debating trying another vendor or a more expensive 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm adapter.

My original plan was to find a new 4 conductor TRS male plug, but that proved impossible via the usual sources. 3 conductor is easy.

If anyone has suggestions feel free to reach out.

The Classic Example: UPS

Started in 1907 and adopting the name United Parcel Service in 1919 UPS has no real “high tech” background unless you include the Ford Model T. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t become more efficient. UPS has made a science of the delivery business. For example it’s famous for it’s “no left” policy. Simply put they found that avoiding left turns means less time waiting at lights which means less fuel is wasted. The more efficient routing formerly done by humans now computerized saves them 3 million gallons of fuel in 2007 alone. Lets do the math:

Assuming they run 100% diesel at an average cost of $2.87/gallon in 2007 [doe] multiplied by 3 million that’s $8.61 million dollars by trying to avoid left turns.

Not bad for a souped up mapping application.

By having their drivers do things like turning of the ignition while unbuckling their seat belt at the same time, and scanning for the doorbell while walking towards the door (it’s easier to see from a distance than up close) they can shave time off of their routes.

Then of course there’s package tracking. While customers might like to know in what city their weight loss taps are sitting tracking systems help reduce loss and monitor package routing for optimal efficiency.

Cutting Utility Bills: Google

Being the largest search engine, a large ad network, email provider, analytics firm, mapping service, video site, and whatever else they do means Google needs a ton of servers. Cramming servers into data centers and keeping them cool to prevent hardware failures is a complicated and expensive task. Keeping the whole thing powered is also really expensive. Google has scrutinized server designs to eliminate all waste possible. This has resulted in Google having more horsepower at a lower cost than their competitors. Having more capacity at a lower cost means Google can do more at a lower cost than their competitors. I won’t discuss Google in too much detail since they did a great job themselves recently and I mentioned it the other day in another blog post: Google’s Data Center Secrets.

Shipping Efficiency: Amazon

Amazon’s long been improving efficiency by using data collection and analysis to encouraging their customers to spend more. Their algorithms to recommend related products you might be interested in is one of the best out there. Their ordering system is streamlined to prevent customers from bailing before completion. Their products are SEO’d to appear on the top of Google searches. That doesn’t mean Amazon can’t improve other parts of their business.

Amazon several months ago started a Frustration-Free Packaging program. Here’s how they describe it:

The Frustration-Free Package (on the left) is recyclable and comes without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It’s designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging (on the right). Products with Frustration-Free Packaging can frequently be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box.

The key here is “can frequently be shipped in their own boxes”. By shipping a box alone rather than packaging they can skip a step in their warehouses (and the packaging materials that go with packaging something for delivery). This also lowers the weight as those extra boxes don’t weigh 0 oz. The frustration free packaging is also the perfect shape for efficiently filling trucks and strong enough to not crush easily thus lowering returns due to damage.

Amazon now even has a feedback form [login required] for users to share what they think of their package. This has the added bonus of helping further reduce the inefficient shipping practices so common right now.

Amazon’s also done a significant amount of work on their infrastructure to make their servers scale well using tech such as EC2 and S3. By selling capacity to other companies they able to take advantage of economy of scale as well as diversify their business beyond just retail. Of course they are planning their data centers to have access to cheap power.

These aren’t haphazard attempts at increasing efficiency, these are well calculated engineered approaches to removing even the smallest inefficiencies with the knowledge of how they compound as operations scale. Aren’t they clever?

Amazon S3 is cloud based computing. Essentially when you send them a file using their REST or SOAP interface Amazon stores it on multiple nodes in their infrastructure. This provides redundancy and security (in case a data center catches fire for example). Because of this design it’s often though that cloud based computing is invincible to problems. This is hardly the fact. Just like any large system, it’s complicated and full of hazards. It takes only a small software glitch, or an unaccounted for issue to cause the entire thing to grind to a halt. More complexity = more things that can fail.

Amazon S3 is popular because it’s cheap and easy to scale. It’s pay-per-use based on bandwidth, disk storage, and requests. Because that allows for websites to grow without having to make a large infrastructure investment, it’s popular for “Web 2.0″ companies trying to keep their budgets tight. Notably sites like Twitter, WordPress.com, SmugMug and Amazon.com themselves all use Amazon S3 to host things like images.

Many sites, notably Twitter, and SmugMug didn’t have a good day today. WordPress.com and Amazon.com operated like normal. The obvious reason for this is WordPress.com and Amazon.com are much better in terms of infrastructure and design.

WordPress.com uses S3, but proxies that with Varnish. There’s a brief description here, and a more detailed breakdown here. According to Barry Abrahamson, WordPress.com does 1500 image requests per second across and 80-100 are served through S3. They have (slower) back up’s in house for when S3 is down and can failover if S3 has a problem. This means they can leverage S3 to their advantage, but aren’t down because of S3. Using Varnish allows them to keep the S3 bill down by using their own bandwidth (likely cheaper since they are a large site and can get better rates on bandwidth). This also and lets them have this have a good level of redundancy. Awesome job.

Amazon.com uses S3 themselves. If you look at images on the site, they are actually served from g-ecx.images-amazon.com. Which is actually:

g-ecx.images-amazon.com. 38     IN      CNAME   ant.mii.instacontent.net.

instacontent.net is actually part of Mirror Image, a CDN. This is essentially outsourcing what WordPress.com is doing in terms of caching. It’s similar to Akamai’s services. A CDN’s biggest advantage is lowering latency by using servers closer to the customer, which are generally going to feel faster. The other benefit is that they cache content for when the origin is having problems. Because Amazon has a layer on top of S3, they have an added level of protection and remained up and images loaded.

Twitter serves most images such as avatars right off of S3. This means when S3 went down, there were thousands of dead images on their pages. No caching, not even a CNAME in place. Image hosting is the least of their concerns. Keeping the service up and running is their #1 concern right now. The service was still usable, just ugly. Many users take advantage of third party clients anyway.

Using a CDN or having the infrastructure in house is obviously more expensive (it makes S3 more of a luxury than a cost savings measure), but it means your not depending on one third party for your uptime.

Defining uptime, security, and privacy

For the intents of the discussion at hand, “uptime” is defined as the application being accessible and functional to the user. Note putting a “fail whale”? image up so that the page loads doesn’t not qualify as functional. For all intents and purposes the service is down. One should also note that traffic goes through different routes to get to different users, hence a site can be down for one person, but up for millions of others. The vast majority (95%+) should be able to use the service for it to really be considered “up”.

“Security” defined as the assurance that privacy, data integrity, and account access are restricted in accordance with typical site functionality and users understanding. “Privacy” is defined as not allowing any unauthorized person or entity to manipulate, view, copy, handle, destroy, or know about the existence of data without explicit approval from the user.

Why applications fail

Applications can fail for many reasons, but most can be lumped into a handful of categories. At the highest level you have in-house and upstream reasons. In-house can be defined as something you can control, for example software or servers you control, while upstream is typically a vendor or partner, for example ISP, colo facility, etc, which there is less control over (other than submitting a ticket). Generally startups have more upstream services and bring more things in-house as time goes on. For example, Facebook relies on colo facilities for their servers. They now plan to build their own (more control, and hopefully will ensure lower costs as well).

On a lower level you break things down to hardware and software. Hardware failures are inevitable. Computers suck in a 24×7 environment. We deal with that since they are better than people, who still insist on sleep (lazy bastards). Hard drives fry, motherboards fail, fans die resulting in “thermal events”?. Generally it’s pretty easy to deal with this. You can use RAID so 1 hard drive isn’t critical after all, moving parts are the most prone to failure. You can also have more than one server powering a successful application. If one dies, the load goes to other boxes running on the grid. You can put them in different data centers so if there was a problem at one, your still up and running. This obviously comes at a cost. Services like Google App Engine, Amazon’s S3 and Amazon’s EC2 help lower the cost, but also result in hardware being handled by an upstream provider. Amazon and Google are very redundant, but they too can and have failed.

Software generally fails because it either wasn’t designed to scale, or it was hatefully put together to meet a deadline. Startups are infamous for this as the business guys just want things done quick and cheap and don’t care about reliability until it’s too late (they will also deny this until the end of time). All major software platforms can scale when done correctly. Many people say Perl can’t scale, but it has for a decade, look at IMDB, Amazon and Slashdot among the many. Even more claim PHP can’t scale, but Facebook and Yahoo seem to run fine. Python (YouTube), Ruby-On-Rails (YellowPages.com, Hulu, 43things) ASP.NET (MySpace and Microsoft) all seem workable in high traffic situations. It’s not what you use, but how you use it. These run on Apache, IIS, Oracle, MySQL, among others. The platform is rarely (if ever) the problem. The implementation almost always is.

There’s also the possibility that everything is fine and dandy, but somewhere along the internet from the servers to some of your users there’s a problem. ISP’s encounter tons of problems with people snagging their fiber and tearing a line, to DoS attacks and viruses reeking havoc. When this happens close to the user, no sites are accessible, when this happens further away several sites may be inaccessible or slow. Users often wrongly attribute this to a site or application being slow or down when that’s hardly the case. Using a data center with good connectivity reduces these cases. Having data centers distributed around the globe is even better, but often not economical. The best a business can do is submit a ticket and wait. If it’s frequent enough they can move somewhere else.

Why security fails

Security failure is almost too complex of a topic to discuss without holding a complete college course. The most obvious answer is that someone is cleverer than the person in charge of security, and outwitted or outsmarted them. It could be in the physical form (stealing a server or hard drive with data), or in the electronic form (Phishing, XSS, DoS). It could be a “hacker”, or it could be an application failure that results in a security glitch.

Many websites take several measures to protect your privacy. They require “strong” passwords, maybe even require you to change them. For things like banking you may have “security questions” to answer. Perhaps even a key fob to provide two factor authentication.

Most security failure can be traced to stupidity. For example using “password” for your password, or replying to an email asking for your password. A poorly configured server can also be a vulnerability. Then all you need is someone who wants to exploit that. If the data is of any value, that person exists.

When businesses fail

Hackers want your data, business want to keep it secure, but don’t want to spend too much time/effort on it since the formula is time = money. There’s really not much more to explain here.

Sometimes it’s not even the business you know your dealing with. You may be working with company X, but they may use company Y, Z, A1, A2, A3, and A4 to actually provide their services. Your data may be accessible by any or all of them.

Then there’s the possibility of a business going out of business. They may give you a chance to download your data and move it elsewhere or they may even do it for you. They may also just shut down abruptly and disappear of the face of the earth. Goodbye data.

Take control of your data

I may sound cynical for effectively saying applications fail, many people could potentially see your data, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m not, I am a realist, and I know what goes on behind the scenes. There actually is something you can do about it: Take control of your data. Keep control of your data.

1. Know who has your data, what they might do to it, who they might share it with, and what they will do to protect it. Companies (at least reputable ones) post privacy policies for a reason. Check them out or Google for some info on that company. The results may surprise you. For example if you delete something from Google Docs it may take 3 weeks for it to actually be deleted on their servers. This isn’t uncommon, but many people assume once you delete it, the company deletes it. That’s not the case.
2. Think about accessibility. What happens if that application has an outage? What happens if your ISP has a problem? Or your cable line got cut? Using an online office suite is a great way to keep documents accessible from home or work, but not so great when you can’t access them. Storing them on a USB drive may prove useful, at least as a backup. If you’ve got a business, this is especially true. You may also want to consider a 2nd way to get online should your ISP have problems (giving a wireless card and a laptop to certain employees may also have the perk of allowing employees to be more mobile).
3. Decide the fate of your data. I personally prefer to keep a copy of everything so if a company goes under, I still have my data. I host my own blog, and my own photos. I keep backups of all that too, in multiple locations. I know I’ll be around as long as I care about keeping that data online. I’m not going out of business. If I am, I don’t care about that data anymore . I always have my data. You should too.

Keep control of your data

Just because you’ve figured out how to protect your data, doesn’t mean you’re done. You need to reevaluate yourself every time you start using something else, or change your usage patterns. You don’t have to keep your data offline, just understand what putting it online really means. Offline backups aren’t a bad idea. Having backups on another service is also an option, but may be even more complicated.

This is somewhat more complicated in the case of things like social networks, but things like Data Portability are slowly becoming a reality.

Google in general has been pretty good with leaving the options to take your data back. Gmail lets you use IMAP to download all your mail, Google Reader lets you export an OPML feed, Google Docs lets you save all your docs to your computer. It’s important to know what the services you rely on let you do with your data. Don’t just assume you can easily get it out.

You’re responsible for your fate

It’s easy to blame Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or Twitter for your problems, but that’s really a poor excuse. You’re responsible for the choices you make, and what you rely on. If what you’re relying on isn’t giving you what you need, you need to find something else, or reevaluate if your putting your priorities in the right place.

I now present to you…

Accettura’s Law Of Business Computing

where
people = prone to frequent failures
technology = expensive, complex, frequent failure

business computing = people + technology = complex frequent failures that are costly in nature.

You can see how this works right? Best way to avoid that cost? Make sure your technology is redundant, and your people’s interaction is controlled to prevent failure from leaking into the technology.

This should be in Wikipedia and every Business and CompSci textbook. That way everything that a student touches or thinks about in this industry is done with this in mind. Build with the knowledge in mind that the fail whale will just make you a relic before you even hit your prime.

That said, get over Twitter being down and stop complaining.

• Google’s Project Virgle the first permanent human colony on Mars.
• Google’s Gmail Custom Time lets you choose when to send mail. Never be late again.
• Google’s gDay™ with Mate™ lets you search content on the internet before it’s created.
• Google Talk to convert conversations to IM speak on Earth Day. Bot available for practice.
• Massive YouTube RickRoll via user “YTRickRollsYou“. Should note embeds are disabled on the real video for whatever reason. This one is still available.
• Build your own Google Airplane.
• CNET says everyone’s favorite public speaker Mark Zuckerberg will be on Saturday Night Live, TechCrunch acquires Tiger Beat, will rename it CrunchKids, Flying Spaghetti Monster statue at Tennessee courthouse.
• Lenovo reveals ThinkPad Mr. Coffee Edition.
• Gizmodo decided to put Mr. T on every post.
• Mozilla about:mozilla newsletter for April 1. Featuring Toronto’s CN Tower office.
• ThinkGeek has several products including the usb pregency test, Super Pii Pii Brothers and Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock.
• XFire PWN3D their homepage. 1337! OMGZERGRUSH!!!KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE
• The BBC made penguins fly [Video].
• ESPN Deathmatch coverage.
• The Register: Comcast acquires BitTorrent for $53 billion.
• macosxhints.com goes OS 9.
• TechCrunch sues Facebook.
• Amazon’s Dog Computer Interface.
• Matt Cutts gets a Firefox tattoo on the back of his neck.

Also quite interesting is How To Hide An Airplane Factory.

[Hat Tip: A Welsh View]

I’m strongly considering moving it all eventually over to Amazon’s S3 storage. At $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred it would be very affordable to keep backups in an even more secure fashion. I’d still use my own encryption on top of theirs for extra security. For things like media, I could even see myself hosting it solely at Amazon. It just seems like that may be a more practical and scalable approach.

Unfortunately until either FTTH or DOCSIS 3.0 comes to town, it doesn’t look like Amazon’s S3 will be practical for home backup purposes. This server has a beefy connection to a few large pipes to the internet (Level3, Global Crossing, and Cogent last I checked). They provides high speed connectivity so a backup would take only a few seconds. At home with a cable modem on a DOCSIS 1.1 network (such as Comcast) the bandwidth is just to slim to allow enough upload capacity. Comcast still only allows 384kbps up. Even the top plans in select areas don’t top 1Mbps. Of course these are Comcast’s numbers (the actual performance is often less). In areas that they currently serve, Verizon FiOS (FTTH) is available at 15 Mbps/2 Mbps. Much better suited for such purposes (though more would be welcome). As strange as it may seem pricing is quite competitive, giving cable a run for it’s money. Perhaps one day DOCSIS 3.0 will appear, though that seems to be a while away. Perhaps one day all homes will have 100Mbps full duplex connections with low latency.

The only real way to get around this limitation is to perhaps use rsync to perform backups. Initial backups would still suck, but after that it wouldn’t be too bad. Though that wouldn’t work with services such as Amazon’s S3, which are token based. There is an rsync-like clone, but it’s still not the real thing. Perhaps Google’s upcoming GDrive will be cool enough to allow the use of rsync over SSH (I could dream) in addition to WebDAV (which is what I expect to see). Last I checked rsync doesn’t support WebDAV because WebDAV is done over HTTP. If I understand it right, RFC 3229 would add Delta encoding support to HTTP, making something like rsync over WebDAV possible since it uses delta encoding.

Amazon.com
Apple
Google 1
Google 2
Marriott

Apple cleared the entire homepage. Amazon as usual took advantage of it’s ability to quickly collect payments. Google has a huge audience, and put a link to a page containing help info. Marriott did as well. eBay has setup a few things as well.

I was surprised how many have no indication of such events. During 9/11 several websites completely redid their corporate homepage. This isn’t anywhere near a US trend, as I checked many international companies as well. IBM, Intel, Microsoft, all have no mention or indication.

So before you make an amazon purchase do the following:

1. Visit a9 and perform a search
2. Visit amazon.com (if you like me… use my link so I get affiliate credit)

Robert Accettura, since you’ve been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional ^π/₂% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout (it will happen whether you use the shopping cart or our 1-Click Shopping®). You don’t need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.

We don’t advertise this additional discount that we give in exchange for using A9.com, so if you want your friends to know about it, please tell them. It is probably the only way they’ll find out. All they have to do is use A9.com as their regular search engine. They should make sure they are signed in to A9.com (it should be recognizing them by name) so that we can be certain they get credit for their visit.

While the ^π/₂% discount is a good additional reason to use A9.com it isn’t the best reason. A9.com licenses its web search results from the industry leader Google, and then supplements those results with Amazon’s Search Inside the Book™ results. The coolest feature is that A9.com keeps track of your search history for you on the server side. To see how this works, do some A9 searches from your computer at work and then sign in to A9.com from your computer at home.

How can we afford this additional ^π/₂% discount?

Sponsored links revenue -from the small text-based ads on A9.com and Amazon.com search results pages -will help offset costs we incur through the Rewards promotion. With our automatic ^π/₂% discount, we are effectively sharing with you some of the money we collect from sponsored links, i.e. sharing the pi.

Please use A9.com and tell your friends.

Thank you

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[Source:Amazon.com 9/19/2004]