I was asked to put together a group of interesting folks to discuss issues related to, the oft abused moniker, Web 2.0 for the TiECon East event held in Waltham, MA on May 30.

I picked people that I thought were the most interesting and capable of having a conversation about the future of the Web and business models related to it. Thanks to the following folks bringing their insight to the panel:

Fred Wilson - A VC from NYC is a thought leader in this space with a wicked (we saw that word here in Boston) sense of humor to boot.
Don Dodge - The man with the coolest name in Tech is in BD with Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. He always has insights given his vast operating experience.
Brian Balfour - Founder of Viximo, based in Cambridge, MA, is leading the charge with new ways to monetize social networks with digital goods.
Nabeel Hyatt - Nabeel runs Conduit Labs, a social gaming platform. You can find him sipping lattes at Open Coffee Boston and talking entrepreneurship.

And David Cancel, Lookery CTO and Founder, asked the interesting questions and steered the panel.

There’s insight into Twitter’s rumored recent $15M venture round. Apparently, it hasn’t closed and anything you read in the blogs was pure conjecture.

The conversation is great. But the video quality sorta sucks. Oh, and the sound needs to be fully jacked-up. But if you work in this space, this video should be of interest to you.

I love The Onion, but I sometimes only need to read the headlines to get a good laugh. I can make up the rest of the story in my head. The irreverent headlines are typically my favorite.

I enjoy reading the Lyric Of The Day Twitter statuses because, well, I love music too.

I stopped in the middle of washing dishes this morning and decided to modify Whitney’s Twitter bot code to create one for Fake Onion headlines.

Create and post some irreverent humor. Here’s how:

1. Sign-up for Twitter here.
2. Follow this user: FakeOnion
3. Make up something funny, perhaps Onion-headline like, and post them in your Twitter status using @fakeonion

Here’s an example Tweet

Nikon has taken PictureProject links off of their site, likely to sell copies of something else.

I find it remotely useful for certain things and needed it again recently.

It’s still up in several forms though it might not last for long:

http://www.nikonusa.com/software/P2/PP175WinEN.zip

Dear GrandCentral,

I would like to leave Vonage and port my number to GrandCentral, but sadly I cannot. I would gladly pay for such a service and I think others would as well.

Best,

Raj

Here’s a quick list of things I want from Amazon’s EC2 Web Services offering:

1. Better I/O performance for machine instances because it’s currently less than desirable. Most applications are disk I/O bound not CPU bound. Being able to scale processing resources is great and it’s a wonderful thing to boast, but that doesn’t help make basic, practical services like MySQL any faster without a ton non-trivial application engineering. Restoring a large amount of MySQL data took 5 to 8 times longer on EC2 than it did on similarly equipped physical hardware.

2. I need to be able to call and speak to a human when things start acting up. I recently used the official Amazon 64bit Fedora Core image for some large scale processing that I needed. I restored a database with hundreds of millions of records and configured it appropriately. Apparently, the Linux kernel was leaking memory like a sieve (for no obvious reason) and Amazon told me to go pound sand when I posted to their message board. Kill the instance and start anew. In other words, scrap your work and start over again because we’re not going to help you. A good web host would have taken responsibility for their hardware and fixed the problem. Amazon let me down in a big way. P.S. Providing primary support via a message board is lame, lame, lame.

3. Graphical tools to manage instances. Don’t get me wrong — I like text console foreplay like the rest of the world, but give me web-based tools to manage AWS please. And don’t point me to some 3rd party service that wants to charge for this — it should come free with usage of Amazon Web Services. Seriously.

4. Dynamically allocate more storage to instances without some kludge FUSE based spaghetti-strapped hack. Seriously, it’s weak on too many levels to complain about. It’s almost embarrassing.

5. The ability to suspend an instance without killing it entirely. I need to put a configured instance to sleep without destroying it. There are times when I need to suspend an instance for some interval and then start it again —- I need a state between instance reboot and ec2kill.

I’m gravely concerned with the recent uprising and resulting squashing of the Tibetans in Lhasa by the Chinese. The Chinese govt is simply inching their way up the punishment ladder to determine what the West can stomach.

The Chinese would like us to believe that “Tibetan culture is repugnant, full of superstition, cruelty, and that it’s an inalienable part of China.” Apparent double-think, but enough for them to wage cultural genocide on the Tibetan people unscathed.

If we let them get away with killing Buddhist monks who protest inhumane treatment, there will be no end in sight to their rampage. There are already plans in place to censor activities in Tiananmen Square from the Chinese TV watching audience. There are bound to be protests (rightfully so) and demonstrators pointing out the laundry list of human rights abuses in China.

I’m saddened that we even have China as a trading partner given their support for other dastardly regimes such as in Sudan. The Chinese (and Indians for that matter) are largely interested in African energy resources — everything else is secondary including human life.

I’m generally disinterested in Olympic sports because the West tends to dominate in most every category — so is it really a competition at all? Those with better resources are better trained and probably fed better to boot. Within a margin of error, we likely already know who will win given past performance data. But the Chinese Games should be protested on more moral grounds: dictatorial and repressive regimes should not be rewarded for their valor in killing innocent people. Or else we can’t fight the next battles as effectively. Boycott China and the Beijing Games.

So far, New Zealand might be one of my favorite places that I have ever been. I have traveled all over, but our first night here is awesome so far.

I love listening to music on long train rides in foreign places. The combined audio/visual makes for great living music videos of sorts. Right now, Old Fools from the Magnetic Fields “Distortion” record is an obsession and fits the visual well. We’re on the train from Sydney to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains — can’t wait to get there.

The fact that the Blackberry version of Google Maps works so well in Australia is probably reflective of the Aussie team that wrote the thing, but no matter — it works here, but Yahoo Go! does not. I love you Google Maps.

Just bought tickets to the Jens Lekman show in Cambridge at the Middle East. Should be great. Jonathan Richman tickets go on sale tomorrow for the March show. Hoping on that fast.

1 week until we leave for Australia and then New Zealand. We’re excited as hell. 14 inches of snow tonight might slow things down in terms of other things, but rest assured: we’ll be ready to roll next Sunday. The 14 hour flight from San Francisco to Sydney is nothing to look forward to, but we’ll manage by slumming it in coach.

1. I got my hands on the forthcoming Magnetic Fields record entitled Distortion.
2. I love it.
3. I’m trying to buy tickets to their Somerville show, but hate being pimped on ebay.
4. I was a pimp in a former life.
5. I’m being punished in this life as a result. If you care to change that, let me know.
6. I pre-ordered the album on Amazon. You’re welcome.
7. I’m telling all my friends about it. Again. You’re welcome.

I use Dreamhost quite a bit for a variety of domain hosting.  I recently tried using it for DNS services for a custom domain name that I was using for a tumblr tumblog.

It didn’t work so well.  (the Dreamhost DNS part that is)

The idea itself is simple:  You create a CNAME DNS record pointing to the Tumblr IP address.  And then they handle it internally when requests come in.

The problem with Dreamhost is that it creates a number of CNAME records for domains that they are managing as part of your account.

Dreamhost allows you to create multiple CNAME records as expected, but doesn’t consistently work.  For some unknown reason, my CNAME record that pointed to tumblr’s IP address would occassionally resolve to what appeared to be an HTTP directory listing enabled site.  I mean, WTF? 

In any case, I forgot that DynDNS was the best solution.  I pointed my rajzilla.com’s nameservers to DynDNS (rather than through Dreamhost) and then created a CNAME record there that points to Tumblr and now it consistently works. 

You have to use the DynDNS custom domain service in order for this to work, but these guys have been super through the ~8 years that I have used their paid service.  And it’s cheap as hell.

The current unrest in Pakistan won’t end gracefully.  Nor will it end soon.  People are calling for the restoration of democracy as if there was one functioning before.  Their history doesn’t exactly portray one of a harmonious, mountainous nation thriving by the will of the people.  Frankly, democracy isn’t what we should be concerned with at the moment.  It’s the power vacuum about to be created with radicals waiting in the wings that the world should focus on.

Further, Pakistan’s friends and foes alike will need to intervene when Musharraf loses power.  There’s an assumption in the previous statement:  I don’t think he’ll make it through this unscathed.   His time as come — and his opponents will use this current weakness as an opportunity to seize power and convert Pakistan into our greatest nightmare:  extremists with nuclear weapons.

Even with a relatively stable regime, the Pakistanis managed to proliferate nuclear weapons to every known offender worldwide who possessed a little cash.  Iran and North Korea only have their nuclear capabilities because of these fellows who are now regarded as national heroes.  Iran in particular looks like a walk in the park compared to the situation in Pakistan.  So Ahmadinejad questions the Jewish holocaust — who cares at the moment when there might be another one but on a much larger scale?

There’s no easy answer to the current situation.  Propping up Musharraf’s regime with billions of US dollars has not proven useful.  US troops on the ground won’t work as a force to keep things from completely disintegrating — the Pakistani people would revolt in a violent way.   A puppet government also would prove ineffective as it has so many times in the past.

Our main mission, however covert it might be, should be to secure the nuclear weapons — or just destroy them before it gets into the wrong hands.  India might be forced to react to this before the US has a chance.  We’re not next door to Pakistan and don’t have the urgency that India has.  And I wouldn’t blame her either.

I started a tumblelog at tumblr.com. It’s at rajzilla.com.

My aggregated life has an RSS feed.