Small Macintosh OS X Leopard hint, first in a series of one, because I usually don't do this kind of thing. If you have a local mail folder named "notes" you need to rename it before Mail will let you save a new note you create.  Otherwise you will get an error message that reads "The note could not be saved." May legions of Leopard users find this blog post through the wonders of Google and save themselves just a little bit of time.

Derek Gottfrid of the New York Times describes how he used Amazon's EC2 and S3 to generate PDF versions of 11 million articles.

"I then began some rough calculations and determined that if I used only four machines, it could take some time to generate all 11 million article PDFs. But thanks to the swell people at Amazon, I got access to a few more machines and churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances, and generated another 1.5TB of data to store in S3."

How can I use spreadsheets to answer some of my many questions about the world? 

• =GoogleLookup("life"; "meaning")
• =GoogleLookup("God"; "existence")
• =GoogleLookup("Beatles"; "iTunes launch date")
• =GoogleLookup("one hand clapping"; "sound level")
• etc.

It's not quite as simple as text, but TaskPaper seems to add just enough on top of plain text to make it worth using for keeping lists.  Of things.  To get done.

Spent a little bit of time at the Web 2.0 summit this afternoon, with the express intent of catching the following early afternoon lineup:  Kedrosky, Butterfield, Recordon & Fitzpatrick and then Safa Rashtchy's panel discussion with a group of baby boomers about how they use the web. Kedrosky convinced me that I need to learn more about dark pools; Stewart showed off some really sexy new photo mapping features coming soon to Flickr, and Safa's panel was as entertaining and enlightening as ever.  (This couple was on the panel, and they were great.)

I'm admittedly biased, but the highlight for me was David and Brad. They did a great job of laying out the problem of closed social networks: as more and more applications benefit from social interaction, connecting those apps to an appropriate set of your friends will become a more frequent occurrence. In short, soon you will be very very tired of using the word "friend" as a verb, if you're not already.

The solution is a combination of a technology tools, a mindset change, and user education.  The technology stuff is basically there -- XFN, FOAF and OAuth, for example -- and is being demonstrated now in the Six Apart Relationship Update Stream that David announced today. The mindset change requires social network operators to open up that data, which will come, even if it takes a while. The education piece is about providing simple user experiences that (a) teach users how this works and (b) shows them the value of expressing at least a portion of their graph publicly and (c) allows them to control and maintain their relationship data.

David's got a post up on O'Reily Radar that summarizes their talk; it's a good followup to his post on Opening the Social Graph at sixapart.com.

Worth reading in full: Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store.

Amazon uses a highly decentralized, loosely coupled, service oriented architecture consisting of hundreds of services. In this environment there is a particular need for storage technologies that are always available. For example, customers should be able to view and add items to their shopping cart even if disks are failing, network routes are flapping, or data centers are being destroyed by tornados. Therefore, the service responsible for managing shopping carts requires that it can always write to and read from its data store, and that its data needs to be available across multiple data centers.

I'm sure you've read this already, but Joel Spolksy's piece explaining the Excel bug is worth linking to just to accrete an infintessimal amount of incremental PageRank to joelonsoftware.com.

Q: Shouldn't they be testing for these kinds of things?

A: I'll bet that most of the numeric testing done on the Excel team is done automatically with VBA code. Cells containing this value display as 100,000, but from VBA, they're going to look like 65,535 (since the number would be passed into the Basic runtime in binary, before the display formatting.) I'm sure there's plenty of code to test display formatting, but with a bug like this that only happens on 12 out of 18446744073709551616 possible floating point binary numbers, it's unlikely that any set of black-box tests would cover this case.

And if you make it all the way through to the end, his parting shot is good for the laugh, but perhaps a bit over the top.

David Recordon, who's back (in force) at Six Apart blogs about one of the things we're contributing to at Six Apart: opening the social graph. It's long but worth the read (and the time for the screencasts); David does a great job of putting all of the work that's happening around the web on OpenID, hCard, XFN and FOAF into a user-centered context. The goal is making it easy to discover and connect with people across networks. "An open social graph is just as important as an open identity."

For the record, recent things that won't dislodge from the top of the stack: Marc Andreessen on the three kinds of platforms (and, relatedly, some of the new stuff announced by Salesforce today); Cringely on the Goog's plan for world domination; Matt Webb's experience stack; and Kottke's note on impressionism v. realism in blogging.

In case you're looking for a reason why updates to this site have been sparse the past few weeks, we shipped Movable Type 4.0 on Tuesday night. I've never worked with a more talented or hard-working team; huge kudos to everyone involved (you know who you are). And here's to the tremendously addictive rush that comes from shipping great products. So, onward!

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(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.