Patent on Performance and Capacity Planning

Here is another patent that I filed while working at Sun.

System and method for generating a probability distribution of computer performance ratios

A system and method for generating a probability distribution indicating the probability of a range of performance ratios between computer systems. Benchmark and/or other testing results are obtained for both computer systems. For each test, a ratio of one system's performance to the other is calculated. The ratios and/or testing results may be weighted. From the performance ratios, a histogram is produced to indicate the probabilities of achieving the various ratios. Based on the distribution of probabilities, a particular performance ratio can be predicted with a corresponding level of confidence, and used for capacity planning or configuring a computing environment.

Patents on Peer to Peer Trading Platform

While working at eBay Research Labs I did some work using Skype that resulted in four patents in the area of P2P trading and reputation systems. I just noticed that they are now public, as of late 2007, and here they are:

Peer-to-peer trading platform

Peer-to-peer trading platform with relative reputation-based item search and buddy rating

Peer-to-peer trading platform with search caching

Peer-to-peer trading platform with roles-based transactions

The seed of the idea came from my good friend Josep Ferrandiz, who still works at PayPal. The ideas were developed with help from Zahid Ahmed who is now working for EMC, and with a lot of help from Neel Sundaresan who manages eBay Research labs. The patents are in all of our names.

I think we came up with some cool ideas, we also stress tested the Skype API's in some novel ways and got some things fixed. The lasting legacy of this work is more robust application to application messaging API's and improvements in Skype4Java.

BIL Podcast: Garrett Lisi - Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything

I published a BIL podcast from the recordings I made, first talk is my favorite, particle physics explained by Garrett Lisi

http://web.mac.com/adriancockcroft/BILcast/BILcast/BILcast.html

Subscribe to the podcast to pick up new talks as they are added.

BIL - recording an excellent adventure

The closing slide of BIL by Garrett Lisi



Two days of intense expansion of my horizons, a self-organizing conference, and I am left holding a jewel. My contribution to BIL was that I basically did tech-support and audio for all the speakers in the main hall for two days. I brought my audio recorder a good mic and stand, a guitar amp (that was used as a PA speaker) and bags of cables and adaptors. Other BILsters provided a video projector and a karaoke machine for PA. I hooked up the mic and a mini-jack cable for computer audio out, and kept it all running as best I could. I recorded almost 800 minutes of content on my Korg D16 hard disk recorder, which is almost all of every talk. There were other people recording on Saturday, including video, but they had technical problems on Sunday, so we have little or no video of the Sunday talks.

Next I'm going to make a backup copy, then start working on extracting the raw data for other people to process. I'll make mp3's of my favorite talks as I get time. Several TED speakers talked at BIL, including Aubrey De Grey on Saturday and Garrett Lisi, who closed out the conference with a fantastic talk. I chatted to Garrett a bit, very cool...

For the stream of consciousness with pictures that I uploaded during the talk, look at my twitxr page. I will update my twitter account with progress on the audio files. I don't expect to use twitter and twitxr on a daily basis, but I think they are useful for conferences. I'll track progress at Ecomm08 on March 12-14th the same way.