What the Shut Down of Megaupload and other File Sharing sites means for Business

Now over the past week, a lot of turmoil in the interwebs has sprung up as the US tightens its grips on online piracy. Recently popular file-sharing sites such as Filesonic, Fileserve and FileJungle have take measures to avoid confrontations with the Department of Justice.

The reality: There is more than enough content on the internet to satisfy those who can only offer their time.

Though it may or may not happen, people may start paying attention to smaller productions such on Youtube, flash games and other indie projects. If this is the case, Hollywood would have successfully helped many smaller industries in film etc.

While DOJ’s actions may not directly create any new revenue sources for Media giants, it may have helped in the creation and new industries more robust in the wake of the online crackdown.

However there are arguments that these companies are overstepping their bounds and bribing politicians. Whether or not that is the case, we will have to wait and see how this plays out.

 

Equivocal Investments and an Uncertain Future

An economy has to grow in the US to sustain itself. Everything must be bigger than the day before. When you have 100 dollars sitting in the bank and you pay them to build a house, assuming that that worker was doing nothing to grow the economy, now there are still 100 dollars but a hew house is made and so forth and so forth. This is a very simplistic model, but shows how our economy grows in many ways. What we expect though is that the valuations of these assets will remain the same or go higher for the economy to grow. The economy is less of what is actually is happening that what people feel. If people feel the economy is recovering, the start again to leverage their assets again, hire more people, build more products and again should expect the market valuation of these assets to remain the same. But this is our cycle.

So the future of the markets as we know is uncertain and volatile. Anyone who says they know the direction the market is moving must know some news or know there’s a panic. But today I’m going to talk about a guy named John P. Hansen. He’s fictional so if there is anyone with that name, I guess ignore it.

John P. Hansen is a retail trader.  He is a sales manager at FakeCompany LLC. and has saved up enough cash and wants a higher return on his money than a savings account can provide. John P. Hansen decides to invest in equity securities in his spare time. He has work from 9-5pm so misses many of the foreign markets as well as much of the domestic market. So he swing trades, he sets trailing stops at all the wrong places and first and loses money on price fluctuations. He learns to set them lower than levels of support but thinks he’s smart and plays a volatile stock and the lack of liquidity loses him money. John is confused and decides to buy the stocks everyone buys: the household names brands.

He buys Microsoft. The sideways swinging 10 year lulz stock he knows is secure. The stock loses/gains money over time but he receives his dividends. But the pace is slow and John wants to chase his loses. Company XYZ_TILT is releasing a new product called AVERACAN and John believes the product will do well. John doesn’t limit his market exposure and soon he doesn’t know what the market is anymore. He feels sick to his stomach. The market is this big huge shadowy monster.

A lot of people end up this way, but the market is just a bunch of people staring at the monitor just like you. Play the players, not the market.

Where some people go instead:

I’ll get to writing these next:
Putting money in Hedgefunds: 2/5
Putting money in Mutualfunds: 2/12

Putting money into Private Equity: 2/19

Some cool libraries for Java: Comparators, etc…

This is just for personal note, but if you code in Java, check these out:

http://code.google.com/p/google-collections/

http://code.google.com/p/lambdaj/

Like a Kid in a Candy Store: Amazon Web Services

I signed up for the Free Usage Tier (not likely I’ll exceed it) but it’s really really REALLY awesome.  Here’s what you get:

Micro Instances

Instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.

• Micro Instance 613 MB of memory, up to 2 ECUs (for short periodic bursts), EBS storage only, 32-bit or 64-bit platform

 

EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

 

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**
• 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
• 10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**

 

A break once in a while is good, so I think I’ll learn a lot more about Amazon Web Services as my breaks from now own. : )

Living an Amazing Life: Why I am Thankful

I don’t have tons of money laying around, I don’t eat lobster or expensive food nor do I wear nice and lavish clothing, but I really have a great life; this doesn’t mean I’m content with the ways thing are as I will always strive to improve, but in many ways I’m grateful for everything so far. So to be blunt, there are so many people who would love to do what I can do, but cannot. 

I always remember this from a podcast, I think stated by P.J. O’Rouke:

I have a 13 year old at home, and she is always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says that, I say, “Honey, you’re cute; that’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that’s not fair. You were born in America; that’s not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.”

I remind myself about this everyday. I could be tanning leather hides, digging in underground mines for precious rare earth metals, starving in the middle of the desert, born into a family that has AIDs, finding refuge from political upheaval or in middle of a war that has no meaning. But, that is not the case. I’m here in the US, chasing a dream that many people wish they could and many who are. I have many people to thank, my parents, my family, loved and cherished ones, the United States. 

But that’s where I stop, I don’t believe that being thankful my entire life is where I find meaning. In essence, people as creatures, species need others to say that ‘you’ exist. And just as I am thankful to those who have helped me, I want to others to feel the same; maybe not towards me, but toward the things I can create.

We all strive to make things bigger than ourselves, music, art, businesses, stories, wars and families and leave a legacy behind. No matter what religion you believe in, the ‘you’ that you are now, only has one life on this Earth and to live every second to its fullest, doing something you love, is an opportunity afforded to the few. So to those who can, remember what an amazing life you have and how it can always improve. Not just improve for you, but for those around you and those who are six degrees away and beyond. 

 

Taking a Leisurely Break: Spring Framework

For the past weeks now, I’ve been hearing a lot about Spring, a development Framework for Java. (As much as I know now) So instead of catching up with the Kardashians (I believe they are a family that had a show) or reading about why Snooki (also from a show, thought title eludes me atm)  showed up at CES, I think I’ll have more fun learning about Spring in the next 15 mins.

The first thing I really notice is how well designed the site is. The elliptical drop shadow, that directs the eye to the center of the screen. Everything is well designed : ). But enough about that, let’s get into the juicy juicy code or docs.

Ahh okay after looking at the features, it seems like its a bundle of tools, data abstraction w/ focus on web integration. That fits my style really well.

Alright to the code or docs actually now.

Okay so part one is telling me about how powerful java is, but leaves a lot of menial coding for the programmer, which we develop patterns and code to deal with.

Oh wow and look at that 15 minute break is up!

2012: The End of the World for my unused resources

2012 is the year I clean out my game repository. I had a lot of unfinished ideas and I think this year, I’ll finish them off.

Holiday Game For Android: Santa Joyride!

Thanks to everyone who downloaded Santa Joyride Free!

There are over 100 downloads since I first released it! Keep it up guys : )

I did a small dance today guys so have fun playing.

For those who haven’t yet check it out,

click here to play it for yourself!

Learning Django and Python: Part 1

There’s a lot of things that I’ve delayed in life and one of them is learning Python. It’s in everything I use and I think its about time I settle down and crack some code out with it. Django then is the perfect web framework mate to accompany my learning of python. What worries me a bit is that I should probably be a bit more comfortable w/ Python before touching Django, but how can I resist?

Initial Thoughts : Python | that is even before “Hello World”

• Python is OOP supports procedural, so transitioning to it from Java/C shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.
• Good: SQLite is built into Python, which I’m comfortable with already.
• IDLE and console are lighter, but less powerful than Eclipse : \ Tradeoff
• ByteCode and PVM, just like Java!
• Tons of Frozen Binary options : ) YES
• Garbage Collection in Python = code faster;
• All in all reminds me of my old calculator programming days. (though not many similarities in terms of actual code, syntax)
• Fairly simple object serialization

Initial Thoughts: Django | Before Installing/Using

• Has great Database Abstraction. There’s nothing like messing up MySQL code. This is great and will plug a lot of injection attacks. Now just gotta worry about cross site scripting.. etc..
• The website has so much great info on the framework, since it takes you to the docs directly. It will take me a while to get through all of it… PART 2 COMING SOON.

How to make an App Portfolio

I wish I had 48 hour days, but I’m human just like everyone else, and getting to building a portfolio hasn’t been a top priority. So I decided to go ahead and build a new one since one of my resolutions that I set way back when was to finish one by Jan. 2012. I make Android apps, the majority of which are undergoing heavy external and internal surgery atm. Nonetheless, I’m going to go ahead w/ the portfolio. This of course is great for iPhone, iOS, Blackberry apps, etc…

I’m might add some other work as well besides apps.

Step 1: Model a Phone and Set up the Scene

I quickly opened Blender and Modeled a phone and set up the scene for render. If you need modeling tutorials, check out CG Cookie. The Scene is just has a basic lighting set-up that is commonly used to light green screen film sets. So for lighting, go onto YouTube and look for lighting tutorials.

Step 2: Render and Add Additional Assets

Render the Scene in your favorite renderer (Cycles, Octane, POV, Yafaray, Vray?) and attach on some info.  This of course doesn’t have to be the way you do every scene.

Next, I added some additional info to the Scene.

Step 3: Work on the Other Apps.

Now this might not be the way it is for everyone, but I made some old assets and will be re-using them. I simply attach them to a similar template.

There will be a link here to my portfolio when I’m done!