Looking back on 1 million pageviews

This blog just hit one million pageviews:

Seems like a pretty cool milestone to me. I never imagined I'd get so much traffic.

Just for fun, here are the top five most popular posts on this blog so far:

Why I'm Leaving Harvard (99263 pageviews), in which I announce my departure from Harvard to Google. I guess this post became a kind of touchstone for a bunch of people considering an academic career, or those who also made the decision to leave academia. I'm often asked whether I still think I made the right decision after nearly 3 years at Google. The answer is a resounding yes: I'm extremely happy and my team is doing amazing things - some of which you can read about here.

So, you want to go to grad school? (43314 pageviews), in which I try to give an honest assessment of why someone should (or should not) do a PhD in Computer Science. The main thing I try to dispel is this myth that you should "take a year off" and work in industry before going to grad school. Way too many students tell me that they plan to do this, and I think it is a really bad idea if you are serious about doing a PhD.

Day in the life of a Googler (33885 pageviews), which was intended as a tongue-in-cheek look at the difference between a day at Google and a day as a professor. Somehow this got taken seriously by people, and someone sent me a link to a Chinese translation that was getting a lot of hits and comments (in Chinese). My guess is that the intended humor was lost in translation.

How I almost killed Facebook (28367 pageviews), an early post about the time I tried to talk Mark Zuckerberg out of dropping out of Harvard to do a startup. Thankfully he did not listen to me.

Programming != Computer Science (25794 pageviews), a little rant against grad students who seem to mix up writing software with doing research.

Of course, not all of my posts have been widely read. Going back over them, it looks like the ones with the smallest number of hits focus on specific research topics, like my trip report for SenSys 2009 (115 pageviews!) and an announcement for postdoc openings in my group (a whopping 68 pageviews). I guess I should stick to blogging about Mark Zuckerberg instead.

Moving my life to the cloud

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clspeace/2250488434/

I'm in the process of moving my (computing) life entirely to the cloud -- no more laptop: just a phone, tablet (which I use rarely) and a Chromebook Pixel. My three-year-old MacBook Pro is about to croak, and it seems like now is the time to migrate everything to the cloud, so I can free myself from having to maintain a bunch of files, music, photos, applications, and backups locally. I'd really like to be in a place where I could throw my laptop out a moving vehicle and not care a bit about what happens to my data. Still, there are some challenges ahead.

The Chromebook Pixel itself is a sweet piece of kit. The keyboard and trackpad are nearly as good as my Mac, and the screen resolution is simply unreal: you CANNOT see the pixels (ironic choice of product name; as if the next version of a Mac would be the "MacBook Virus"). It boots in 10 seconds. Hell, the other day I did a complete OS upgrade (switching from the beta to the dev channel), which took no more than 10 seconds -- including the reboot. The Pixel comes with 1 TB (!) of Google Drive storage, so at this point there's no excuse for not storing all my stuff in the cloud -- this is more space than any laptop I've ever owned.

But you only get to use Chrome!?!? Working at Google, I spend about 70% of my time in Chrome already, so the environment is pretty much exactly what I need. The other 30% of my time is spent ssh'ing into a Linux machine to do software development. The Secure Shell Chrome extension provides a full-on terminal emulator within the browser. I pretty much only use the shell and vim when doing development, so this setup is fine for me.

Since I left academia, I don't have much need for writing papers in LaTeX and doing fancy PowerPoint slides anymore. If those were still major uses of my time, I'd have to find another solution. Google Docs works perfectly well for the kind of writing and presentations I do these days; in fact, the sharing capabilities turn out to be more important than fancy formatting.

What about working offline!?!?! Who the hell ever works offline anymore? I certainly don't. Even on airplanes, the majority of the time I have WiFi. I generally can't get any work done without an Internet connection, so optimizing for "offline" use seems silly to me. If I'm really offline, I'll read a book.

Music? Google Play Music and the Amazon Cloud Player work great. I have a huge music library (some 1,200 albums) which I keep in both places.

Movies and TV shows? It's true that iTunes has the best selection, but what's available on Google Play and Amazon Instant Video is pretty good. I mostly watch movies and TV on my actual TV (crazy, I know) but for "on the road" I think streaming content will work well enough. There's no real offline video playback on the Chromebook as far as I know; for that I can use my Android tablet though. Netflix apparently works fine on the Chromebook, although I unsubscribed from Netflix when they started screwing people over on their pricing.

Of course, it's not all roses. A few pain points, so far:

Migrating my photo library to the cloud was more painful than I had hoped. I have around 70 GB of pictures and videos taken over the years, and wanted to get it onto Google Drive so I'd have direct access to it from the Chromebook. This involved installing the Google Drive Mac app which allowed me to copy everything over, although the upload took a day or so, and it wasn't clear at first if everything was syncing correctly. (I also had to make sure not to sync the photo library on my other machines which had the Drive app installed.)

Managing photos in the cloud still kind of sucks. I'm not happy with any of the cloud-based photo library management solutions that I've found. I have a Flickr Pro account which I use for sharing select pictures with family and friends, but I don't feel comfortable uploading all of my photos to Flickr. I could use Google+, however, it's more focused on sharing rather than large library management. I am not sure what is going on with Picasa these days. Dropbox is another option, which I use for general files, but its photo management is pretty rudimentary as well. For now I'm going to make do with the bare-bones photo support in Google Drive and think about a better way to manage this. What's cool is that I already take all of my photos on my phone which automatically syncs then to both Google Drive and Dropbox, so there's never a need to physically plug the phone in to anything.

Editing plain text files is -- surprisingly -- kind of hard. About the only use I have for plain text files (apart from coding) anymore is writing paper reviews -- I read a PDF in one window; fill in the plain-ASCII review form for HotCRP in the other. There are a couple of Chrome extensions with bare-bones text editors, but it's a far cry from a full-fledged editor. I am experimenting with Neutron Drive, which is a pretty cool editor/IDE Chrome Extension which uses Google Drive in the backend. Maybe I'll have to change my habits and just fill in my reviews in HotCRP directly (see above about not being able to get any work done offline).

Where to keep my really private stuff? By which I mean porn, of course. Or tax returns. Or anything I don't want (or can't) store in any of the cloud services. This article from VentureBeat does a good job at summarizing the policies of the popular cloud storage providers, but the upshot is that all of them have some mechanism to either take down objectionable content or report it to law enforcement.

What I'd really like is to set up a "private cloud", perhaps running a server at home which I could then access (securely) over the web. There are several solutions for private encrypted cloud storage out there (like Arq and Duplicati), but most of them require some form of specialized client (which won't work on ChromeOS any time soon). I guess I could run a WebDAV server or something on a local box or even a machine in the cloud which I could access through the browser. Still, I'm not sure what to do about this yet. It seems insane to me that it's 2013 and we still don't know how to get file sync right.

Disclaimer: Everything in this post is my personal opinion and does not represent the view of my employer.