Monthly Archives: March 2009

Cloud Computing and Amazon Mechanical Turk

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I attended the third London Cloud Camp last night at the QE II conference centre. I had a really good time and met some interesting people. One of the conversation topics was around Cloud Computing definitions: you can probably imagine the discussions over what is just the internet and what is the “cloud”. Someone mentioned Amazon Mechanical Turk the service which lets one outsource menial jobs via a Web Service API.

The history of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk

The history of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk

This got me thinking, if you look at someone like George Reese’s definition of a Cloud Service Mechanical Turk meets all the criteria. I’d add scalable as another criteria that a service has to meet do be defined as in/on the cloud and Mechanical Turk does this.

Why does this matter? What people seem to miss when trying  to define Cloud Computing is that it doesn’t matter how the service is implemented! And that is the whole point of the paradigm. For all we know Amazon EC2 could be run by a team of monkeys typing on keyboards or using abacuses. The beauty of Cloud Services is we don’t need to know how they are implemented, just how we interact with them.

When you’re trying to explain Cloud Computing just remember Amazon Mechanical Turk!

Hip Operation

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On Friday I had my operation. It went went well, although I was in surgery for two hours and caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the recovery room (more on that later). So what exactly was up with my hip? As suspected, confirmed and (hopefully) fixed by my surgeon I had Femoralacetabular Impingement or FAI. This is caused by a deformity in the femoral head (ball) of the hip joint called a Cam impingement. This deformity caused a tear in the hip cartilage (it turns out the tear was quite large) which had been giving me problems for over two years.

The Treatment

I won’t dwell on this too much but it is quite interesting. The treatment is known as a hip arthroscopy, which means going inside the hip joint with a camera. To achieve this the hip joint has to be semi-dislocated, which is done using traction. Three incisions are then made to allow a camera and instruments to be inserted. I’m not sure exactly how they fixed the tear in the cartilage but I can imagine how they removed the Cam deformity!

Wounds

Wounds - one still covered up

The Aftermath

I woke up in the recovery room after the operation in quite a lot of pain. I was dreaming and it was all a bit of a blur. I remember trying to turn on my left side to try to stop the pain which caused a few problems because I was attached by several wires (blood pressure and heart monitoring). This caused a bit of a kerfuffle and I felt quite embarrassed when I became finally with it. The nurse gave me some pain killers but they didn’t seem to have any effect so I had quite a lot of morphine. This did help, although I didn’t receive the wave of relief you see in the movies (just a dulling of the pain). They also have to inject other stuff into you to stop you being sick. At some point the surgeon came in and said that the operation had been a success. I realised I’d been in surgery for two hours which is longer than I expected. The nurse I was with was quite chatty and went to get me some water. I think she meant for me to only have a sip but I drank it all straight away (I was quite dehydrated as you cannot drink or eat for 6 hours before the operation). Thankfully I wasn’t sick! After about an hour in recovery I was well enough to leave and got wheeled back to the ward. The hospital bed wasn’t big enough and the porter still had a bit to learn — several times my right leg almost hit things on the way and then he smacked the bed into something whilst parking me. I spent a couple more hours on the ward sleeping and then was able to go home.

Hopefully my hip will now have free movement and I can start playing sport again. For the moment I’m doing physio exercises to try and get it moving again (currently I’m unable to get one of my socks on and off again, which is annoying). I’m managing to walk without crutches but getting in and out of bed and that sort of things is a little bit troublesome. It’s quite a weird feeling — effectively teaching my leg to do things again.

I’ll post more on what I’ve been up to since the op and also some of the things that I think the NHS could improve.