September 2009
5 posts
Over Labor Day I spent some time ranting about how the quality of jeans and many consumer goods has been on a steep decline as U.S. companies have aggressively outsourced production. It would be easy to write the discussion off as an abnormal geek obsession. Ok that’s true. But I do believe that the recognition of quality and craftsmanship is important if you, yourself, want to produce a...
10 years ago, when home internet access was limited to dial-up modems, many discussions in the industry centered on the last mile problem. Completing the last leg of the high speed internet to residences was going to cost far more and be a much bigger technical problem than the commercial backbone. At the time I didn’t own a computer because the access I had at home was dwarfed by what we...
A few months ago I wrote how I was humbled trying to record
screen capture demos of our product for internal training. My original attempt wasn’t too productive.
I probably was overly ambitious and set my standards too high. But recently I decided
to give it another shot, with the opposite expectations. I lowered my standands and decided to release what ever I created
in one take. Well, I...
It has been awhile since I’ve updated my website regularly. In retrospect, I regret this. 15 years after logging onto the internet, I still believe in the democratization of information that it once promised. Before it was almost impossible to distribute content with any scale, and the media was firmly controlled by the few. If you think the media controls opinion now, remember what it was...
Some American made goods for Labor day…
Today, while perusing the web site of one of the few companies in the U.S. which sell the Japanese jeans I wear, I saw a product by the Japanese apparel company, Sugar Cane,
jeans made in the U.S., that caused me to pause. I had just documented some
of my
U.S. made goods, and high quality U.S. made jeans
are something I’ve been seeking for...
August 2009
1 post
In the last couple years I’ve been entrenched in a project management role which I have enjoyed, but for better or worse, I’ve probably spent more time in meetings, than writing code. But recently, I’ve become more involved in development process again, and I’m enjoying my work more than I have in a long time.
To be honest, the guys on my team, which I’m fortunate...
June 2009
1 post
We recently shipped a significant release (way to go guys!) of our application. At the end of
a release cycle I typically demo the app to the other depts to bring everybody up to speed on the new features.
Since this release is chocked full of brilliant new features, not to mention a completely updated UI, I had what I thought was a genius idea:
create a screen capture demo video.
It seemed...
May 2009
1 post
The netbook represents a serious threat to Microsoft’s core OS business.
For years, I’ve believed Microsoft was in a precarious position in the market because the cost of software
had become a larger precentage of the cost of a new PC.
In 2004 I said:
When PCs cost $3000+, DOS and Windows ran about $100 for OEMs. That amounts to about 3% of the retail cost. Fast forward 10...
March 2009
1 post
Outside a few choice racing sims,
I’ve never really gotten into gaming. I’ve always found coding itself to be enough of a game to keep entertained at the keyboard. But Jeff Atwood, he’s a gamer, and it makes him a better developer.
Until recently I didn’t think that gaming could improve my understanding of general application design, but it is becoming clear that...
January 2009
3 posts
Note: This is a work in progress, and I’m interested in soliciting feedback. These are the guidelines I use with my own team, but
this is my first attempt at formalizing them.
Often when there is a recommendation to omit goto from a language developers pointing out the edge cases where goto can make sense will argue for the inclusion of the construct, and surprisingly even relatively...
I happened to be looking through some old emails, and I found my review of ASIO.
In my opinion the library should be accepted. This is the best example of
an asynchronous library available in either C or C++. All other major
program platforms Java (NIO), .NET, Python (twisted) have well accepted
asynchronous networking support, and I think this is important for C++ as
a high performance...
In the last year I transitioned from lone cowboy developer to project manager. In this roll I find that I am called upon to make quite a few judgment calls both on the behavior and the architecture of the application.
I am really fortunate to work with a great team who I respect and are far better developers than me, so generally this goes pretty smoothly. But occasionally, either due to my...
December 2008
3 posts
CARPE+ITEM: januar 2008
Really big task lights
Product Review
Here are some examples of using anthro carts as hi-fi racks
Stefan Didak’s Home Office
Using this as the gold standard for the ultimate geek home office.
Newegg.com - LG W2452T-TF Black 24” 2ms(GTG) Widescreen LCD Monitor 400 cd/m2 10000:1 DCR with HDCP support - LCD Monitors
Looking at this monitor for a inexpensive 24”. Realized it won’t work with ergotron monitor arms, so it is out. Blah.
August 2007
3 posts
Links for 2007-08-10 [del.icio.us]
Room & Board - Chelsea in Angora
Have all but decided to buy this sectional, but can’t pull the trigger.
facebook data store api thoughts - snarfed.org
This looks interesting.
(via christopher baus.net)
Links for 2007-08-09 [del.icio.us]
mohair wool beige sofa
mohair wool for $375?
vintage Knoll side table / coffee table chrome & walnut (?)
MOOTS YBB SUPERLIGHT TITANIUM MOUNTAIN BIKE SIZE 17
dream bike
One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t…
“”If I want to manufacture biological weapons with my copy of iTunes, I will, fascists. “”
Mega hands-on: Virgin...
Links for 2007-08-08 [del.icio.us]
IKEA red lounge/recliner chair
Noguchi Table / Jacobsen Dining Chairs / Laccio Tables / DWR Theatre
**SOFA from ROOM&BOARD
White Eames Elliptical Table from Room & Board
George Nelson Bubble Ball Lamp - HUGE
Nelson lamp
Funky, Cool, Retro Hairdryer Lamp
(via christopher baus.net)
July 2007
14 posts
Links for 2007-07-27 [del.icio.us]
uncov, uncovering web2
Still don’t get the strategy of developing a web2.0 company while bashing everyone at the same time.
(via christopher baus.net)
Twitter Malfunctions
I think Twitter is neat. The concept of aggregating brief messages from
multiple sources is simple but fun, useful, and technically interesting (well
to me anyway). But I have had
a couple strange malfunctions in the past couple days. The most disconcerting
was that SMS notifications were turned on in the middle of the night unleashing
a small torrent of messages on my phone, walking me up.
...
Links for 2007-07-19 [del.icio.us]
Tenerife Skunkworks Amazon S3: Now with locking, transactions and no delay between writing and reading
This sounds most excellent. Erlang + mnesia + s3.
Tenerife Skunkworks Amazon S3: Now with locking, transactions and no delay between writing and reading
This sounds like it is going in the direction I was thinking with my twitter/s3 posts. Very interesting.
(via christopher baus.net)
Erlang hacking
If you’ve been following my
tweets, you know that after about
6 months of trying to figure out a new side project, I’ve decided to teach
myself
Erlang.
In short, it will have you digging deep into your CS education to remember
languages like Prolog and ML. And after using languages like Python, the syntax
is well, ugly. And it certainly doesn’t read like prose, which...
Links for 2007-07-17 [del.icio.us]
Bubble in the desert
Pretty amazing blog about hiking the Sierra Crest trail. This is the west coast version of the Appalachian trail.
(via christopher baus.net)
Links for 2007-07-15 [del.icio.us]
BoConcept Home
(via christopher baus.net)
Links for 2007-07-12 [del.icio.us]
Zenoss : Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring
Homepage of ZABBIX :: An Enterprise-Class Open Source Distributed Monitoring Solution
(via christopher baus.net)
Links for 2007-07-11 [del.icio.us]
Anti-Grain Geometry - Texts Rasterization Exposures
Wow Microsoft, hire this guy ASAP.
Delta Gunite: California
Shotcrete contractor in sacremento.
(via christopher baus.net)
Visual Studio SP1 takes forever to install
This is crazy.
This is my favorite part:
Because VS 2005 SP1 is so large, it takes a long time - typically around 10 minutes - to load the entire image into memory in order to generate a hash over the image.
Update: Now the patch is just sitting there saying “Time Remaining: 0 seconds.” I think Microsoft has lost their collective mind.
(via christopher...
Links for 2007-07-08 [del.icio.us]
Mnesia Reference Manual
(via christopher baus.net)
Links for 2007-07-07 [del.icio.us]
How to Write a Spelling Corrector
I think the list comprehension syntax in python is amazingly elegant.
Spell corrector (aka Google suggest) in Erlang (first iteration) | Federico Feroldi’s blog
here’s an erlang version. Oh man python list comprehensions have it all over Erlang. Guido is a genius.
(via christopher baus.net)
S3 Twitter: What is needed is quick hash append
I dug up couple interesting posts from ‘Al’ at Folknologist (sorry,
I can’t find Al’s full name on his blog).
First is a comment on the
circleshare blog regarding Twitter’s
database scaling issues:
The big problem is the inserts (if the backend is a db), every tweet has to be inserted. Thus even if you have a fast messaging (in memory) the write that...
Links for 2007-07-03 [del.icio.us]
The Chord/DHash Project - Overview
This looks pretty cool. I think google can only be stopped in a distributed fashion. A distributed file system is a start.
(via christopher baus.net)
Twitter on S3: S3 objects as lists
S3 as a data store was still on my mind as
I rolled out of the fog and into Marin on my bike ride today.
Let me take the thought experiment a bit further. Let’s
assume tweets could be reliably blocked and written to S3
objects. Just to put a number on it, let’s say 1000 tweets are
stored in one S3 object.
If every tweet in one object is by a different user, how does...