Startups are pretty fascinating. I work for a startup, and one of my good friends works for another startup. I’ve also worked for 2 other startups, one during the first “bubble”, and another one a few years later. Oh my, how the world of web startups has changed in that time! 1999: You must have…
Author: bkjones
Social Media, The Future of News, and Data Mining
I went to a very good panel discussion yesterday hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. There has been a conference going on there that covers a lot of the overlap between technology, law, and journalism, and the panel discussion yesterday, Data Mining, Visualization, and Interactivity was even more enlightening than…
Get a List of Years and Months in a Date Range with PHP
I can’t find the initial inspiration for this to link to – sorry. I came across a forum post or maybe a blog post where someone needed to do something like return an array of the months (or maybe it was days or something) in a given date range. I had a place where I…
A Couple of MySQL Performance Tips
If you’re an advanced MySQL person, you might already know these, in which case, please read anyway, because I still have some questions. On the other hand, f you’re someone who launched an application without a lot of database background, thinking “MySQL Just Works”, you’ll eventually figure out that it doesn’t, and in that case,…
rrdpy – Thanks, Corey!
I have a somewhat unique situation to deal with in terms of monitoring. I need to put a graph a bunch of historical data mined from web server logs. I can get so far with loghetti, which is coming along and is great for certain things, but there’s a bridge missing between it and something…
Ubuntu 8.04 and Python Editors
So I updated one of my laptops to Ubuntu 8.04 pretty much as soon as it was available. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro laptop for everything for probably over a year now, because I grew tired of the hobby that *is* running Linux on a laptop and getting everything to work. I’ll note that…
Python Magazine April Issue is Out
Hi all, This month’s Python Magazine has been released, containing a few really great articles, including on about using the Google API and Google Spreadsheets to create a database “in the cloud”. For you scientist types, there’s also an excellent article about BioPython. For XCode users, there’s an article about scripting XCode with Python, and…
Spring Means Blooming Flowers… and Ideas
I seem to have found a pattern in my own internal workings. In the fall, I work furiously and get a lot done. Around the time of the winter holidays, I almost always do major personal web site changes and upgrades according to a mental list I’ve compiled over the previous year. In the spring,…
New web host: check!
If you’re reading this post, it means that the DNS entries have propagated, and you’re viewing my blog at it’s new location: WebFaction! Thanks to everyone who left comments in response to my cry for web host recommendations. Almost everyone mentioned webfaction in the comments, and I got a few emails with that recommendation as…
Can’t find the Ruby Kool-aid
I picked up the Apress book about Ruby for Systems Administrators, because I plan on learning enough about Ruby to make it a viable tool that I can use if I have to use it at some point. I still plan on doing that, but in reviewing the first couple of chapters, I don’t think…