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…
Category: Big Ideas
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…
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,…
Ok, that’s it. It’s “lose”. Not “loose”.
Every. Single. Day. This. Happens. I read a *LOT* of online technical documentation. Come to think of it, I read a *LOT* of documentation offline as well. I also occasionally read things like blogs and comments and stuff. In all of my reading, I have found that the most prevalent mistake made by the writer…
All Linux Distros Suck
1. In reality, all Linux distributions suck, some just suck in ways you might not have discovered yet. While I am not the holy master of all that is Linux, I like to think that, having deployed, administered, maintained, and supported a good number of distros (not to mention UNIX variants), in varying environments and…
A non-degree-holder’s view of hiring decisions
I get a good number of job offers without sending resumes around. I guess my name shows up in enough places, associated with enough buzzwords, that recruiters fire off emails first and read the fine print later. The “fine print” in my case, says that I do not have a college degree. 99.999% of the…
Amazon Adds Static IP and “Availability Zones” to EC2
This is cool. You can now associate a static IP address with your EC2 instances. No more mucking about with 10-minute DNS timeouts or dynamic DNS routines. You can also elect to start certain instances in multiple locations using “Availability Zones” These new features will make it a little easier for people to deploy larger…
Hadoop, EC2, S3, and me
I’m playing with a lot of rather large data sets. I’ve just been informed recently that these data sets are child’s play, because I’ve only been exposed to the outermost layer of the onion. The amount of data I *will* have access to (a nice way of saying “I’ll be required to wrangle and munge”)…
The Power of Open Source
I think my very favorite aspect of the open source development model is that it allows me to practice the philosophies I use in my every day personal life, and apply them to software development as well. In my teens and early 20’s I read quite a lot of Aristotle and Plato, and a very…
Loghetti Beta – An Apache Log Filter
I’m thinking about just making this an open source project hosted someplace like Google Code or something, because there are folks much smarter than myself who can probably do wonders with the code I’ve put together here. Loghetti takes an Apache combined format access log and a few options as arguments, throws your log lines…