First, AddThis.com (where I was the director of IT) and Clearspring have merged! A side effect of that is that I’m now (happily, on purpose, by choice) a full-time consultant! I’ll have a web site up soonish. Until then, check back here for updates. If you’re a tech firm who needs help, and don’t mind…
Category: Database
Sustained IO on EBS == No Bueno
I have a small EC2 instance running with a 25GB EBS volume attached. It has a database on it that I need to manipulate by doing things like dropping indexes and creating new ones. This is on rather large (multi-GB, millions of rows) tables. After running one DROP INDEX operation that ran all day without…
More Adventures in Amazon EC2 (and EBS)
Short Version: You can find a fantastic video here about bundling customized AMIs and registering them with Amazon so that you can launch as many instances of your new AMI as you want. The video is so good that I don’t bother writing out the steps to do the bundling (it would be pretty darn…
PyWorks Conference Schedule Posted
Hi all, The schedule for PyWorks has been posted! I’m really excited about three things: 1) there are some really cool talks that I’m looking forward to attending. There are a couple of sysadmin-related talks, AppEngine, TurboGears, Django, and an area I’ve been especially slow to move into: testing (I know, shame on me). There’s…
Why I Don’t Write Book Reviews
I have a lot of interaction with publishing types. I write a lot, and I edit some, and I do tech reviews and stuff for some publishers, and I co-authored a book, and I’ve worked on two magazines, and a newspaper, and I’m generally fascinated by the technical book market and stuff like that. I’m…
The promise of Drizzle
I got to actually speak to Brian Aker for maybe a total of 5 minutes after his micro-presentation about Drizzle, which took place at the Sun booth at OSCON 2008. I was a bit nervous to ask what questions I had out loud, because the things I had wondered about were things I really didn’t…
OSCON Day 2: Launching a Startup in 3 Hours
Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well…
OSCON Evening 1 Begins, and More Portland Tips
The evening plans didn’t wait for talks to be done. The IRC channel (#oscon on irc.freenode.net) was alive with talk of prospects for dinner and drinks after the conference. I myself was torn between a group going out for Lebanese and another going to Henry’s, but opted to go with my buddies from home to…
OSCON Day 1 Comes to a Close
I think I have pictures of most of the basic parts of the conference at my OSCON Flickr set, and I thoroughly enjoyed day 1 of the conference. Of course, while *day* 1 is over, *night* 1 has yet to even begin. There are lots of BoF sessions, and maybe even more smaller meetups going…
Day 1 of OSCON Begins, and More Tips for Conference-goers
I got an early start. Too early. But I’m from the west coast, so my body thinks I slept in. I wandered around a bit, took a few pics which you can see at my Flickr OSCON set, and I discovered a couple of things that might be of interest: The starbucks in the conference…