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…
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…
Design Patterns in System Administration
Most readers of my blog know that I consult, in addition to usually having a day job. I started my career working for a consulting firm, and couldn’t let go of the endless fascinating problems that exist in the “technological landscape”, and in addition, the seemingly endless numbers of ways to solve them. I’ve learned…
Is it time to switch VM apps on OS X?
Thought I’d throw this out to the lazyweb for advice. I’ve been running OS X as my primary desktop OS since I got my macbook pro around May 2006 or so. I installed Parallels as soon as I found it, and it was great. I still have it installed. However, I’ve found two issues with…
Microsoft Makes Progress, but Still Misses the Point
I’m still digesting certain parts of OSCON 2008, but I think I’ve finally settled on a conclusion for my thoughts on Sam Ramji’s presentation of Microsoft’s contributions to open source projects, and their progress toward rethinking how they do business to be more friendly toward competing platforms and technologies, so that other platforms can integrate…
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 Update: Coverage gets harder as conference moves faster
As expected, the conference really started to deliver starting Wednesday with the opening of the Exhibit Hall, announcements of all kinds from all companies, and parties at every turn. Wednesday also marks the first day of sessions that are only 45 minutes long instead of the 3-hour sessions on Monday and Tuesday. I’ve attended too…