We’re starting a San Diego Hadoop User Group. Please send me an email ( darugar at gmail ) if you’re interested or leave a comment here. Details to be worked out, but we’ll likely will have the first meeting towards the end of February.

I’m fascinated by what’s “normal” for people. Example: right now my feet are hurting from the cold. I have a fairly high tolerance for pain, so the fact that I took notice tells me that it’s actually pretty damned cold.

I could put on a pair of socks. I could put on shoes. I could grab a blanket. I could turn on the heater.

But I won’t. I’ll continue to sit here in the cold and ignore the pain. 

That’s strange. But it’s normal for me. In fact the only reason I even noticed was the contrast with last night’s dinner at my parent’s house. They had my aunts and their families over, and like normal people they had the heater on. I was burning. It was driving me nuts.

I think my “normal” with respect to cold comes from my upbringing. Rarely would we turn the heat on when growing up. My dad slept every night, even when snow was falling, with his bedroom window open. 

I don’t know why. For me, it’s something about being able to control my reaction to physical phenomena, mind over matter, and probably more importantly, habit. 

Pretty inconsequential example, but I think these little “norms” have a big impact in how we live. Do I procrastinate or tackle tasks head on? Do I read books? Do I exercise routinely? How do I react to failure? 

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to guide 2009 by tackling my norms, hopefully orienting them to a healthy, happy lifestyle.

Hell, I’m going to go grab a blanket right now.

Ok, I’m going to do one of these memes things - highlight activies you have done from this list. Via Empty Thoughts.

1. Started your own blog

2. Slept under the stars

3. Played in a band

4. Visited Hawaii

5. Watched a meteor shower

6. Given more than you can afford to charity

7. Been to Disneyland

8. Climbed a mountain (eh - I’ve climbed a few hills…)

9. Held a praying mantis

10. Sang a solo

11. Bungee jumped

12. Visited Paris

13. Watched a lightning storm

14. Taught yourself an art from scratch

15. Adopted a child

16. Had food poisoning

17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty (saw it from the ferry :))

18. Grown your own vegetables

19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France

20. Slept on an overnight train

21. Had a pillow fight

22. Hitch hiked

23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill

24. Built a snow fort

25. Held a lamb

26. Gone skinny dipping

27. Run a Marathon

28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice

29. Seen a total eclipse

30. Watched a sunrise or sunset

31. Hit a home run (Where I grew up we didn’t play baseball. I once made a game-winning save in a soccer match, if that counts)

32. Been on a cruise

33. Seen Niagara Falls in person

34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors

35. Seen an Amish community

36. Taught yourself a new language (does English count?)

37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied

38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person

39. Gone rock climbing

40. Seen Michelangelo’s David

41. Sung karaoke

42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt

43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant

44. Visited Africa

45. Walked on a beach by moonlight

46. Been transported in an ambulance

47. Had your portrait painted

48. Gone deep sea fishing

49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person

50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris - the line was too long and I too lazy

51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling

52. Kissed in the rain

53. Played in the mud

54. Gone to a drive-in theater

55. Been in a movie

56. Visited the Great Wall of China

57. Started a business

58. Taken a martial arts class

59. Visited Russia

60. Served at a soup kitchen

61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies

62. Gone whale watching - I swam with a few hundred sharks in the ocean once

63. Got flowers for no reason

64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma

65. Gone sky diving

66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp

67. Bounced a check

68. Flown in a helicopter

69. Saved a favorite childhood toy

70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial

71. Eaten caviar

72. Pieced a quilt

73. Stood in Times Square

74. Toured the Everglades

75. Been fired from a job (layed off)

76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London

77. Broken a bone

78. Been on a speeding motorcycle

79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person

80. Published a book

81. Visited the Vatican

82. Bought a brand new car

83. Walked in Jerusalem

84. Had your picture in the newspaper

85. Read the entire Bible

86. Visited the White House (haven’t been inside)

87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating (would you believe, sparrows)

88. Had chickenpox

89. Saved someone’s life

90. Sat on a jury

91. Met someone famous

92. Joined a book club

93. Lost a loved one

94. Had a baby (I have 3 sons, but I didn’t give birth to them)

95. Seen the Alamo in person

96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake

97. Been involved in a law suit

98. Owned a mobile phone

99. Been stung by a bee

100. Read an entire book in one day

Interesting video of how Obama’s campaign logo was designed. Via LogoDesignLove.

I used to fire up Chrome once in a while, mostly for compatibility testing, logging into a service with an alternative id (instead of logging off the service and re-logging in in my main Firefox window), or for other esoteric reasons.

Now I find it’s my main browser. Very odd. Not sure how it happened, but somewhere along the way I subconciously became convinced that it’s less of a resource hog than Firefox. Being able to reclaim resources by closing tabs is very attractive.

I do miss having a delicious plugin on a regular basis, and still use Firefox for Firebug. But otherwise, I’m mostly Chrome these days. 

Microsoft’s Cashback program is an attempt to take a bite out of the lucrative search marketing market. It’s a big market, and it’s supposed to be a big play: it’s what Microsoft announced to much fanfare after the Yahoo! take-over fell through.

The idea is to offer cash to customers in order to incent them to make use of MS Live Search, and therefore attract more advertisers to advertise on Live. 

According to this Fatwallet thread and several others there have been significant problems with the cashback program. The users make purchases, receive Microsoft’s cashback email confirming the cash back, and sometime toward the end of the 60 day cycle receive another email telling them their cashback is denied. Apparently there is no good way to contact MS and correct the issue.

If true, this is a very significant problem. Even if not true, the current state of complaints is a very significant problem.

The whole point of this program to create a positive image in the users’ minds and habituate them to using Live. If instead the cashback program creates an image of difficulty, dishonesty, and headaches, it will backfire and drive users to other search engines.

My guess is Microsoft is outsourcing the cashback operations to one of the rebate handling firms, who in turn are employing their regular tactics of rebate denial in order to save money. 

The problem is the millions of dollars saved here are squandering away the billions this program is supposed to enable.

It’s fairly surprising that Microsoft would let this happen; someone high up needs to wake up and fix it quickly.

Picking up from Tim’s post, since he has comments disabled:

Solaris: I know that Sun is deeply emotionally invested in Solaris, and that they can point to technical superiority on several levels. Fantastic. Unfortunately that battle is over - no-one outside of Sun cares. Linux is the operating system of choice for servers in small, medium, and large enterprises. It will be a heart-wrenching decision, but Sun has to move on from Solaris, take its best pieces of technology, and bring them to Linux. They can even keep the Solaris moniker if they’re enamored with it, just have it be Solaris Linux. 

Picture a Sun Linux distribution geared for servers, with ZFS, DTrace, and a variety of other advances thrown in, running on reliable, power efficient Sun hardware. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Picture not having to invest so much in competing with Linux, with APT, with the vast river of advances pouring into the Linux train. Picture instead investing those resources into improving Linux, making high-end, enterprise Linux synonymous with Sun.

Put another way: what percentage of hardware buyers are looking at Solaris as an advantage versus a disadvantage in their hardware purchasing decisions?

My own experience: A few years ago I was trying to find a home for a very nice Sun server that I had essentially free access to. To my great surprise no-one wanted the free hardware: “it’s not worth it, we’ll just have to move everything over to Linux eventually anyway”. That was eye opening.

The Hardware: Sun’s strongest attribute, one it’s squandering away rapidly, is the reliability and performance of its hardware. If you talked to hardware buyers 5 few years ago you’d see a deep-seated loyalty to Sun, because the hardware just worked. Sun had nailed operational reliability, saving people from 3am “server down” phone calls. That wins you big points.

Again from personal experience I can tell you other hardware vendors have trouble meeting the same standards; heck, the failure rate from one well known vendor was so shockingly high it was mind blowing. 

Sun is putting too much focus on their other stories, ignoring this crucial advantage. Considering the cost of hardware purchase pales in comparison to the cost of operating that hardware over the following years, why not pouce on this, make it the focus of your story?

The Margins: Margins on servers have been eroding. That’s a fact of life, one that Sun cannot turn the page back on. The sweet spot is, more and more, distributed grids of commodity servers. Sun has to embrace this, realize it means their business will be a different size and a different shape, and move on.

If they have an interest in getting into the startup and small business world, Sun has to realize it can’t sell hardware in the same way anymore. Resellers aren’t going to be part of the equation. I agree with Tim on the sales organization.

Developer Tools: Netbeans may well be the best IDE on the planet. I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t used it. I’d ask my friends’ opinions, but I don’t know anybody that uses it. I’d try it, but I can’t figure out a good reason to pick it over Eclipse (which I use, but I certainly don’t love). They seem very similar, but Netbeans has a much smaller community.

Glassfish could be a fantastic piece of software. To be fair I know people who are interested in using it (if not already using it). But it’s competing with several other pretty decent options, and they’re all free.

Someone needs to explain to me the benefit of competing with free on so many fronts. I don’t buy the idea of winning developers over to your platform; it’s just not working out. 

Instead, find the most popular free tools and provide the best platform to run them on.

MySQL: This is a fantastic piece of technology to draw on, to leverage into selling your other wares. I’m picturing a Sun server (running Linux of course), geared specifically for high-performance MySQL. It may simply be a matter of marketing, but I know if Sun put its substantial technical expertise and reputation behind a MySQL server that was configured to give me great performance, I’d pay a few extra bucks for it. Make that a cluster configured for master-slave with reasonable BCP that I didn’t have to design myself and I’d pay even more for it.

MySQL itself is a very nice, growing technology, one of the bright spots for Sun. I’d invest in things like Drizzle and orienting it for cloud operation. 

Looking forward: I largely agree with Tim here, and hope Sun can pull it off.

Disclaimers: I don’t speak for my employer, my uncle, or your friend’s poodle. These are opinions held at a particular point in time, subject to change in the face of relevant and convincing arguments. Enlighten me with comments below.

Slides from my Data Processing in the Cloud talk:

I’m at the Cloud Computing expo preparing for my talk and observing my fellow attendees. Interesting stuff.

The gentlement seated on either side of me at the last talk were Japanese. As I fumbled around with my blackberry and iPhone while trying to get Wifi to work on the laptop and reading email, I noticed the rapt attention paid by these gents to the speaker. Both listened attentively and took photos of every slide with their ever-present digital cameras. One took copious notes while the other not only took notes but also recorded the audio.

This has me wondering - are the Japanese simply better listeners that we are? Are they less afflicted with crackberry syndrome? Or does the fact that they had to fly half way around the world to attend a conference naturally orient them to paying more attention? Or, are they taking copious notes to share with their colleagues back home in order to justify their presumably expensive trip?

Culturally aware readers of this blog, I’d like to know: are the Japanese always this polite and attentive? Surely they’re not lacking in the number of attention grabbing gadgest available to them, so how do they manage to keep focus?

Have you noticed how more and more the headlines of the top blogs are all the same announcement at the same time? Unfortunately we’re going back to the PR-firm driven news reporting that was prevalent in the era of magazines, instead of that brief but wonderful time when bloggers actually thought for themselves and found stories of their own liking. At least magazines had standards related to grammar and some base level of fact checking, but oh well.

On the bright side the blog world is wide and deep enough to provide lots of interesting news sources, even if they turn out not to be the top blogs.

I love Autohotkey but I’m not crazy about its programming language, so I decided to investigate building an alternative with a simpler language, namely Python.

Turns out the key sniffing portion is actually quite easy to do. Here’s a simple script from the Keylogger in Python thread that does it in 10 lines using pyHook and Mark Hammond’s Win32 Extensions:

import pyHook
import pythoncom

def OnKeyboardEvent(event):
	print event.Ascii

hm = pyHook.HookManager()
hm.KeyDown = OnKeyboardEvent
hm.HookKeyboard()

while True:
	pythoncom.PumpMessages()

Mindtrove’s post has further details including code and examples for event filtering.

Peter Schiff calls the recession, standing firm against all the other pundits, at times literally getting laughed at. Even if you consider it luck or statistics (with so many pundits one of them has to get it right), his fortitude in sticking to his position despite everyone else going the other way is admirable. Via Signal vs. Noise.

I read The Alchemist again the other day and loved it just as much as the first time. There’s something special about that book - it makes you want to get up and pursue your dreams, to think big and open again.

So I had high expectations for Eleven Minutes. Unfortunately it didn’t live up.

Eleven Minutes is a much more conventional novel than the Alchemist. The primary subject is sex and prostitution, with several undercurrents of deeper meaning thrown in for good measure.

Somehow it just didn’t grab me. The latter parts of the book get a bit creepy, and the ending, frankly, disappointed.

Perhaps it’s just the shock of the difference between The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes; looks like lots of people on Amazon reviews found it jarring.

I’m onto the Zahir next, still hoping there’s a lot more Coelho I can enjoy.

Informative study of compensation and equity for various positions at various stages of a startup.

I was checking out projects from local San Diego developers and ran across Swurl. One very neat feature that worked so well I barely noticed it: when you reach the end of a page, instead of having to hit “next page”, Swurl automatically loads the contents into the bottom of the current page, so you get the uninterrupted experience  of single long page without the downside of having to wait for a giant page to load. Check it out on founder Ryan Sit’s Swurl page.

Simple but very effective visualization of the exit poles.

My wife’s passing comment gave me the most profound understanding of what tonight means.

A few months ago she said of my son’s 5 year old african-american friend: “that kid is so smart, I feel like he’s the next Barack Obama”.

Not the next Michael Jordan. Not Tiger Woods. The next Barack Obama.

And just like that, the outlook for generations to come changes.

Let me start by saying: I’m voting Obama.

However, this analysis by Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who wrote “the book” on macroeconomics, is bringing tears to my eyes:

If there were no taxes, … then $1 earned today would yield my kids $28. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

Under the McCain plan, … a dollar earned today yields my kids $4.81. That is, even under the low-tax McCain plan, my incentive to work is cut by 83 percent compared to the situation without taxes.

Under the Obama plan, … a dollar earned today yields my kids $1.85. That is, Obama’s proposed tax hikes reduce my incentive to work by 62 percent compared to the McCain plan and by 93 percent compared to the no-tax scenario. In a sense, putting the various pieces of the tax system together, I would be facing a marginal tax rate of 93 percent.

The bottom line: If you are one of those people out there trying to induce me to do some work for you, there is a good chance I will turn you down. And the likelihood will go up after President Obama puts his tax plan in place. I expect to spend more time playing with my kids. They will be poorer when they grow up, but perhaps they will have a few more happy memories.

In most cases I prefer dot notation over bracket notation for dictionary access. That is, I prefer mydictionary.myfield over mydictionary['myflield']. I also prefer attempted access to undefined keys to return None instead of raising an exception.

With the help of this thread, this is what I’ve been using:

class dotdict(dict):
    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        return self.get(attr, None)
    __setattr__= dict.__setitem__
    __delattr__= dict.__delitem__

>>> dd = dotdict()
>>> dd.a
>>> dd.a = 'one'
>>> dd.a
'one'
>>> dd.keys()
['a']

>>> existing = {’a':’A', ‘b’:'B’}
>>> dot_existing = dotdict(existing)
>>> dot_existing.a
‘A’