I remarked to a friend that Mark Suster's entrepreneurial roots show in his approach to being a VC - he's come out of nowhere and in short order aggressively pushed himself into being one of the most relevant voices out there. He seems to be working a lot harder than …

django-mptt is a library for storing tree oriented data using the Django ORM. It allows you to place your model instances into a tree structure and efficiently query for ancestors and children.

Here's a brief tutorial on how to use it:

After installing, you'll need to modify your model to …

I was doing some log analysis this morning and was struck by the variety of user agents accessing Xpenser. Quite a bit of mobile access with quite a variety of different browsers, as well as some more exotic items (various tablet PCs I don't recognize, etc).

Then there's the API …

Here's a little script for finding files modified more than 7 days ago and moving them to another directory:

find . -type f -mtime +7 -print > /tmp/old_files.txt
cat /tmp/old_files.txt | while read line; do mv "$line" ../old_files ; done

dpkg -L package-name

Note to self, as I seem to need to do this on every new install:

Ubuntu ships with vim-tiny, which doesn't support syntax highlighting. Do this:

sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny
sudo apt-get install vim
sudo vi /etc/vim/vimrc
( Remove the quote mark from the "syntax on" line, uncommenting it …

Impressive Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie on how stories, and in particular "single stories", shape our views of cultures. Many parallels with how people typically see Iran.

A great quote from the talk: "The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue - it is that they are incomplete".

I used to be a vi guy who finally made the move to graphical editors. I looked for the simplest, lightest possible solutions, using ConTEXT for quite a while.

Some years ago I was forced into using Eclipse for reasons I can't quite recall; probably Java development. I didn't like …

I'm noticing how much the practice of finding a candidate and interviewing them has changed over the years.

First step is to look up the person on the web. Since I'm looking for a technical person I'm expecting a blog, contributions to open source projects, a twitter presence, etc. If …

I still have a big soft spot in my heart for Yahoo, but Yahoo mail, WTF?

Of the entire screen only the area I've highlighted in orange is dedicated to the contents of the message. And this is with the app maximized to full screen.

The interface is unusable as …

I was thinking about what book to read next and it occurred to me to ask you nice people. I'm in the mood for something factual but interesting - something like The Prize, if you're familiar with that. I was intrigued by Fiasco but I haven't looked into it.

So what …

Looks like I've finally converted Alex to Python as well. "This is actually shorter than perl and still makes sense". Be forewarned - if you code with me, you'll be doing Python in no time.

Due to aforementioned OS X stupidity with the Home and End keys, my new favorite Eclipse hotkey is Ctrl-Q. It takes you to the location of your last edit. So next time you hit the End key to go to the end of the line but end up at the …

The title pretty much says it; I'm planning an SJC/SF trip next week, if you want to meet or chat drop me a line - Darugar at gmail.

Nice and detailed article from Jesse Noller on concurrency, threads, the GIL, and Python. Worth a read; I learned a lot from it.

For the record I'm one of the people who doesn't think threads are not the true solution to the concurrency problem.

Yet another Scoble post on a facebook accounts being closed, this time with the iFart app author.

Facebook is like Disney Land. It's a nice and enjoyable place, but it has its own special governance. It can decide when to let you in and when to throw you out.

It's …

After 2 days of pain, finally a hackintosh is born. My advice to you if you're thinking of setting up a hackintosh: don't. Go buy a cheap mac instead.

As I was fond of saying in the old days: Linux is free if your time is worthless. Hackintosh is about …

Inaugration day, and I missed just about all the festivities. One thing did stand out for me: the text of the Oath of the Office of the President:

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best …

Queues are nice things. We should be using more of them.

A couple of benefits that I knew of but didn't really appreciate until Alex started using beanstalkd in his application:

- Having a worker-pulls-jobs-from-queue model provides near optimal use of the machine and prevents overload and thrashing. Setup as many …

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.