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

Slides from my Data Processing in the Cloud talk:

Cloud Computing: Hadoop

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: pig cloud)

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 …

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 …

There have been several requests for this, so I might as well post it here for general use. I put together a simple system for dumping data out of Oracle databases and loading onto Hadoop DFS. The slightly interesting part is the parallelism - Python's Processing library is used to dump …

I'm trying to setup ad-hoc small mailing lists using GMail. They have a contact groups feature that mostly does what I need. However, the interface for adding contacts is quite limited - you pick from a list.

It'd make a lot more sense to allow addition of contacts to groups based …

I'm trying to find the appropriate design for RESTful design of URLs for search and for collections of items.

The setup: we have two models, Cars and Garages, where Cars can be in Garages. Base URLs:

/car/xxx           (xxx = car id)
/garage/yyy     (yyy = garage id)

Now we want to …

I'm using Yahoo Live to get a look at the Yahoo UCSD Hack Day event, and I'm quite surprised at how well it works.

Seeing someone's face via their webcam is an absolute waste of time, particularly on on video conference calls, but here I'm looking at a view of …

I am an incredibly cheap bastard frugal. I don't like to pay for things.

Yet I just paid for Flickr without hesitation or a moment of doubt. Odd.

Here's why, I think:

• Cheap: $25/year is not a lot of money.
• Excellent service. I've never had a problem with the …

My image, mp3, and ebook collection were a mess after years of copying to various servers, consolidating, and re-copying. I had lots of duplicates.

I looked for an app to find and remove duplicates but surprisingly didn't find anything very good. So I had to write my own.

This is …

As the "computer guy" for my wife, various friends, and my own activities, I often see a need for a very simple "CRM" system. But it's not really CRM; it's more of a contact management system together with a way to send emails to various groups of friends / customers, a …

Say you want to access the values if your dictionary via the dot notation instead of the dictionary syntax. That is, you have:

d = {'name':'Joe', 'mood':'grumpy'}

And you want to get at "name" and "mood" via

d.name
d.mood

instead of the usual

d['name']
d['mood …

(First install beanstalkd and pybeanstalk)

Beanstalkd is an in-memory queuing system. It supports named queues (called 'tubes'), priorities, and delayed delivery of messages.

Terminology: a message is called a job, and queues are called tubes.

Let's look at an example scenario. Say you want to create 2 tubes, one called …

beanstalkd is a promising in-memory queuing system in the mold of memcached (minimal configuration, just works) with client libraries in a variety of languages. The following worked for me for installing it on Ubuntu 8.04:

mkdir ~/packages

# pre-requisite: libevent.
cd ~/packages
wget http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.4 …

I'm participating in the UCSD Yahoo Hack U week this coming week (Oct 13th-17th) with a talk on Wed and hopefully sticking around through most of the actual hack day (Thurs/Fri). If you're going to be on campus let me know by emailing me ( darugar at gmail ) or leaving …

My laptop suddenly stopped working, throwing me into panic - what if it's a problem with the motherboard, the same problem that killed my last laptop?

It turned out to be the power adapter, fairly easily remedied, but it got me thinking about backups.

I realized I actually don't have a …

For about a week now the network at home has been slow. Just as I'd get frustrated enough to do something about it it'd get fast again, so I procrastinated.

Meanwhile I was cursing Time Warner, Linksys, Apple, and just about everybody else whose hardware I own. The Linksys wireless …

Stackoverflow is a newish service for developers - ask a question, get answers, vote on answers, build reputation. Sort of like Yahoo! Answers but for developers.

I'm surprised at how good the service is so far. I asked a question on IRC and the same question on Stackoverflow. Within 2 minutes …

This is an excellent development - The Big Picture from boston.com, a beautiful photo blog and one of the big reasons for putting ReaderScroll together, has implemented j/k navigation, inspired by ReaderScroll. Nicely done - now you can navigate the pictures via the j/k keys.

One down, many more …

Watching the Palin/Biden debate and the subsequent babbling by the TV talking heads has me depressed. Nothing of substance was said during the entire debate. What we witnessed was an audition for a supporting role in a B movie, not a debate between potential 2nd in commands of the …