Is it me or does Palin struggle to say "nookiller" instead of nuclear? It seems like she knows the correct pronunciation but goes out of her way to say it incorrectly. Some sort of Bushism or republicanism maybe?

Actually it'd be interesting to draw party lines along pronunciation. I say …

The Freebase folks have open sourced their Python (Jython) based Hadoop framework, calling it Happy. Looks interesting, will need to give it a whirl when I get a chance.

Here's a lazyweb question for you: what's the best way to convert my flickr photo stream into facebook albums on an automated, continual basis? I much prefer dealing with flickr than facebook for photos, but many of my lazy friends are on facebook, keep asking for photos, but are apparently …

How's this for a productivity tip: leave your power cord at home. I'm in this situation now, and I'll tell ya, it does bring a razor sharp focus to what you need to be doing with those precious few minutes you have of computer time.

(Of course if I was …

Disco is a map-reduce framework written in Erlang and Python. Seems reasonable - I definitely prefer Python to Java for writing maps and reduces, and Erlang is rumored to be good at parallel stuff.

Interestingly no mention of an underlying distributed file system.

Via High Scalability.

Live doesn't get a lot of love and with those new ads Microsoft needs some serious help getting the word out, so let me say something nice about them. I've been using Live Maps lately, mainly because of the "Bird's eye view", and it's quickly becoming my favourite map app …

I'm surprised to find I use Chrome pretty regularly already. It's mostly my interface to Gmail, Google Reader, and GCal, and sits quietly in the task bar until I need to check email. Lack of firebug and various other extensions prevent me from using it for everything, but it's part …

Drizzle is interesting:

Drizzle: A High-Performance Microkernel DBMS for Scale-Out Applications
Drizzle is a community-driven project based on the popular MySQL DBMS that is focused on MySQL's original goals of ease-of-use, reliability and performance.

Headed up by Brian Aker, Director of Architecture at MySQL AB. Take a look at the …

I wasn't aware of generator expressions:

wwwlog     = open("access-log")
bytecolumn = (line.rsplit(None, 1)[1] for line in wwwlog)
bytes      = (int(x) for x in bytecolumn if x != '-')
print "Total", sum(bytes)

Similar to list comprehensions, but evaluated lazily. Voidspace describes it:

None of the generators are consumed until the …

The Chrome download was surprisingly fast (as in, less than 5 seconds). FireFox options import during install didn't work, but it's been smooth sailing since then. It's snappy and so far not buggy. Aesthetics of rendering web pages is good, seems better than FireFox. Quite fast too.

I remember thinking …

Interesting that Google's Chrome is based on WebKit instead of the Mozilla rendering engine…

Javascript inheritance is another one of those topics that always escapes my mind, so I'm recording it here for future reference.

I tried to get into Crockford's Prototypal Inheritance method but I like the plain-old prototype inheritance without the object.create better. It's entirely possible that I'm not quite getting …

What I know about the innards automobiles I learned from a book on Wankel engines when I was 8. So when my "check engine" light turned on I knew I'd be in for a severe siphoning of money out of my pocket.

Buoyed by my strong sense of miserliness, however …

I frequently run into pages with loads of images (here's one via Kedrosky, here's another, and here's yet another). Viewing these images involves a dance of scrolling or hitting space, then scrolling again to get the image lined up in the viewable part of the browser, and repeating over and …

Three.

The number of programmers who will write most of the code in a system developed by a team of 24 engineers, two project managers, three group leaders, a quality lead and an office manager.

From Russ Olsen.

Several friends have been at work on several startups and are looking for technology leaders to round out their teams. One opportunity is in the social network / eduction space and is looking for the VP Technology / CTO as well as good web/php guys. Another is more hardware related. Both …

MI5 report on terrorist profiling, via Schneier. The short version: it is very difficult to come up with a valid profile.

Mozilla announces TraceMonkey, a just-in-time compiler for Javascript. If you've watched Steve Yegge's talk on Dynamic Languages (transcript) you've already had a taste of what the future could look like for dynamic languages - namely, performance on par with today's low level languages.

Javascript started as an ugly language but has …

Parand.

Mike Verdon's Python Twitter Tools is less popular and findable than the Dewitt Clinton's python-twitter (I only found the former from an email on the latter's mailing list), but it's a beautiful library. 125 lines, most of which are comments. It implements the full API by implementing a single call …