Ran across Brendan Eich's popularity post via Ajaxian. Besides the interesting history lesson (which, btw, is quite interesting), I was struck by the quality of writing. It's rare to see such quality and care in blog posts. I was immediately motivated to subscribe (although I didn't because it looks like …
MoreI spent 5 hours last weekend trying to get rid of the multitude of the viruses and bugs that had taken over my parent's laptop. Apparently they literally had little bugs and critters running around their screen singing and playing music.
I tried two antivirus programs but neither could clean …
MoreWell, it's official - I'm an iPhone fanboy. This thing is just fantastic, one of those "just works" deals. I'm supposed to give it to the wife, I'm gonna miss it dearly…
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Spent the day at the Hadoop Summit. Here are some notes and impressions, in undetermined order, on 4 hours of sleep:
I was impressed by the level of effort, participation, and momentum behind Hadoop. It's now used in so many places and forms the basis of so many projects I …
MoreWell, after a ridiculous amount of procrastination I finally bought the iPhone. I'm using it to post this. So far: amazing, revolutionary, frustrating, imperfect, and really very nice. Typing is by far the least successful part of this thing. Thank god for the auto correction, I don't think I've spelled …
MoreLet me just say: unit tests are an amazing god-send. If you're not using them you are missing a tremendous amount. Beyond the obvious, the freedom and confidence it gives you to re-work your code makes it feasible to actually go back, clean up, and create better code. I'm enjoying …
MoreThere was a massive collision this morning blocking off the main road connecting our neighbourhood to the rest of the world. We were all trapped in our little parcel of the world, unable to get to school, work, etc.
This was not happy occasion by any stretch, but it did …
More[Update] I can confirm that the iPhone is easily unlocked and very usable on T-Mobile USA. ZiPhone is your friend.
Even I'm getting sick of relentless procrastination in getting a new phone. The problem is this: I want an iPhone with 3G speed with reasonable monthly charges, and no such …
MoreJaime Lerner's Ted Talk on sustainable cities is pretty funny. A couple of choice quotes:
MoreA City is like a family portrait - we don't rip our photo even if we don't like the nose of our uncle.
Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget. If you cut …
Continuing the conversation with Daniel,
» Lectures are not where you learn, I agree. I missed as many lectures as I attended as an undergrad. Grad school is a different story as lectures tend to be more conversational and informative and the material more challenging.
» A lot of the smartest professors …
MoreI'm watching a Yahoo Research talk by Christos Papadimitriou. Reminds me of a grad school story…
I was hanging around the grad student lounge, chatting with a friend about the computational theory class and our difficulty in grasping all the concepts. Christos was a professor at UCSD at the time …
MoreTwiddla looks really good. Browser based no-setup shared white-boarding. There are a whole mess of people playing around in the sandbox and it's holding up surprisingly well.
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I caught Peter Semmelhack's talk at ETech and also had a chance to chat with him and Mershad over lunch. Bug Labs sounded interesting - an open hardware platform where functionality can be added as modules, almost like connecting legos together. But it turns out there's more to it than that …
MoreIt was hip a while back to declare email bankruptcy and admit being hopelessly over-run by your inbox. I'm taking it one step further - I'm now SMS message bankrupt also. At this moment I have 613 unread SMS messages, most of which are various email and calendar alerts, and some …
MoreSo you spend 4 days working on something, only to discover a solution that obviates everything you did and solves it in 1/5 the effort. Do you feel great about coming up with a simpler, better, faster solution, or do you feel like an idiot for wasting 4 days …
MoreSaw Tom Coates' talk on Fire Eagle at ETech today. Actually quite different from what I had expected. It's basically a service into which devices and apps can feed location information, users can control access rights to that information, and devices and apps can consume a normalized and standardized view …
MoreA recent stomach flu forced me into a 48 hour span where I didn't eat anything and drank little. By the second morning I was exhausted, still mostly nauseous, but starving.
I started to make my way downstairs. By the second step I could clearly smell a wheat bread toast …
MoreI've been messing around with Starling. Working well so far, although I haven't done anything fancy with it yet.
I also need to create several simple, small, single purpose servers (eg. one to translate IP addresses to country codes). I have the python code, I just need to turn them …
MoreStarling looks very interesting - it's a "light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol". To use it you fire up your regular memcached client library, point it at the Starling server, and do a regular set to put an item on the queue, and a get to read an …
MoreMille Fleurs is one of San Diego's better known high end restaurants. We ate there with some friends last night and once again I was disappointed. The lobster bisque was luke-warm and a tad salty. The steak was good, but only cooked on one end (I'm not even sure how …
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