Subtitled Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, I have to admit I really kind of liked this book. While I don’t agree with everything that Horowitz did in his career at Opsware (and its always easy to Monday morning quarterback someone else’s decisions), the thing I did like about this was its honesty and solid advice on what to do when there are, well… no easy answers.
I really like the Padrino web framework. Its simplicity and layer of just enough above Sinatra appeals to me over the burgeoning complexity of Rails of late.
As my applications have become more complex though, the lack of documentation and good examples have become an increasing issue. I’m intending to write a few blog posts on common, yet more complex things, you need to do in Padrino to use it as a Rails replacement. Hopefully it can increase uptake and help other people with issues to solve some common gaps.
Simple works.
Sometime around early 2012 I switched over to using Things for OSX from the spartan essentials of Taskpaper. I have to admit, at the time I was angry with Taskpaper. It was still using the SimpleText service (Taskpaper now uses the uber-reliable Dropbox) for synchronizing with my iPhone and it had done what I felt was the inexcusable: It had lost tasks I had to complete in a sync conflict and even after I recovered the file, I didn’t know what they were (partly my stupidity for not having it source controlled in git).
Everyone I know that deals with large amounts of data has been looking closer at Hadoop as it’s matured. Especially with tools like Hive, old datawarehouse hands are taking a serious look at it as a better type of long time data archive and storage. You probably should too.
While most of the time for the types of real work you’d be doing, it makes more sense to spin up Amazon’s EC2, Elastic Map Reduce or another flavour of virtualized Hadoop instance in the cloud for the clustering and crunching benefits, it’s very good to have a local install for development and testing.
[Updated: 2013-01-08 - A lot of people asked for Postgres instructions]
After my faithful Macbook Air went down hard in Tonga, I was really surprised at the number of outdated posts, misinformation and general number of questions (even on Stack Overflow), on how to install a Rails dev environment from scratch on a new OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion machine.
This HOWTO runs from zero to getting you to what I consider a naked dev
environment where you’re good enough to start and source control a
project and issue a rails new command. It starts from a totally fresh
install of Mountain Lion with all system updates.
Some quiet holiday time has finally given me the chance to polish up the code I wrote earlier this year and finally release my blog engine.
Kobayashi is finally out in the world in at least a first release form with a few tests, a basic theme and working code.
I wrote more extensively about why I’d write a blog engine here .
Kobayashi’s built to handle large blogs and still be damn fast and cache and act as if the entire site was static so (hopefully) hold up under high loads with highly optimized caching using memcache and etag http caching. The whole thing runs on heroku with a simple push.
While getting my new system back to the way my old system was configured, I’ve been very surprised at the amount of old, outdated information on setups floating around the web.
For example, a few months back Chrome provided a new way to have both
mailto: links and your default system mail handler in OSX set up
from the browser. Google searches still point to the outdated and
cumbersome methods to do it. Here’s the easier way…
This clip is just amazing. I have to admit swimming with wild dolphins at Kaikoura was perhaps one of the most amazingly enjoyable things I have ever done, but I would have lost it seeing this video footage.
Even more amazingly, the whole thing was captured with a simple GoPro camera (a Hero2 with the dive casing and a home-built “torpedo”, apparently.). In any case, just watching this puts you in a better mood. Dolphin amazingness starts just after 1m30.
Stunning spoken word video with some great imagery and music mixed in by Jason Silva on The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck .
Definitely one of those full screen, dim the lights and turn the volume way up kinda of things. Some very cool sentiment on what it means to be human and awestruck.
(though personally don’t know if I would have gone for the Hubble as the penultimate written expression of awe, though “mainlining the whole of time through the optic nerve” is definitely something I’m filing away for future conversational use at a swanky cocktail party… =] ).
OK, kinda love this to scale comparison of the various planets of the solar system. Kinda cool to remember how much bigger some of the other planets in the neighbourhood are than good old Earth. Despite me starting off in astrophysics, it’s never top of mind how big Uranus and Neptune are.
