programming Amazon S3 file deletion FAIL I'm a huge fan of Ec2 and S3 offerings from Amazon; they're the future. However, there's a severe deficiency in the S3 API; when you need to delete billions of files, the API breaks down. While there are batch operations, they don't
hardware Fast & Slow Pondering the meaning of life while bombing down Poorman [http://connect.garmin.com/activity/26459956] the other day on my mountain bike, I realized the two things that have had the most impact on my two my favorite activities (coding and mtn. biking) serve two radically different purposes. Disk Brakes.
rails Multi-level Single Table Inheritance (STI) in Rails This took me more than one attempt to get right, so I thought I'd blat it out in a blog post in case anyone else has been struggling with it. In the end, the implementation matches your intuition, but getting the sub-classing syntax right took a few tries
browser Google Chrome for Mac I spent the past few days with Google Chrome for Mac as my default browser on my primary machine. I tweeted some notes about the experience [http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=&phrase=&ors=¬s=&tag=chrome&lang=all&from=jvaleski&
browser Does Browser HTML5 Support Matter? A few weeks ago I watched a saddening interview that a Google guy conducted in NYC; What is a Browser [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ]? It was sad because effectively no-one even knows what a browser is. The neat thing about that fact though is that the browser
management Gnip's 2009 Rocked My World After spending 2008 building a phenomenal development team, early 2009 tested me like I'd never been tested before. Half of my career has been spent building/managing teams, and I thought I had it dialed in. Along the way, feedback from individuals (peers, bosses, employees), raises/bonuses, and
browser Chaning My Computer Interface For a few weeks now I've been using fingerprint readers to login to my computers. Mostly an experiment to see how good, or bad, the technology has become over the past several years, it's turned into my preference for logging into my machines and accessing sensitive
ip-address IP Address Brokers; Please Stand Up I've been trying to formulate some clear thinking for awhile now regarding a major challenge on the network today. It's been brewing for years, and the proliferation of API usage is boiling it over. The power of open discussion is giving the topic some structure and
u Isolated Collaboration I periodically checkout the Mozilla Add-ons site [http://addons.mozilla.org/] to see what's new. I just grabbed Reframe-it [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5677] given that a decentralized client, non-publishing platform specific, commenting model only makes sense. Sadly, no-one's using it; the sites
parenting Like Father, Like Son Ahhh parenting. Earlier this evening my wife and I returned from our seven-year-old's first parent-teacher conference as a first grader. We'd done a few when he was in kindergarten, but those don't really count as they're just too young to derive much
Nokogiri Performance: xpath vs. tree walking/iterating At Gnip [http://gnip.com] we're doing some heavy XML parsing in Ruby and obviously chose Nokogiri [http://nokogiri.rubyforge.org/nokogiri/] as the underlying engine. I started the week doing xpath searches to tease out the elements/attributes from the documents we were parsing, and ended the
friends Tahoe Weekend I'm wrapping up a perfect mountain biking weekend with some old friends. We've been riding our brains out for three days up in Lake Tahoe. One of the guys used to own his own bike shop, so he became defacto group-support on the trail. What a
techstars TechStars Pain Pattern Image courtesy of Colin Sackett | Book design & publishing [http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/]. I recognize patterns; large and small; over short periods, and long. Remember those SAT questions to find patterns in obscure information? I owned those. After my 2nd year involved in TechStars [http://www.techstars.org/], a
programming Can't scale? Be Sure To Blame Your Code. Web app scale bottlenecks (software & hardware) have leapfrogged themselves a few times over the past 15 years, and I just came across a concise view of how software had to react once hardware/bandwidth reached a new speed/throughput tier back around the year 2000; http://www.kegel.com/
ip-address Fatal Flaw in Cloud Based Social Media Apps? For the purposes of this post I'm going to define "cloud computing" as a service that allows you to easily run your application on someone elses' infrastructure, and importantly, within their IP address block range. As "web app" web API usage continues to
programming Dirty Data, Python & Gnip I've been tinkering with Python (2.5) over the past few months; both in Google App Engine, and in free-running apps/processes. My initial free-running apps ingested "structured" content from a variety of web APIs, and would crash roughly every 12 hours, and would need to
analysis Sarcasm and Sentiment Analysis Sentiment analysis of digitized content (tweets, email, blog posts, etc) is hard. Sarcasm makes it even harder. Consider how many sarcastic comments are made in our online communications each day. "I love being delayed at the airport." "I can't stand it when everything is going
http Speed Date with Google App Engine I assumed that in the months since the announcement of Google App Engine [http://code.google.com/appengine/], that its glaring HTTP client deficiencies would have been resolved. Nope. Any modern platform needs a robust HTTP client (timeout controls, full method support, custom headers, compression support, authentication support, and redirect
TechStars Boulder 2009: Half-Time Report The other night I attended the first "pitch practice" for this year's set of TechStars [http://www.techstars.org/] Boulder companies. Watching the evolution is always fascinating. So far, my first impressions are holding strong. Those who I suspected would struggle, are struggling. Those who I
Faithfully Breaking Rules Spending a week on a 15k person island (Martha's Vineyard) with family has made me think about breaking the rules in more ways than one. Reading the local paper this morning reminded me of how important it can be to break the rules. One of the bakeries in
programming "Mommamacations" & Perfect Software My 6.5 year old son and I built a Lego Mindstorm vehicle yesterday. After constructing it, we wrote the software for it. After watching version 1.0 of our software run for about 5 seconds, we noticed a bug so we iterated, fixed the bug, and ran v2 of
programming Google I/O: My Impressions Photo from Matthias Schicker's post. [http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/fileadmin/mimuc/mmi_ws0405/uebung/essays/matthias.schicker/Devices_for_text_input.htm] [http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/fileadmin/mimuc/mmi_ws0405/uebung/essays/matthias.schicker/Devices_for_text_input.htm] I attended last week'
technology Boulder & California While playing with my daughter this morning she pulled out the key-chain pictured here. I noticed that the "Boulder" sticker was sitting on top of another. I peeled it back and found "California" underneath. Growing up in Boulder, spending four years in Silicon Valley, then moving
hiring Pair Programming & "top notch programmers" Gnip [http://www.gnip.com/] is hiring again [http://www.gnip.com/company/jobs] so the flood of recommendations/resumes/suggestions has begun. Gnip's a pair programming shop which means there are two developers for every CPU in the office, and two developers sit side by side, day
boulder State of Boulder Dinning Boulder's at an interesting juncture when it comes to it's restaurant offerings. If you adhere to the notion that opening a restaurant takes at least 12 months of planning, our new crop of joints are the brainchildren of plans concocted prior to the economic disaster that
