large scale data analytics, indexing and search…as a service. spoke with Bradford a week or two ago, and as i told him, this is an interesting proposition. as more folks realize the need for big data processing, the value of such services only goes up.

serving as a fact witness in a patent trial

this makes IntenseDebate significantly more interesting to me. unfortunately, however, i haven't had any luck configuring the self-hosted WordPress plugin using a WordPress.com identity.

the focus on hiring around themes is very welcome. it's been difficult to parse the volume for a while now.

details on Twitter's migration from MySQL to Cassandra

a rebuttal to Forbes' anti-NoSQL rant

what is essentially an anti-NoSQL rant

i haven't taken it apart yet, but clearly a lot of work went into the math of cloud computing. worth a read.

a bit late with this, but if you're in the data space, the Infochimps guys want to talk to you

this is sad news indeed. most of the data i've seen indicates a severe and accelerating decline in bluefin tuna populations. i personally will not eat bluefin, although it is perhaps the best tasting of the species.

i'll be at NoSQL Live next week: ping me if you'll be there as well

it shouldn't, but it still surprises me when firms – particularly small ones – eschew the advantages of existing languages in favor of a roll-your-own solution

pretty, as i've said before, is a feature, which is why i appreciate the attention to the aesthetics. approve or disapprove of the new designs, the direction is positive. i'll probably end up using the new theme, and the splash is very nice.

just what it says. relatively positive review, overall.

a user review of the Droid from ESPN's Keith Law, a former BlackBerry user

i understand the thinking, and am very glad he didn't run the strip into the ground, but i really do miss Calvin and Hobbes

"If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you'll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus." – sadly, i couldn't be less surprised

i'm torn. i have to admit that my affection for the open web is warring with my pragmatism.

"Let's be clear: It's fine to say that Flash is flawed; it is. (You know who'd agree? The Flash team.) It's fine to hope for alternatives to take root. (Competition makes everyone better.) But let's also be honest and say that Flash is the reason we all have fast, reliable, ubiquitous online video today. It's the reason that YouTube took off & video consumption exploded four years ago. It's the reason we have Hulu, Vimeo, and all the rest–and the reason that people now watch billions of videos per day (and nearly 10 hours apiece per month) online. Without it, we'd all still be bumbling along." – love or hate Flash, and i fall into neither bucket, it should be given its due. compete with it, criticize it for not being open/standards/etc enough, all fine.

but arguing that it hasn't been important is silly.

"Let me explain: Network carriers hold onto their slots at all costs to prevent any competition, short term or long term. This not only prevents new airlines from entering (or smaller airlines growing), it also means network carriers use their slots with small planes that can fly profitably (or as close to it as possible). Think about it this way — you're American Airlines. You have 20 slots at LGA. These slots are legacy from years ago and don't reflect your current operational imperatives. As such, rationally you should drop 5 of them just like you have at most airports in the country. But if you do, Southwest might get their hands on them and start flying there more flights to Chicago, competing against your core business. So you hold onto them. But you can't afford to put 738s and 757s on them (that would require filling close to 200 seats!). Instead, you put little regional jets on them…The result is reduced competition and smaller average plane size."

just for my later reference

couldn't agree more. remember the Aeron chair?

how search engines view Twitter. i knew i was right to avoid hashtags.

it really is an excellent place to live and work. and not just because of the beer.

just what it says. very interesting.

Foursquare makes it to our little town

an interesting response to Kellan's question

"If the tablet is – as expected – based on an ARM cores, the perhaps Apple may be able to spring a surprise or two, and steal a march on the rest. Engineering researched by the APT group in Manchester usually finds its way into ARM chips within a few years. Apple – if it choose – would have the money to accelerate the process of converting academic research into commercial products. I don't know whether they have or not but speculation is fun. So, let's take a look at some interesting research projects at Manchester." – this would be interesting

"Merriam Webster's 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the "sexually graphic" entry is "just not age appropriate", according to the area's local paper." – i was hoping this was a joke, but sadly, it's not.

maybe kids would be safer if we just rounded them up and kept them in hermetically sealed little houses, with no outside input whatsoever.

"The quandary I am facing is the one I've always faced in the Blackberry vs iPhone debate. I cannot type nearly as fast on a screen as a keyboard. I've given the Google phone a month. That's about as long as I've ever given the iPhone." – the quandary, indeed.

"The question that will be answered in the years ahead is this: Is write-once-run-anywhere the destiny of software, or was it an anomaly?" – or, as is generally the case, history cyclical, and this just a swing of the pendulum? there is no "destiny" to markets, no permanent end state. the rise of Microsoft post-IBM, the rise of Google post-Microsoft, provide us with strong evidence that what today looks like need not – and indeed is unlikely to – be predictive of what 10 years from now looks like.

there are legitimate, not too mention important, questions to be asked about the lock-in model. but i think Manjoo significantly underestimates both the appeal and the benefits of centralized account access.the paradox of choice still applies.

i'll give this a try, but unless it's free streaming, Dropbox is still the better option for me

"To be sure, Google’s new service may turn out to have some limits or catches that haven’t yet been disclosed. And taking full advantage of the space may require other software developers to jump in and write some middleware apps (as happened with Amazon’s S3).

But so far, it looks like Google’s new service is once again resetting the playing field and pressuring prices all throughout the clouds."

who knew that wind chill was such an artificial, woefully imprecise statistic?

if you update your plugins and WPtouch stops working, it might be an issue with WP-Supercache. try these instructions to restore the functionality: it worked just fine for me.

more on the power of data, and what Google can tell us about ourselves

interesting release by the Flightcaster guys

tells an interesting story

a peak inside Weta's datacenter

very late with this, but a nice piece from William Vambenepe on how the cloud can obscure proprietary software costs

interesting comments from a Microsoft Technical Fellow

this would be a real boon, given our familial history

data on VC mentions from ITDatabase

"As most of you know, we moved reddit to EC2 back in May of 2009. Our experience there has been excellent so far. Since we moved to EC2, the number of unique users has gone up 50%, and pageviews are up more than 100%. To support this growth, we have added 30% more ram and 50% more CPU, yet because of Amazon's constant price reductions, we are actually paying less per month now than when we started."

"All of these factors contributed to developers stepping up and taking ownership of the process of developing software. These days, you see lone developers implementing a somewhat formal process for building software. Ten years ago, it was tough to find programmers who wrote unit test. Now there are a lot of programmers out there writing unit tests even when people aren’t looking. Programmers are taking ownership of the full life cycle of software development like never before as well. Take a look at some of the more recent writing on continuous deployment — it covers everything from requirements to maintenance to monitoring of running applications. More work done in public, public discussion of that work, and the introduction of new best practices have defined the trend of the decade — developers owning the processes under which they work."

"Holding the product version and support level constant across an on-premise license and Amazon EC2 instance, the price premium of Windows vs. RHEL, if X% for on-premise, will be less than X% on the Amazon cloud.  Said differently, the license cost differential between proprietary and open source products narrows in the cloud."

good to see the alma mater keeping up with the times

i'd go if i was around

thoughts on open source fundraising

i'm late with this, but it's interesting to see Cassandra building out connectors

Twittered this a while back, but deserves a link here as well. evidence based decision making is going to be far more common, soon, than it is today.

count me as unsurprised

"While the barriers to use something like Hadoop have fundamentally dropped there are only a handful of experts that can make your Hadoop cluster perform well. What’s needed is a new suite of services and tools that can analyze your cluster and automatically optimize your performance. Hadoop Timelines, while rudimentary, is the beginning of an exciting new business niche, Hadoop Performance Optimization (HPO)."

i'm not leaving, but it's an interesting thought exercise

"As startups scale into a company, founders and the board need to realize that the most important transitions are not about systems, buildings or hardware. It’s about the company’s most valuable asset – its employees.

Great companies do this well."

some very interesting lessons in here.

no, i'm not a "prepper." but i do think some self-sufficiency and preparation is probably a good idea.

nothing surprising in here, except that it's interesting in that if Forrester is recommending this it means that the recommendations are no longer bleeding edge, but early to late majority

don't agree with all of it, but worth the read

the calculation certainly qualifies as an estimation, but still, the numbers are interesting

a loss for Novell, no doubt, but i'm happy for Nat. very much looking forward to seeing what he does next.

looks like i'll have to register this year. if it helps with a saltwater population census, i'm all for it.

"I don't want to die on an airplane. I don't want to die in my home while eating an organic bagel infested with parasites that lay eggs on my liver. I don't want to die from starvation or bad water or a thousand other things that I pay our government to monitor and regulate.

But I also don't expect the government to protect from the literally endless possibilities and threats that could occur at any point to end my life or the life of the few I love."

"The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old's "pencil-holding deficiency," hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — "helicopter parents," teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and "Kinderkords" (also known as leashes; they allow "three full feet of freedom for both you and your child") and Baby Kneepads (as if babies don't come prepadded). The mayor of a Connecticut town agreed to chop down three hickory trees on one block after a woman worried that a stray nut might drop into her new swimming pool, where her nut-allergic grandson occasionally swam."

worth a read

we're seeing a lot of it ourselves

Mozilla on Chrome extensions

what happens when the data hungry become data addicts