Archive for June, 2008

Telling semantic lies

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Inspired by conversations with some smart people at a recent Semantic Web Austin event, I've undertaken to restart my education on semantic web technologies like RDF, RDFa, Microformats, etc. When I wear my web developer hat, I'm definitely an advocate of clean semantic markup that correctly describes the structure of ...

Running Hadoop on Windows

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

What is Hadoop? Hadoop is a an open source Apache project written in Java and designed to provide users with two things: a distributed file system (HDFS) and a method for distributed computation. It's based on Google's published Google File System and MapReduce concept which discuss how to build a framework ...

Most interesting sentence I’ve read today

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

From Free Exchange (the blog home of The Economist): ...by some measures—including those used by the Congressional Budget Office—the American economy has uninterruptedly performed below potential since the 2001 recession. Even though we're not technically in a recession (two quarters of negative GDP) and even though being technically correct is the best ...

Let’s toss those plastic discs

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Jenn and I have been using Netflix's streaming service a lot recently to watch all sorts of great classic sci-fi on our TV but the whole s-video-from-the-laptop-to-the-TV-with-no-remote setup is wearing thin. Clunky setup aside, the actual streaming experience has been mostly flawless with only the occasional hiccup. That's why we're ...

Best geeky sentence I’ve read today

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

With apologies to Tyler Cohen... Normalization is a kind of ethical system for data. This is from a great post on the always fascinating High Scalability about how you sometimes just have to let go and de-normalize.

Facebook chat uses Erlang to scale

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

I started playing with Erlang last year. Mostly that meant reading the Joe Armstrong book, looking at ejabberd and writing a little code. Sadly, I've not had the chance to go much beyond the "playing" stage. Anyway, I've got a soft spot for functional languages like Erlang since my Programming ...

Appozite starts to take shape

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

I'm currently in the process of getting my new company, Appozite, off the ground. We're still being a little intentionally vague about what exactly we're doing but suffice it to say that I'm excited enough about it to leave my job at Kadro Solutions to get Appozite off the ground. ...