Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

A recent Rubyist goes to the Lone Star Ruby Conference

Sunday, September 7th, 2008

I attended the Lone Star Ruby Conference (LSRC), held here in Austin over the past two days. As this was my first conference on the topic, I thought I would share some observations. First, a vigorous caveat emptor... I'm a former Java guy still relatively new to the Ruby world. ...

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 ...

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 ...