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Velocity Conference Recap
These are the notes I collected (and found interesting) during my day at the Velocity Conference. General Themes I had never heard of it before, but almost every single presenter referenced Ganglia as...
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The New Nelz.net
Welcome to the new and improved Nelz.net! Background I started this blog way back in the beginning of 2007. At the time, I wanted more than just a blog host, I wanted a host where I could deploy other...
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Working With Amazon SimpleDB
At Widgetbox I’ve been playing with Amazon SimpleDB to implement some features that we’ll be releasing soon. I wanted to share some of my impressions with you, but another blogger has already posted a...
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Leavin’ on a jet plane…
I am taking a vacation. w00t! Normally at this time of year, I would be in full-on packing mode for Burning Man. Alas, my best friend from college decided to get married on the day the Man burns (in...
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How To Rock In Life
Somewhere I found a link to this blog post: “How to Ensure Your Life is a Bull Run“. I found it amusing how they couched the whole conversation in financial market terms, but otherwise I really liked...
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Facebook Connect: Nonconsensual Privacy Leak
The Problem I do not like Facebook. I do not like it one bit. I want nothing to do with Facebook at all, and I’ve been very adamant about not signing up for an account despite the urging of everyone...
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Widgetbox Rocks!
On a lark, I recently submitted a request to the Widgetbox HR person, Brittany, to see if I could get the company to allow me to attend the “Random Hacks of Kindness” event in mid-November. I was...
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Motorcycle Diary
As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently took a “where the wind blows me” vacation in France, and I’m gonna tell you about that wind. I started out my trip in Bordeaux, where I found a pretty nice...
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Book Review: Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation
A few months ago, I was approached by a representative from Packt Publishing to do a review of their book “Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation”, presumably because of my frequent posts about Maven....
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Embedded Job Posting?
So, I’m doing some stuff at work that has me looking at HTTP headers. As a reference, I looked at the feed URL for this blog, and I noticed the following header: X-hacker: If you're reading this, you...
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Google App Engine in Maven + IntelliJ
At Widgetbox, I sometimes get to play around with interesting technologies that are outside of our regular stack. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to use Google App Engine‘s Java environment (GAE/J)...
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ClipperCard – Personal Privacy Audit
For the past few months I’ve been commuting from San Francisco to Palo Alto via CalTrain, which was the impetus for me to finally get a Translink card ClipperCard. (I actually got my card right at the...
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Project Begets Love for AppEngine and Python at Java’s Expense
The Project For the past year or two I’ve had an ongoing side project where I post to the Twitter account @bman_countdown. It started out as just a simple countdown, but I realized I could use it as an...
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Gawd Damn Spam
So, I go to check some traffic stats on one of my silly sites, and I find some wierd referrers: Both of the the Bit.ly referrers (like “forexmarket”) just resolves to this URL...
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Business Card Etiquette
I recently went to my second South by Southwest Interactive (SxSW or SxSWi) in Austin, TX. If you’re not familiar with the conference, it is a 5-day internet and technology subsection of the greater...
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Pertinent Negatives, as Applied to Software
At one point in my life, I was a volunteer Firefighter/EMT. During my time working in paramedicine, I learned a valuable concept: the pertinent negative. Let’s say you’re examining someone who fell...
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Occupation Scholarship
Last night I had an idea. I want to support the Occupy Wall Street movement, but I don’t have the time to actually fly out to NYC to sit with everyone. But, I do have enough discretionary cash around...
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Velocity 2012 – Day 1 Notes
I started the day poorly. Even though I got in on time, I forgot to bring a notebook. Also, I didn’t properly charge my laptop, so I couldn’t take notes with that. It took me until 10AMish before I...
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Velocity 2012 – Day 2 Notes
Keynote: “Frying Squirrels & Unspun Gyros” – (Yahoo) All about HA planning 29% of DataCenter outages caused by UPS failures - point: some defenses create their own failure modes If you solve for...
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My Pursuit of Maturity (as an Engineer)
I recently found this article: On Being A Senior Engineer I really liked it, and will borrow the “bulleted list” of characteristics that I will work towards myself… Mature engineers seek out...
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