There’s a nation-wide Prop 8 protest this Saturday. Find the protest nearest you by reading this. I’ll probably post photos from the SF protest, which is at 10:30am in front of city hall.
Peace and love.
Prop 8 Protest
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Category Archives: Links
Keith Olbermann on Prop 8
I love Keith Olbermann. As a friend has said, “He is fearlessly confident to speak his opinion.” Not to mention he and I have similar political views. Please watch this six-minute video of Keith Olbermann on Prop 8. He talks not of politics and religion but of love.
Introducing the Cloudera Blog
Me and the Cloudera gang are going to start contributing to our new Hadoop and Big Data blog, so add the RSS feed if you’re interested. The only post there now is an introduction from Mike, our CEO. More good stuff coming soon, though.
Finally on Yelp
I finally signed up at Yelp. Here’s my profile. The plan is to write reviews for as many places in Seattle and Los Angeles as I can think of, time permitting of course, then to write a review for each place I visit in San Francisco.
Also notice my little sidebar widget for my recent reviews; pretty shnazzy I would say.
Tech Marketers, Meet Your Maker
I’ve been meaning to write a post about the comedic potential of listening to non-technical marketers talk about technology. I’m only referring to the marketers who speak with such conviction that innocent bystandards might actually believe they know what they’re talking about. I’ve witnessed this many a time when speaking with MBA-types about various web startups. I would normally cite specific examples, but Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has done better than I could ever do. Read this short article about cloud computing and silly marketers who want so badly to be technical but fail miserably. It’s like a new Revenge of the Nerds, even though Ellison probably isn’t a nerd given how much cash he’s rolling around in.
What’s curious is that the title of this post is “Larry Ellison’s Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant.” That’s completely misguiding. This isn’t an anti-cloud computing rant; it’s an anti-marketer-who-speaks-with-conviction rant.
The Financial Crisis: Explained
Time does a really good job explaining the current financial crisis. My favorite quote:
When greed exceeds fear, trouble follows.
Thank you, greedy bankers, for making tax payers pay for your bull shit. As if the war wasn’t enough reason to pay taxes. We all really appreciate it.
For you guys that know Jim
I know a lot of you know Jim, so I thought I would announce his new blog: Jim George. His other blog, INTelegance is purely technical and artistic; his new blog will be focused on personal experiences. He’ll continue the Shanghai stories once I’ve left.
Handle Emacs Backups and Autosaves Better
I finally got annoyed with all the damn #files# and files~. Emacs users will know what I’m talking about. Follow this guide on dealing with Emacs backups and autosaves to get them all to go into one directory. Much better.
All Internet Knowledge Wrapped Up Into One Video
Twitter: A Case Study for Bad Software Development
I read (yet) another post about Twitter’s performance problems, but this one unlike others shined light onto the technical difficulties that Twitter is facing. From the post it appears as though Twitter was created too rapidly with an underemphasis on performance. It’s very easy for software developers to be so interested in cranking out features that they disregard performance altogether. I think Twitter is one of these cases. Read the post for more details, but basically they were naive when developing their application and didn’t dig deep into performance bottlenecks and limitations.
Let this be a lesson that performance must be a factor when developing an application. Consider what will happen to your code if you experience an insane amount of usage, and understand the performance bottlenecks that you’ll have. Google is a good counterexample to Twitter. Larry and Sergey knew how difficult it would be to create a fast index of the internet, so they developed tools to deal with large data. I’ll bet the developers at Twitter are running around like maniacs, profiling, testing, and screaming profanities. Had they taken performance into account earlier they could have avoided their recent downtime altogether or at least been more prepared to fix the problem when it occurred.