May 2011
12 posts
2 tags
Introducing Druid: Real-Time Analytics at a... →
No real details yet but there was one interesting quote.
Our 40-instance (m2.2xlarge) cluster can scan, filter, and aggregate 1 billion rows in 950 milliseconds
Assuming rows aren’t represented as /dev/null, that’s impressive.
April 2011
14 posts
2 tags
40% Off Books by Fowler, Beck, Cohn
If you’re a fan of Martin Fowler (or Kent Beck or Mike Cohn) you’ll appreciate the 40% off promotion that InformIT is currently running. I just ordered a copy of Domain-Specified Languages (Fowler) and Test Driven Development by Example (Beck). Good through 5/15.
1 tag
Google Apps Decreases Free Tier User Count
I got this email a little while ago from the Google Apps team:
Hello, We recently announced upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. We want to let you know that, as a current customer, the changes will not affect you. As of May 10, any organization that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more...
2 tags
YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious →
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Why do travel sites suck?
If you have ever booked travel online, it sucks. Two wonderful travel related exceptions are Kayak (but, I can’t actually book there) and TripIt (same). Below are a list of frustrations that I dealt with today but especially for the airlines, I have seen these same sites have the same problems for literally months.
Airtran: Simply impossible to redeem rewards. Trying to book rewards travel...
2 tags
Comparing EC2 Instance Sizes
I recently found a link comparing ec2 instance sizes and it reminded me of something I had discovered. The standard small has 1 compute unit, 1.7GB of RAM, 160GB of storage, and is 32-bit. The High-CPU medium has 5 compute units, 1.7GB of RAM, 350GB of storage, and is 32-bit. When deploying a system recently we decided to move from 6 mediums to 12 smalls (the price is the same, 2 smalls costs the...
3 tags
Google Voice comes to Sprint
Having had enough of AT&T, back in June 2010 I packed up my things, and headed over to Sprint. Having been a long time iPhone/AT&T user, I wasn’t sure whether Sprint would be able to compete but I thought the HTC Evo could at least give the iPhone a run for its money. And any carrier could beat AT&T on service so I wasn’t worried about that.
Fast forward to March 2011 and...
4 tags
Cucumber isn't (strictly) about testing
Recently DHH (creator of rails) posted about his, uhm, dislike of Cucumber. I’ve used both Cucumber and rSpec for unit/functional/integration testing and have my own opinions but I’ve never thought about Cucumber as strictly a test tool. DHH said, “Cucumber makes no sense to me unless you have clients reading the tests.”
Where I’ve found Cucumber to be most useful is...
3 tags
Amazon Elastic MapReduce Office Hours
Today I joined the Amazon office hours session for their Elastic MapReduce product. Office hours are a neat idea. Instead of marketers talking to engineers, it’s engineers talking to engineers. I liked the format a lot more than any other webinars I’ve been on.
They covered a few new features:
S3 multipart uploads (good for parallelization)
Elastic IP address integration (good for...
2 tags
Ghetto Scheduler for node.js with Redis
Recently I was working on a project where I had gotten access to a no.de smartmachine and was trying to keep the system requirements minimal. One of the features of this project required that social networks be polled periodically for each user. I wasn’t anxious to run something like delayed_job or even worse, quartz so I rigged up a solution using just node.js primitives with Redis.
First,...
3 tags
1 tag
Coinstar Hack
You know those machines you see at grocery stores for turning 2 years of pocket change into actual bills? Those are Coinstar machines, and Coinstar basically owns that market. They also charge nearly 10% for that ‘service’. Typically I redeem as a gift certificate (Amazon usually) to avoid the service fee. Today the machine had some kind of technical difficulties while fulfilling my...
Leaving Kona
Last day in Kona with Katherine and the family. Such a beautiful place filled with beautiful people. Looking forward to a 16 hour hackathon on the way home, but definitely going to miss my family. April is going to be a crazy month culminating in a move to New York, just trying to squeeze every last minute out of this amazing trip.
