I like to collect folk tales and old books - especially ones with good illustrations. Here are some scans from a book originally copyright in 1894 (the edition I have was printed in 1917).
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My daughter received a bunch of art supplies from her friends for her birthday and did a little sketch of a tree on a hill just for fun.
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Those crafty people at Google are doing some cool work to "make the Web faster". The first I had heard of this initiative it turned out to be how to make "pages" faster - a decent thing, but fairly well known. But recently some folks over there have started to look at the actual underlying issues with the gears grinding out the Web - mainly networking latency. Trying to improve the network protocol of the Web is a tricky thing - lots of people (and egos) can get involved. Surprisingly their effort seems to be off to a good start and everybody is taking it at face value and being supporting and questioning things in a positive way.
One really cool thing mentioned in their whitepaper isn't a direct 'latency' thing - it's about 'server push'. If they can really make this happen a whole knew world of application development would open up.
To enable the server to initiate communications with the client and push data to the client whenever possible.
We ran into a heinous bug in IE regarding using Javascript to modify the DOM while the page is loading. It turns out that IE6 and IE7 will show a modal error dialog and then clear the page when the user dismisses the error message. On IE8 it was fixed to merely stop rendering the page at that point. How helpful.
You can find out more here on an MDSN blog
If you are unable to defer Javascript execution until after the page finishes loading, the following snippet may work in your use case.
var tags = document.getElementsByTagName("*");
tags[tags.length-1].parentNode.appendChild(n);
My daughter is going to Redmond for a Thriller zombie dance movie thing. The only redeeming thing about a Michael Jackson related event is that she found a Ramones t-shirt at Value Village to wear. (but she cut it up, omg)
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Haven't been to the new coffee place in Kirkland. They have the largest single block of wood table I've ever seen
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This past weekend we headed out of town to visit Pt. Townsend on the Peninsula. The weather couldn't have been better for this time of year - blue sky and sunny from the time we arrive to when we left on Sunday. We did a little walking around the beaches and forests of Ft Worden doing some geocaching and after a dinner we were looking for a cool place to hang out. Rinneke spotted this brightly lit stairway going down underground into who knows where. We could hear music drifting up so we went down. It turned out to be the UnderTown, a coffee/wine bar and they had live music on Saturday night.
It was a great way to relax, have a warm drink and spend some time together. If you are ever in Pt Townsend check it out.
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We've been working with Tokyo Tyrant for some large scale key-value lookups and the performance has been very nice, but has degraded over time. I've been poking around the various options to try to improve the performance and although there is documentation of various options, the pages are hard to read and figure out what's what. So I thought I'd collect them here for reference. I'll describe the results of tuning and tweaking in a future post.
The most recent authoritative references are here:
Great game so far and weather is sunny now.
Stephan's team dominated the first half and are having a good second half so far
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Very insightful post about startups and hard work from someone who has been there.
We agreed that a lot of what we then considered "working hard" was actually "freaking out". Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn't have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn't -- and other time-consuming activities.
Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do.
This past Wednesday several of the Rubicon Project engineering team went out for dinner at a Korean BBQ in LA. It was a good mix of a working meeting - talking about engineering practices and development in general - and good food and drink. The meat was all very tasty and only at the end did I find out what some of it was. I had never had beef tongue before - I always swore I wouldn't taste anything that could taste me back - but it was all really good, especially the soju (a lot like vodka).
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Cool - Bob Wyman is involved in the PubSubHubBub discussion group. In this post he hints at content-based routing - not just topic based routing - being possible in the future with PSHB. It's time to find some excuse to use this new PSHB technology at my day job.
For instance, while today we think mostly about "topic-based" distribution -- i.e. subscribing to known feeds by name, in the future, people might like to subscribe to "concepts" or "words" that appear in the content of updates. Rather than saying "Tell me whenever Tom's feed changes!", you might like to say: "Tell me whenever any feed mentions PSHB." In that case, down stream systems are going to want to have the content (not just a notification of change) in order to match updates to subscriptions.
Bernard Lunn has a good post over on ReadWriteWeb putting the recent PubSubHubBub/RSSCloud news into context. Very funny that he calls KnowNow a "blow out", but I think he correctly identified their issue being a focus on the enterprise market (when that market had fairly established solutions).
Wish I hadn't been so busy over the past two years and could have worked on helping build PubSubHubBub-style technology.
