Anatomy of MySQL on the GRID. “A number of these users came running to (mt) Media Temple with the promise that their applications, despite all of their deficiencies, would be accepted and not turned off. These users are radically different, by orders of magnitude, from anything we had previously analyzed or benchmarked.”
Category Archives: Personal
Bikeshed
Is it important, or is it the color of the bikeshed?
Twenty-three
Another day, another year! One step at a time, I seem to have found myself another year older. 2006 was a great, I’m just amazed at how quickly it went by. Time flies when you’re having fun. 🙂 Previously: 22, 21, 20, 19. (Have I really been blogging that long?)
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.
In defense of simplicity
Disconnect
One thing I’ve found in the past year is there is sometimes a huge disconnect between people who make noise on blogs, or might have impressive blogs themselves, and productivity in the real world. It’s unfortunate, because it makes it that much harder to find good folks.
Net Income Show
Tomorrow I’m going to be on the web radio show Net Income. That entry mentions my Wikipedia page, which oh-my-goodness has an awful picture.
From Within
Michel Camilo & Tomatito – From Within, from a fantastic CD given to me by Luis Rull when I was in Spain. It starts off slow and then becomes really intense, a beautiful song.
Static File Web Server
Philip Greenspun asks What’s the best web server program for a lot of static files?
ALA Style Guide
The A List Apart Style Guide is fantastic, a nice concise refresher for anyone who writes to be read.
Dojo Offline Toolkit
Resolution Recap
Like Tantek, I found I didn’t seem to make any public resolutions in 2006, so because of my awful memory I don’t have any idea what I hoped to accomplish last year. Anyway I thought it would be interesting to make a progress report on the resolutions I made two years ago.
- Build up piano chops — This pretty much tanked. I got an upright piano for my living room and started taking piano lessons from someone I found on Craig’s List. However right before I left CNET I got this awful pain in my hand, particularly my thumb, that was pretty crippling and I ended up with my left hand in a cast for a bit. The only thing that had changed in my routine was that I was practicing a lot of piano at the time (probably too much) and the doctor recommended I stop. I lost touch with my teacher, and basically haven’t done much with it since. Mainly I use the piano these days to keep my ear up by transcribing parts of music I enjoy. (Did you know Timberlake’s Lovestoned is all pentatonic?)
- Read more — I’ve done pretty well on this one, mostly thanks to travelling about 20x more than I used to. I’m a little bit addicted to computers, so I rarely read at home, but when forced offline I tend to tear through books. I usually carry a book in my bag to grab moments for cafes/parks, which doesn’t happen very often, but is worth having the book for the once every month or so it does.
- Release more — This has been yes and no. WordPress.com is the epitome of release more, with pushes sometimes dozens of times a day, but the space between WordPress 2.0 and 2.1 is way, way too long. (2.0 is over 1.5 million downloads now.) We’re trying an experiment after 2.1 to encourage more frequent release, since the codebase is pretty much “stable” all the time since it runs live on WP.com. I’ve heard about book writers who have to stop blogging to work on their book, so similarly maybe I should take a break to get some of my unreleased software out the door. On the bright side, I feel like everything currently released, from bbPress to Akismet, is getting all the tender loving care it needs, so nothing is really neglected. (Which is a bad feeling.)
- No more mental roadblocks — This is a little ambiguous. I still procrastinate sometimes. I think what I was referring to was assuming certain resources were needed before doing something and a fear of failure. One thing I’ve certainly learned in the two years since making that resolution is that there is no causation between resources, especially money, and success. I really believe with committment and elbow grease, you can make almost anything happen.
Now to start thinking about resolutions for 2007, hopefully things a little more measurable.
John Mayer
John Mayer’s blog is good, but someone tell his personal ninja to hook him up with permalinks.
2006 Predictions
Thomas Hawk takes a look at all the predictions people made for 2006 and how right or wrong they were. I don’t know why, but I love prediction posts because they get people’s imaginations going.
Focusing on Market Share
IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE — “[A] study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.”
Performancing and PayPerPost
PayPerPost, a company I still consider highly distasteful (when you’re forced to change a core aspect of your business because of the FTC, that’s a bad thing) has bought Performancing Metrics. On the bright side, Performancing’s ad and Firefox products were not part of the deal.
Firebug
Quoted
“I am always hard to buy for” — Bill Gates in response to what’s on his Christmas list.
Iconistan
Tony Conrad muses on Iconistan.
On Simplicity
MT Export Helper
Split Your MT Export File. I wrote a quick little web service to intelligently split large export files from Typepad and Movable Type into more manageable chunks.