February 2012
1 post
3 tags
January 2012
1 post
“What is the key thing that is wrong with code? The fact that you don’t express...”
– I want to fix programming - jonbho
just tristan.: My Favorite Companies to Watch in... →
tristanwalker:
Last year on Dec 31, I wrote a post: Favorite Companies to Watch in 2011
I had fun doing it so decided I’d give it a go again this year. But first, a quick recap of last year’s selections before the 2012 predictions.
foursquare - I’m biased, but I think we have had a fantastic year. 15+MM…
Agree with the opportunity in sensor applications. Preferably some pattern...
December 2011
3 posts
2 tags
On discipline
“The first and best victory is to conquer self; to be conquered by self is of all things most shameful and vile.” -Plato
Circumstances have me thinking a lot lately about discipline. At 33, career well under way, family about to grow by +1, I have new influences on how to spend my time and ways to focus my energy.
Here’s the problem. I don’t have any discipline. My interest alone...
November 2011
2 posts
“Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness....”
– Bret Victor, A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interactive Design
September 2011
2 posts
3 tags
“Despite the fact that he wasn’t driving it any more, he insisted it would never...”
– - Brad Bowling, Bullitt Mustang – Discovery
After seeing Drive this weekend, I got into a car mood and discovered that the original Bullitt Mustang has a bit of mystery surrounding it.
“I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I...”
– Douglas Rushkoff, “Are jobs obsolete?”
Being a software engineer employed full time, I feel somewhat like a paradox. Able to replicate my work a near infinite number of times, yet I’m still at the office 40 hours a week.
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
1 post
“tcplay is a fully featured BSD-licensed TrueCrypt implementation… It...”
– Disk encryption should be more prevalent.
June 2011
3 posts
2 tags
“Eventually, Laberge had his “aha” moment: a precision controlled...”
– Can one idea be energy’s holy grail?
“He wanted to build a Clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand...”
– Jeff Bezos helping to build 10,000 year clock
4 tags
May 2011
1 post
April 2011
6 posts
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
JLog Message Queue →
I recently found a great project for persistent message queues. In a previous project, we were working with a known number of processes communicating over a static list of channels. They started out running on different machines communicating over the network but ended up all running on the same 16-core box.
In that case, all network based persistent queues were too big of a solution. On the...
1 tag
“Tough Mudder is not your average lame-ass mud run or spirit-crushing ‘endurance’...”
– My wife is competing in Tough Mudder this weekend.
4 tags
Heroku →
I was looking for a place to host a very lightweight landing page and found Heroku. I’ll be using them along with Sendgrid for notifications. It looks to be the perfect solution when the app is all I want to concern myself with.
March 2011
3 posts
1 tag
5 tags
Is there a need for NAS drive rental service?
A few months ago, I decided that my consistent failure to keep regular backups at home justified moving into a cloud backup solution. I found that across all the solutions the prices were reasonable and the software easy to manage. What I didn’t find was an easy way to shove 100GB up my rate limited DSL connection. Estimates were 30 days to send. And I’d have to leave my laptop...
2 tags
February 2011
15 posts
3 tags
1 tag
“Don’t be an entrepreneur by association. Be an entrepreneur by action and...”
– Amir Khella
3 tags
“The State Grid Company had previously set an aggressive target of building a...”
– Jeff Ebihara
1 tag
1 tag
“Yet what’s been occurring for the last 50 years within this tight cluster of...”
– http://steveblank.com/2011/02/22/a-visitors-guide-to-silicon-valley/
1 tag
Are Silicon Valley's Engineers Underpaid? →
Living in Silicon Valley at the moment, I can understand how a 6-figure salary is somewhere right down the middle. On the other hand, not every engineer is top tier. Could it just be that average engineers are being paid average wages?
2 tags
Topics of Interest to Me: Energy, Patterns,...
Three fields of particular interest to me right now are Patterns, Energy, and Visualization.
Energy. Its applications are universal and have very tangible effects on our lives as physical beings. It’s a nice crossover between online life and real life.
Patterns. This is another field which I see a lot of room for advancement. As an engineer, I tell computers which steps to repeat by...
4 tags
Pure C++ or Java is no longer acceptable
I often get job offers that don’t mention high level languages. I can’t help but feel like it’s 1993 all over again. Apps in pure C++ or Java are equivalent to pure ASM code of the past. If you were a developer who cared about performance, you read Abrash and used inline ASM inside of C. Today, capable developers write C extensions for Python or Ruby and save tons of...
2 tags
New Coal Plant in Michigan →
Coal is still very relevant. US has lots of it, and it’s our primary source of electricity. It’s what keeps those data centers running. And the Nissan Leaf, and the Chevy Volt, and the iPad.
Trunket Wooden iPhone 4 Covers →
I found the first compelling reason to upgrade to the iPhone 4.
Old Blog Content →
All of my previous blogging content is still fully available at http://l1ghtm4n.nfshost.com. The more prominent bits will find their way over here, but I don’t intend to duplicate all the content.
2 tags
Packing up the bits and moving
I realized over the past few weeks that the maintenance of my current blog, self-hosted at http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net, has become a barrier for my publishing new content.
The hosting has been great, though I’m behind a number of versions of my Drupal release, and the layout and theme have never been quite to my liking. My intention is to move over to tumblr as my primary blog site...
November 2010
1 post
