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Excellent menu from Fatted Calf. My wife is a sucker for duck,...

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:35:47 -0800

Excellent menu from Fatted Calf. My wife is a sucker for duck, so I’m happy to find a source for cooking at home.

"What is the key thing that is wrong with code? The fact that you don’t express what you want. You..."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:42:11 -0800

“What is the key thing that is wrong with code? The fact that you don’t express what you want. You express what steps have to be taken. Imagine telling your pal to grab you a beer from the fridge, step by step, with each step being robotically-rigid and with very little regard for context. It would be excruciating. And prone to catastrophic failure. Exactly like code is.”

- I want to fix programming - jonbho

just tristan.: My Favorite Companies to Watch in 2012

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:19:34 -0800

just tristan.: My Favorite Companies to Watch in 2012:

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 recognition so these devices can begin to help me with repetitive tasks.

Dreary morning over the bay

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:56:34 -0800

Dreary morning over the bay

On discipline

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:06:59 -0800

“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 was enough to see projects through. This works fine for a single guy with zero dependents and zero reports. No timeline is required, so none is followed. Now I’m constantly interrupted. As a result, I accomplish far less than I used to.

The only way I see to fix this is to “conquer self”. There is some allowance for “this is how my brain works”, but so long as I’m not achieving things I’d like to, there’s a problem.

How I’m going to change things isn’t completely clear yet, but I’ve started my first step. Time. Becoming more aware of time passing. Floating along has made me terribly unaware of the passage of time, even if it was beneficial (12 hour coding marathons). To change this, I’ve started timing small tasks. Errands, chores, walks for coffee. It’s been about a week since I’ve started this and already I feel more clear minded while taking something on.

No substitute for friends and family. Happy Thanksgiving from...

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:50:00 -0800

No substitute for friends and family. Happy Thanksgiving from the Thompson family.

"Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip..."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:57:26 -0800

“

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

”

- Bret Victor, A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interactive Design

"Despite the fact that he wasn’t driving it any more, he insisted it would never be for sale. Steve..."

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:44:00 -0700

“Despite the fact that he wasn’t driving it any more, he insisted it would never be for sale. Steve McQueen himself tried to buy it back in 1977 but Joe had already promised that it would not leave the family, flattered though he was by the offer.
…
He said he was dedicated to keeping the car’s existence secret”

- - 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 understand we all..."

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:17:00 -0700

“I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.”

- 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.

Day trip to surf museum in Santa Cruz

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:43:00 -0700

Day trip to surf museum in Santa Cruz

"tcplay is a fully featured BSD-licensed TrueCrypt implementation… It supports cipher cascades,..."

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:53:00 -0700

“tcplay is a fully featured BSD-licensed TrueCrypt implementation… It supports cipher
cascades, hidden volumes, system volumes, etc.”

- Disk encryption should be more prevalent.

"Eventually, Laberge had his “aha” moment: a precision controlled piston that hammers..."

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:14:48 -0700

“Eventually, Laberge had his “aha” moment: a precision controlled piston that hammers giant shock waves into a magnetized sphere — slamming atoms together hard enough to fuse and create energy.”

- Can one idea be energy’s holy grail?

"He wanted to build a Clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100..."

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 06:16:31 -0700

“He wanted to build a Clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. The vision was, and still is, to build a Clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years.”

- Jeff Bezos helping to build 10,000 year clock

Sailing to Block Island, RI from City Island, NY. It was race...

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:22:37 -0700

Sailing to Block Island, RI from City Island, NY.

It was race week out at BI. Lots of impressive boats in the water. We discovered Gardiner’s Island and some wet sailing on this trip.

We’re currently at anchor close to Mattituck, taking a break from the storm which just went overhead.

A day at Shoreline kite field

Sun, 22 May 2011 19:40:04 -0700

A day at Shoreline kite field

brycedotvc: Coda used to work at Wesabe. He’s a star. He also...

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:09:52 -0700

brycedotvc:

Coda used to work at Wesabe.

He’s a star.

He also delivered the best presentation I’ve seen yet on the importance of instrumenting code to deliver business value. It sends a clear message that creating business value isn’t just for business people anymore.

You can scroll through the whole presentation here.

Dead on. Breakdown of various types of metrics is very insightful.

Dinner at Moto

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:29:50 -0700

Dinner at Moto

Lunch at B Bar in NYC

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 11:55:47 -0700

Lunch at B Bar in NYC

JLog Message Queue

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 05:51:20 -0700

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 other hand, simpler IPC mechanisms like POSIX message queues don’t have persistence across reboots.

Another way to implement a persistent queue is using a database like Berkeley DB or SQLite. But then you’re carrying around an SQL engine or or other indexing mechanism intended for arbitrary record access.

Something home-rolled around shared files seems appropriate here, but not that fun or interesting to implement. That’s how I found JLog.

JLog is exactly how you’d expect a solution in this problem space to be written. File locks around mmap’ed files for quick, safe access. Files are capped at 4MB and deleted by consumers when finished. At 256 bytes per message, that would be 16K messages per file. 1000 files would represent 16 million messages, which is a huge number within a completely manageable file set.

"Tough Mudder is not your average lame-ass mud run or spirit-crushing ‘endurance’ road race. It’s..."

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:33:01 -0700

“Tough Mudder is not your average lame-ass mud run or spirit-crushing ‘endurance’ road race. It’s Ironman meets Burning Man, and it is coming to a location near you. Our 10-12 mile obstacle courses are designed by British Special Forces to test all around strength, stamina, mental grit, and camaraderie. Forget finish times. Simply completing a Tough Mudder is a badge of honor.”

- My wife is competing in Tough Mudder this weekend.