It's a blog.
I think the best analogy for modern-day politics is sports teams. I root for the Red Sox, because they’re my local team. Yankees suck! This is foolish, of course. The Yankees are a great team. They’re not an enemy, but friendly competition. Politics today are the same way. Democrats hate Republicans, and Republicans think Democrats [...]
Lately a lot of my work as a web developer has been way at the back-end, and, for whatever reason, it tends to focus heavily on third parties. I spent a while fixing a bizarre intermittent error with our credit card processor, moved on to connecting with Facebook, and am now working on a major [...]
I’ve mentioned before about how the sync_binlog setting in MySQL can be especially slow on ext3. Of course, I wasn’t the first to discover this; the MySQL Performance Blog mentioned it months ago. I was reading through some of the slides I mentioned in my last post, and remembered that I’d left sync_binlog off on [...]
We were talking quite some time ago at college about how gay marriage had been legal in Massachusetts for a few years. Despite all the hubbub about it being the end of the world–or the greatest thing since sliced bread–we came to the conclusion that it was a complete non-issue. None of us knew anyone [...]
After reading about a series of pirate attacks last year—back then an almost laughably bizarre occurrence—I became interested in the concept of modern piracy, something I, like many average citizens, was unaware still went on. I picked up a copy of John Burnett’s Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas after hearing [...]
Apparently, a company wrote an application for the iPhone called Baby Shaker. It depicts a crying baby, and you vigorously shake the iPhone to make it stop, at which point its eyes are replaced by X’s. Apple pulled the application from its store and apologized, saying, “This app is deeply offensive and should not have [...]
Thinking about a $22,000 lens got me thinking about “real” cameras a bit more. And it occurred to me that Canon is in kind of a weird spot right now. Their flagship camera has always been the EOS-1. With digital it was the 1D, which was followed by a 1Ds. The s designates that it’s [...]
I think you could say with relative accuracy that there are three main bottlenecks in a computer: CPU, memory, and disk. There are some outliers that people might try to pile in: video card performance, or network throughput if you’re tweaking interrupts on your 10GigE card. But the basic three are pretty universal. To cut [...]
This falls into the category of things that are simple yet I’m always trying to remember. Sometimes in bash I find myself wanting a for loop, not of the usual foreach type (for i in `ls /etc/`; do …), but a more classical one (a la C-style for var=0; var<100; var++ … syntax). Here’s the [...]
Lately I’ve felt that things were going pretty well. I was reading a bit of international news and looking at the international reaction to our presence at the G20 summit, for example. Of course not everyone in the world loves us, but I couldn’t help but feel that our presence was a little different than [...]