I used to really want a borescope. The problem back then was that they were very pricey (and I had less money, more mouths to feed, etc). I recently discovered though that the prices have come way down, so I bought one (on principal) off Amazon for about $40. Here is some video from sending the scope down the seat tube of my bike, to the area above the bottom bracket....
See you in Banja Luka!
Last year, if you’ll remember, I did a half-assed job of putting together a musically coordinated christmas light rig, and promised to Do Better this year. Lucky for me I was vague because under-promising made over-delivering a lot easier. :) What I did manage to do was tackle last years technical debt, and get the code cleaned up. I’ve named it Lumen and put it up on Github. Lumen has two modes, record and playback....
We put up lights each year for the holidays, and while I don’t mind having the house decorated, I do not like having to put them up. Despite this, I feel mounting pressure each year to Do Better, which by default means more lights and decorations, which in turn mean even more work. The year before last I had the idea that if I worked smarter I might avoid working harder, and that one of those musically synchronized setups would be pretty sweet....
Due to a scheduling conflict, Jonathan won’t able to present on Cassandra in the NoSQL devroom at this years FOSDEM, so I’ll be going in his stead. I’ve always wanted to go to a FOSDEM, and getting to see Brussels will be a real treat as well. I can’t wait! NP: Black & White, In Flames
Depending on the circles you travel in, you might be aware of the whole NoSQL “movement”. If not, I’m not going try and explain it at this time (explaining it is sort of the problem), but you can get the general idea from wikipedia. I’ve spent the last couple of days at nosqleast and one of the hot topics here is the name “nosql”. Understandably, there are a lot of people who worry that the name is Bad, that it sends an inappropriate or inaccurate message....
I have several trips lined up for the next few weeks: NoSQL East from the 28th to the 30th in Atlanta ApacheCon US 2009 from November 2-6 in Oakland OpenSQL Camp 2009 in Portland, November 14-15 There is also a NoSQL meetup on November 2 as a part of ApacheCon; I’ve offered to present on Cassandra there. I’m also thinking of giving a session at BarcampApache, and I’m scheduled to sit on a “SQL vs....
I rewrote my blog software again (actually, it was done months ago but I just now got around to deploying it). The last one used Turbogears, but the 1.x branch is getting long in teeth, and 2.0 came a little too late. Besides, Django is the new hotness these days. Somehow the rewrite resulted in about half as much code, which is always cool, and I finally got to make use of mod_wsgi, (it is everything that I had ever dreamed it would be, and more :))....
A few months ago a group of researchers announced a fairly serious attack that shattered everyone’s faith in SHA-1. It has frightening implications for anyone who relies on cryptographic signatures, and while consensus is that there is little danger in the near-term, most people agree that now is the time to start a move to something stronger. So, I’ve begun my transition, (document here), and submitted my new key for the Debconf9 signing party later this month....
My latest project at work is Cassandra, a distributed, eventually consistent, column oriented data store. It’s somewhere between Dynamo (Cassandra’s original author worked on Dynamo), and Google’s BigTable. It was developed as an internal application at Facebook, later open sourced, and is now an Apache incubator project. The external interface to Cassandra is thrift-based. Thrift is a framework for creating network services, services that communicate using a compact binary data format....