Big Dave’s Blog

Author: Dave

  • POPSignal – Boston, May 15th

    Those of you in Boston may remember Tech Cocktail last fall. If you were one of the lucky 300+ people in attendance, you know how successful it was. I know I enjoyed it, and I met some great new contacts there. Well, Brian Balfour and Jay Meattle are at it again, but now it is…

  • Continuing the Lockheed Skunk Works Theme

    The History Behind the F-35B Continuing the theme of the Lockheed Skunk Works, this is an interesting take on the development of the shaft-driven fan on the F-35B. The inventor discusses how he came up with the idea and how the system works. Like any good research project, there was a risk of failure, but…

  • Ruby Background Tasks with Starling – Part 3

    In my previous post, I went over the changes I made to Workling to add threading and allow it to run for long periods. Now, we need to deploy and monitor everything. In the Linux word, there are several options, but monit seems to be the most popular. However, I wanted to give god.rb a…

  • Ruby Background Tasks with Starling – Part 2

    EDIT: The latest workling on github has all of the changes described here. There is no need to download my patch anymore. See github.In my previous post, I briefly described how simple it is to add background processing to your RoR app with Starling and the Workling plugin. Now, let’s discuss the changes I made…

  • Ruby Background Tasks with Starling

    At Inquisix, we help sales professionals exchange trusted referrals. To do that requires several background tasks, some that could take 10-15 minutes to process. Obviously, I can’t make a client wait for that, so I needed a system that could handle background tasks. At first, I started with backgroundrb, and it worked just fine. Backgroundrb…

  • F-117 stealth fighters to make final flight and Agile Development

    F-117 stealth fighters to make final flight no one will know about – Engadget It’s the final flight of the F-117. It’s not exactly the prettiest aircraft in the world, but it sure broke new ground. At first, I was surprised, but I didn’t realize there we so few of them left. Then it makes…

  • Vodafone demos “Otello” visual search

    CeBIT 2008: Vodafone demos “Otello” visual search Now this is interesting, and it sure would save a lot of typing. Now, the engineer in me marvels at how you could actually pull this off. The data requirements to do this kind of pattern matching is staggering. I suspect it will be a while before it…

  • Eco Mouse Gets Its Juice From Laptop Itself

    DORmino Eco Mouse Gets Its Juice From Laptop Itself! – Ecofriend This wouldn’t help me because I use my trustee MacBook Pro with an external monitor and keyboard most of the time, but I could see how it could work — especially with aluminum laptops like the MacBook Pros. The aluminum transits heat out of…

  • High stakes salvage – smarts over brawn

    High stakes salvage – smarts over brawn

    High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace Photo: Courtesy of US Coast Guard These guys use some smarts instead of heavy machinery to salvage ships in trouble. When you get offered $30M to save one ship and hold out for more, that extra savings makes for a nice…

  • Google May Buy a Balloon Company to Build Huge Wireless Networks

    Wireless: Google May Buy a Balloon Company to Build Huge Wireless Networks OK, I’m intrigued. The balloons only last a day or so, and then they come down. This is my problem. Exactly where do these things come down? If Google wants to put up bunches of these things every day, that means bunches of…