Category: Technology
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Platform Engineers or Rock Star Engineers
I’ve hired a lot of engineers over the years, and one of the first things I’m always asked to add to the job description is “must have experience in XXXX platform.” I sometimes put it on there to make people happy, but I rarely will disregard an engineer because they do not have a lot…
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Bletchley Park Snubbed by British Government
UK Snubs Support for Home of WWII Enigma Here we go again. Bletchley Park continues to get little love. Here we have what is basically one on of the birthplaces of modern computing. On top of that, the group of people that worked here, along with their US partners in Building 26, did more to…
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Workling Timing Issue
As you probably noticed already, I use Workling a lot, and I wrote about it a few times (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). One minor gotcha to be aware of is that you need to make sure you handle it when Workling is too fast. A common use of Workling is to make a…
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Gotcha with find_each and find_in_batches
Rails 2.3 added a couple of nice new methods – find_each and find_in_batches. Both methods accomplish the same thing in a slightly different way. Unlike a normal finder these methods grab objects in batches instead of all at once. For instance, if you have 500,000 users, you don’t want to do the following: User.find(:all).each {…
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Why We Need Audiophiles
Gizmodo – Why We Need Audiophiles – Audiophiles This is a great read for anyone that is interested in great sound. I’ve said it a few times, I’m not into expensive audio gear because I like gadgets (although that part is fun too). I’m into expensive gear because I flat-out love music, and I want…
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The Perils of Testing Code
Testing code is good, right? No! Testing code is bad. Testing functionality is good. How many of us have written a bunch of code and then turned around and wrote a bunch of tests for that code? Be honest! Everyone has done it, but why is it a bad thing? The problem with this is…
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Replacing Mongrel with Passenger (mod_rails)
I’ve been using Apache + Mongrel for a while now. I read about Passenger when it first came out, but I never felt the need to bother with it since I have a bunch of recipes for Apache and Mongrel (see a previous posts about background tasks with Workling). The other day, I figured I would…
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Music Is Dead: iPods and Young People Have Utterly Destroyed Music
Music Is Dead: iPods and Young People Have Utterly Destroyed Music This is depressing for someone like me. A Stanford professor did an informal study over several years, and he found that students each year preferred low-quality MP3 more and more. Like the author, this is disappointing for me because it most likely means it…
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Reflecting on a New Generation of Mirrors
Gallery – Reflecting on a new generation of mirrors – Image 1 – New Scientist Continuing on the theme of interesting optics, Andrew Hicks, a mathematician, has created mirrors that accomplish some amazing feats. Imagine looking at text in a mirror, and the text is not backwards. Imagine 360-degree panoramas without distortion. It’s all pretty cool stuff. All…
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iPhone Wishlist
I’ve been an iPhone user since the first weekend the 3G came out, and so far I love it. Prior to the iPhone, I was a Blackberry user for a while. My reasons for waiting to change were: My contract with Verizon conveniently ended the same month the 3G came out. AT&T had lousy coverage…