“If you’d have told me then that by 2007 the state of the art would barely have advanced beyond that of 1998, I’d have wept openly.” – Dave Slusher If you fell into a coma when Business 2.0 had a roller coaster on the cover and woke up today, you’d have one more reason to …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Strib: Off-Topic, Uncredited, Fear-fanning, Ads
Reading the Strib’s Business section yesterday, I was reminded of Sesame Street’s “One of these things is not like the other” sketch. Here’s the story, can you guess which one doesn’t belong? “Grounds for worry: Trouble’s brewing in the economy, if the news from the nation’s biggest coffee chains is any indication. No. 2 player …
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Say When
When was the last time you – yes, you, specifically – thought, “I sure would enjoy [insert favorite publication] more if they inserted more advertisements.” Thought so. A friendly reminder that readers, viewers, fans, etc aren’t the people pushing and demanding advertisements. “‘Deal with it’ doesn’t mean ‘Make better advertising’ or ‘Target your advertising more …
Rails Cheap, MySQL Expensive
This is an update to earlier post on Performance and MySQL Indexes. While 10-12 seconds per feed is an improvement, it’s completely unacceptable when we’re talking 2,000+ feeds (full parse would take 5.5 hours) and slow down the system to unusable. In an attempt to find the bottlenecks, I loaded up the query_analyzer plugin on …
China Restates Earnings
“…with the corrected China [Purchasing Power Parity] statistics, the whole question is moot. China is just not that big now and will not get that big any time soon.” – Albert Kiedel of the Carnegie Endowment Kiedel’s article put a number of things into perspective for me – namely why I hear ‘China, China, China’ …
If We Can’t Share Nothing
Hi. Howareyou? Whatsup? Nothing. Yaknow. PrettyCrappyOutToday TrafficWasHorrible How many times have you had that conversation? Today? Banality in less than 140 characters is the foundation of our social interaction. It safely builds the trust required for a longer, more engaging exchange. If we can’t share the meaningless, what can we share? “Part of the power …
Project Launch: Developers.Sun.com
The redesigned Developers.Sun.com, another of the Sun projects I’ve been involved on, launched today. Two things I’m real happy with; links to blogs, video, and other community spaces are at the core of the page, and a directory of development resources at the bottom of the page. The official announcement from Jill Welch, managing editor.
Garrick’s Feed Curator Project Exposed
Ed Kohler just broke the low security around my all-but-secret project: cullect.com. “To me, this looks like a community based RSS reader where you’ll be able to read RSS feeds that are recommended to you by your friends.” – Ed Kohler Ed, you’re close. More background on the project here. New screencasts forthcoming.
Tail-ing Remote Rails Production.log Locally
If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer wanting to keep an eye on what’s happening with your production apps, you already know Capistrano will do it for you: cap shell tail -f web/shared/log/production.log1 Thanks to John Nunemaker‘s comment at anodyne.ca 1. Your path may vary.
Leopard Installs Not Always Problem Free
After the customary until-you-cant-take-it-anymore 30-minute waiting period, I installed 10.5 Leopard on the Mac mini that serves my local network. The mini isn’t my primary work machine, and it’s regular duties are fairly straight forward: transport backups, be invisible. As such, the upgrade was quick and straight-forward (but I wasn’t really paying attention, I was …