John Adams’ views on emerging technologies, software engineering, and various hacks
Apple’s new iPhone4 has created quite a stir, even though consumers are paying slightly more for the same phone with a slightly better display, dual (improved) cameras, and flash. I’m sure by now you know about the antenna problems and the lame way that apple chose to fix it, but I wanted one of these [...]
There was an excellent article in the register about me and my session yesterday at Web 2.0 Expo on Scaling Twitter:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/04/twitter_and_the_end_of_the_sysadmin_as_we_know_it/
The author captures many of my points well, and applauds us for our open sourcing of our back-end infrastructure.
The talk is located right here on slideshare, if you’d like to view it.
Here’s two scripts you can run if you have a 3G card, and a few friends stuck in the hotel room with you who want WiFi.
First, turn your laptop into an access point. These scripts work on MacOS X running 10.5.4 or better — good luck!
I call this script ‘make-me-an-access-point.sh’:
#!/bin/sh
#Edit your /etc/rc.conf to set [...]
Frequently you want to predict when things are going to happen, and if it’s not the end of the world, it might be something occurring a bit sooner, such as your disk filling up.
First capture some data, with cron. We’re going to capture the free space in our database, once a day, so we’ll put [...]
Image by davidwatts1978 via Flickr
Normally I don’t re-post Twitter articles here but this one on the New York magazine was wistful, fair, balanced, and gave a good representation of what it’s like to work here.
The reporter was in the office on the very day the US Airways flight crashed into the Hudson, and he [...]
Image via Wikipedia
Since people started using virtual hosts by name with Apache HTTPD and other web servers, it has become very difficult to figure out which virtual hosts live on a single IP, if all you have is the IP address.
Have a look at the Robtex Internet Swiss Army Knife. It solves this problem, and [...]
Image via Wikipedia
Lately I’ve been examining the actual performance charastics of wireless networking devices.
I recently purchased a Netgear WNR3500, and testing with iperf tells me that I see a maximum of 35Mbit/s. Many commenters have written in to ask me to try forcing the 802.11 connection to 802.11g, so I did that by installing my [...]
It goes without saying that tomorrow is one of the most important days in our country’s history. When you go to the polls, do everything you can to ensure that your vote is counted.
If you’re in California, vote No On 8. It brings hate crime directly into the state’s constitution.
In San Francisco, vote Yes on K. [...]
Tag Galaxy is a 2008 thesis project from Steven Wood at the University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg. It allows you to explore flickr tags while looking at solar systems that represent photos and related tags.
Check it out at http://www.taggalaxy.de
For the last five years I’ve used Macjournal in one edition or the other (professional, standard, and the original free edition) from Mariner Software. I just dropped $34 on the new version, primarily because of it’s auto-encryption feature.
It’s become my repository for all things of interest at work, meetings, and conferences. When I left my [...]
