Playing with Scratch
Amy has been interested in creating her own video game for a while now, so I started looking for easy ways to get an eight-year-old started with programming. It quickly became clear that Scratch was...
View ArticleThe Future of Storage for Big Data
I probably shouldn’t post this. It’s unduly inflammatory in general, and unnecessarily insulting to the HDFS developers in particular. It will probably alienate some people, deepening divisions that...
View ArticleThoughts on Multitasking
A lot of people, especially in the geek community, have historically taken pride in their ability to multi-task. More recently, a lot of research has shown that multi-tasking is less effective than...
View ArticleWhy I Was Late To Work
I’ve been working almost entirely from home since March, mostly so that I can be home in case Amy needs something and Cindy is unavailable due to her sleep issues. On most days I also get to save an...
View ArticlePatch Based Filesystem
Even when I’m happy with my current project, I often like to think about alternative solutions to the same basic set of distributed-data problems that are my area of expertise. So it is with GlusterFS....
View ArticleConfessions of a MOO Programmer
Most people nowadays seem to learn about object-oriented programming via Python or Ruby. Before that it was C++ or Java, and before that Smalltalk or (some flavor of) LISP. My first exposure to...
View ArticleGluster Acquisition
For some pretty obvious reasons, everybody’s asking me about this already and will probably continue to do so, so I might as well get some thoughts written down in semi-coherent form. First, though,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
And Now For Something Totally Random
I was talking about an XKCD comic with my wife, and realized I could do a little experiment myself. Because I’m lazy, I didn’t install gnuplot on my Mac but instead searched for an online graph...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Efficiency, Performance, and Locality
While it might have been overshadowed by events on my other blog, my previous post on Solid State Silliness did lead to some interesting conversations. I’ve been meaning to clarify some of the...
View ArticleSolid State Silliness
Apparently Artur Bergman did a very popular talk about SSDs recently. It’s all over my Twitter feed, and led to a pretty interesting discussion at High Scalability. I’m going to expand a little on what...
View Article
