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Speaking of Ben Evans and Amazon back in August 1 , when Amazon was the hot topic of discussion amongst the small circles we tend to frequent, he neatly and concisely explained many of the mysteries surrounding the company. For instance, why does Amazon turn nearly zero profit? And why, for crying out loud, do so many have such considerable faith in this curious company? ↩ This should give you a general idea as to how good I am at ke..
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From last month but no less applicable now, Benedict Evans takes a few moments to break down the core businesses of Apple, Amazon, and Google. And that’s all it took: a few moments. If only more “tech journalists” would read this before writing — or performing some semblance of the act — their next article. Permalink.
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Shai Ifrach spent the weekend fixing one of the harder Windows Phone issues we had, sometimes on some Windows Phone devices the UI would start with a black screen but never when connected to the debugger! Ugh. Turns out this is a race condition related to using the wrong lifecycle callback (which is used by all of MS’s demos)! Kudos to him because I spent just about ages trying to tackle that issue unsuccessfully, this should now ..
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Like most fun stories this one starts with getting drunk. One summer night I got very drunk at a party. In the morning I hated the hangover and myself. I wanted to try something new. I was going for my first internship the following week, travelling to California. Getting to a new place, I decided to try an experiment - try to make it until my birthday without drinking - month and a half on the dry. I didn’t. I gave in and watched Batman ....
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Video blogs, or vlogs, are becoming increasingly popular and if you have a decent following on Twitter/Facebook/etc then you probably also have a YouTube channel from which to pontificate. Vlogs are great. I get to know you a little better because I can hear your accent, the tone of your voice, and see all the non-verbal facial expressions that add so much to any communication. But there are several downsides, too.
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In the last twenty years there has been a lot of research in a subfield of machine learning called Bandit Learning. The name comes from the problem of being faced with a large sequence of slot machines (once called one-armed bandits) each with a potentially different payout scheme. The problems in this field all focus on one central question: If I have many available actions with uncertain outcomes, how should I act to maximize the quality ..
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In the last twenty years there has been a lot of research in a subfield of machine learning called Bandit Learning. The name comes from the problem of being faced with a large sequence of slot machines (once called one-armed bandits) each with a potentially different payout scheme. The problems in this field all focus on one central question: If I have many available actions with uncertain outcomes, how should I act to maximize the quality ..
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In the last twenty years there has been a lot of research in a subfield of machine learning called Bandit Learning. The name comes from the problem of being faced with a large sequence of slot machines (once called one-armed bandits) each with a potentially different payout scheme. The problems in this field all focus on one central question: If I have many available actions with uncertain outcomes, how should I act to maximize the quality ..
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About 5 months ago, I was asked to join a Ruby on Rails project. After a lot of thinking whether I should switch to a new language after programming in Java for about 8 years or not I decided to do so. I was really excited actually and I couldn’t wait to start learning the new stuff. Day one I had an introduction to the development environment. A text editor and a console. I said, “OK, this must be this guy’s thing, I’ll download an IDE”.....
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Amidst all the hubbub that invariably follows every Apple event as embargoes lift and reviews flood the internet, as writers formulate, present, and respond to thoughts and opinions regarding Apple’s latest moves, it’s easy to lose a diamond in the rough. The problem is further compounded when amongst other diamonds, to continue stretching this metaphor, such as John Siracusa’s famous Mavericks review . Such was the case when Stephen Hacke..
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I realize I have come late to the party, but after just two weeks that does not change the relevancy of John Gruber’s article written in the wake of Apple’s October iPad event. Many wrote about a single aspect: Marco chimed in on the presentation itself , and I devoted an entire article to the notion of an upcoming iPad Pro ; others, such as Jim Dalrymple , attempted the more monumental task of tackling the entire event; still others put....
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This completely blindsided me. I had the lack of foresight to uninstall the betas after Instapaper 5 hit the market, so I had no idea a revamped iPad app was in the works until coming across the announcement in my Twitter feed late yesterday evening. Thanks iOS 7’s automatic update feature, I got to experience Betaworks’ latest revision firsthand as soon as I opened the app; and as I said on Twitter , I really like the new design. The folk..
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When I started writing Need, Fashion, and Matt Alexander I began with the title “Harry Marks Interviews Matt Alexander on Need”. Those curious can look to the post’s URL for confirmation, which still reads as described despite the fact that I changed its title. I set out with such a headline intending to make a short congratulatory post linking to Harry Marks’ article Interview with Matt Alexander of Need ; however, ambition got th..
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Composer is amazing for pulling in packages, but what if you find a Gist that isn't Composer aware? Fear not, as Composer has the magical ability to pull in repositories not explicitly set up in Packagist by defining them in the "repositories" section. But what if you wanted to load a single class from a git gist? You can add the following repositories section to your composer.json file, adjusting name and url as necessary. The name s....
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Composer is amazing for pulling in packages, but what if you find a Gist that isn't Composer aware? Fear not, as Composer has the magical ability to pull in repositories not explicitly set up in Packagist by defining them in the "repositories" section. But what if you wanted to load a single class from a git gist? You can add the following repositories section to your composer.json file, adjusting name and url as necessary. The name s....
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Diagnosing buffer busy waits with the ash_wait_chains.sql script (v0.2)
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tanelpoder.com
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12 years ago
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eng
In my previous post ( Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Guide – Part 11: Complex Wait Chain Signature Analysis with ash_wait_chains.sql ) I introduced an experimental script for analysing performance from “top ASH wait chains” perspective. The early version (0.1) of the script didn’t have the ability to select a specific user (session), SQL or module/action performance data for analysis. I just hadn’t figured out how to write the SQL for th..
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Diagnosing buffer busy waits with the ash_wait_chains.sql script (v0.2)
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tanelpoder.com
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12 years ago
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eng
In my previous post ( Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Guide – Part 11: Complex Wait Chain Signature Analysis with ash_wait_chains.sql ) I introduced an experimental script for analysing performance from “top ASH wait chains” perspective. The early version (0.1) of the script didn’t have the ability to select a specific user (session), SQL or module/action performance data for analysis. I just hadn’t figured out how to write the SQL for th..
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For my next project, I was exploring the session storages for ExpressJS, and I found a question on StackOverflow, but I was frustrated with the accepted and 30 upvoted answer, which compares local in memory session store with remote session stores. The answer is very misleading, there is no chance that remote storage can beat local storage, even if the in-memory solution does O(n^9) calculations, it would be faster than going to web.
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In the works for nearly a year , Matt Alexander’s new startup Need addresses a fascinating deficiency of not just fashion, but any degree of concern with respect to one’s physical appearance all too prevalent in today’s society, especially amongst young people. At nineteen a young person myself, I speak from first-hand experience: you would not believe the things I see my peers wearing, especially on a college campus. I am not wholly exemp..
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How do we help big retailers be more responsive? Many of the retailers I spend time with want to be part of the pop-up culture. Their challenge is that they’ve spent 90 years building process and bureaucracy in hierarchical organisations that are very difficult to change. But they have to change – a consumer revolution is happening and the organisations that are standing still or not adapting are going out of business. That's a fact that is..
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Following Apple’s event last week and after I ordered a top of the line 15“ Retina MacBook Pro, I sat down to read John Siracusa’s famous Mavericks review . I started last year’s Lion review with good intentions, but without any incentive to finish I only read a few pages. This year though, with a shiny new Mac already on its way from China, I finally had more of a reason to persevere than simply to say that I had. Surprisingly, that gra..
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Greg 1.0 Born in the Bronx. Grew up in upper middle class suburban New Jersey. College at Virginia Tech: went in a Computer Science major, came out with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies. College summers working at Walt Disney World, first at Cosmic Ray's Starlight Cafe
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Hi there, I hope you enjoyed my “ Pushing Puppet (to its limit)” talk and demos from Puppet Camp D.C., LISA 2013 . As requested, I’ve posted the code and slides. Here is the code: https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-pushing This module will require three modules as dependencies. The dependencies are: My Puppet-Common module https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-common My Puppet-Runonce module https://github.com/purpleid..
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Hi there, I hope you enjoyed my “ Pushing Puppet (to its limit)” talk and demos from Puppet Camp D.C., LISA 2013 . As requested, I’ve posted the code and slides. Here is the code: https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-pushing This module will require three modules as dependencies. The dependencies are: My Puppet-Common module https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-common My Puppet-Runonce module https://github.com/purpleid..
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XML libraries in Java is a minefield. The amount of code required to manipulate and read XML is staggering, the risk of getting class path problems with different libraries is substantial and the handling of namespaces opens for a lot of confusion and errors. The worst thing is that the situation doesn’t seem to improve. A colleague made me aware of the JOOX library some time back. It’s a very good attempt to patch these problems.
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I’m here at LISA 2013 at the Gluster Community Day . I’ve been asked by Joe Brockmeier to give a little recap about what’s been going on. So here it is! Wesley Duffee-Braun started off with a nice overview talk about GlusterFS . The great thing about his talk was that he gave a live demo, running on virtual machines, on his laptop. If you’re a new GlusterFS user, this is good exposure to help you get started. He also has the nicest ..
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I’m here at LISA 2013 at the Gluster Community Day . I’ve been asked by Joe Brockmeier to give a little recap about what’s been going on. So here it is! Wesley Duffee-Braun started off with a nice overview talk about GlusterFS . The great thing about his talk was that he gave a live demo, running on virtual machines, on his laptop. If you’re a new GlusterFS user, this is good exposure to help you get started. He also has the nicest ..
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Linux is unique to Windows in many ways, and writing programs in Linux is no exception. The use of standard out, standard err and null devices is not only a good idea but it’s the law. If your programs are going to be logging information, it is best to follow the destination conventions. This way your programs will work with all of the Mac/Linux tooling and hosted environments. Go has a package in the standard library called log and a ..
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Visualising data provides clarity, increases engagement and delivers unexpected insights. A rapid and adaptive approach to building visualisations can help you realise value with a minimal investment. Sharing what we’ve learned about data visualisation
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Expanding the Leadership Presence of Women at Tech Conferences: 3 Ideas
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www.thoughtworks.com
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12 years ago
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eng
A veteran conference speaker and CTO reflects on how organizers can get more speaking proposals from women.
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The video of the LTS talk is now live, unfortunately during the talk we had audio issues due to the large number of viewers and had to turn off the camera. The picture that remains for the rest of the slides is a freeze frame of me frowning over not turning the camera sooner. We are gearing up for some major updates and new features in the coming weeks and are now in the process of narrowing down the requirements for Codename One 2.0 (yes..
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Javascript Allongé @raganwald is one of the more refreshing coding books I have read in a big while. Usually when I face a programming language book, I skip the beginner chapters (if I already know the language, of course) and go directly for the juicy ones, but with this one I tried to follow it from end to end because I read some comments on twitter telling that the way basics are explained, become a really solid base for the language,....
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Prefer double quotes if escaping single quotes. Prefer string interpolation over join. Eg. "'%s'" % member_default. Prefer double underscore for privates. Prefer with statement to implicitly close file. with open(path, 'r') as text_file: text = text_file.read() Prefer list comprehensions to filter. Prefer using separate modules over classes if only using for separation. Keep in mind: "eafp vs lbyl" (ie. just let it throw). Prefer except....
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Disruptive Hiring: Empowering Devs to Move Beyond the Job Description
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www.thoughtworks.com
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12 years ago
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eng
The phrase, “we hire really talented people,” is the same line given by any software company these days who is serious about producing great software. I have seen, firsthand, that talent does not necessarily have an Ivy League background or a 4.0 GPA. Creativity and innovation is fostered in an environment where people are able to be their authentic selves, work in a culture that is a “safe place” for everyone, are collaborative, are transp..
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I’m speaking at LISA 2013 , the “Large Installation System Administration” conference. This conference runs all week in Washington . I’ll be giving two talks during the week, and attending at least one BOF. My first talk is on Monday during the Gluster Community Day . I’ll be speaking about puppet-gluster , and giving a live demo. I’ll be showing some new features too. If you’d like to talk more about puppet-gluster, or want to attend..
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I’m speaking at LISA 2013 , the “Large Installation System Administration” conference. This conference runs all week in Washington . I’ll be giving two talks during the week, and attending at least one BOF. My first talk is on Monday during the Gluster Community Day . I’ll be speaking about puppet-gluster , and giving a live demo. I’ll be showing some new features too. If you’d like to talk more about puppet-gluster, or want to attend..
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Today I want to present my Tiny Tiny RSS -installation, running on my own VPS . tt-rss is “an open source web-based news feed ( RSS /Atom) reader and aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible.” Preface Update: Since 30.01.2015 the installation and update-mechanism switched to git . I (hopefully) updated the post accordingly. I’m r....
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