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I coded all morning in a determined effort to finish a long-standing project I intend to write about soon. Although I planned to spend only a short while on this before moving to other things, I ended up using the majority of my afternoon to finally, after months of work, just about make this script feature-complete. It was not something I had planned to do, nor was it particularly enjoyable — in fact, at times I grew quite frustrated with ..
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A remarkably short list for you this week, if it even deserves such a title as “list” with only two members. But, nevertheless, it does contain the two best podcast episodes I encountered over the last seven days. So enjoy, and maybe this weekend spend a little less time with headphones in your ears. Permalink.
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chmod [a]bcd bit scope description a sticky:1, setgid:2, setuid:4 (optional, default: 0) b owner x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7 c group x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7 d everyone x:1/w:2/r:4 - xw:3/xr:5/wr:6/xwr:7 Note: only file/dir owner can chmod it Note: scripts need both x and r permissions to execute (that’s because scripts are read into interpreter) (only r is enough if ran via ruby script.rb, sh s....
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Warning: another technical post.I wrote this cover letter many years ago, when I wanted to get accepted to the Matzov unit of the Israeli Defense Force (in Israeli, every male is conscripted for three years at age 18, and I wanted to put my skills to good use.) Like the picture above, it can be […]
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We neglected to mention in our last post about the new graphics pipeline that it was authored by Steve Hannah who did a splendid job there! He just updated the shaders for the implementation to be far more efficient bringing performance back to the current levels. The true value of this architecture is that now we will be able to manipulate shaders for very complex effects at relatively low cost.
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Today I put the first item (a consumable lettuce leaf) into Gastropoda. The items The lettuce leaf was to be the first food item in Gastropoda. However, before I could make the leaf itself I had to make the food system, which I hadn’t yet planned out in great detail. Four new tables were involved:
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By far and away the best article from Ben Thompson in quite some time, reminiscent of his past three-part series on the future of news and newspapers . I have paid too little attention to this issue to have formed any sort of opinion on it, but based on this piece I would agree with Ben: it seems like book publishers made a ill-fated deal, Amazon has come to collect, and it’s far too late to go back on it now. Permalink.
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America's Last King of Cast Iron Finds His Time Has Come Again
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www.businessweek.com
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12 years ago
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eng
If you have never tried cooking with cast iron, you and everyone that has ever eaten with you are missing out: with the exception of boiling water, every single dish you can think of cooked with a cast iron skillet or Dutch oven turns out better than when made with a utensil of inferior materials, and everything is inferior to cast iron when it comes to cooking. Forget stainless steel, non-stick, and everything else: nothing holds a candle ..
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Building Products at SoundCloud—Part III: Microservices in Scala and Finagle
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developers.soundcloud.com
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12 years ago
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eng
In the first two parts of this series, we talked about how SoundCloud started breaking away from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application into…
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Building Products at SoundCloud—Part III: Microservices in Scala and Finagle
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developers.soundcloud.com
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12 years ago
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eng
In the first two parts of this series, we talked about how SoundCloud started breaking away from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application into…
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In November last year, I started developing an infrastructure that would allow us to collect, store, search and retrieve high volume data…
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This article reminds of Rocky IV, when Rocky Balboa prepared to fight on behalf of the U.S. against The USSR’s Ivan Drago by running in the snow, doing push-ups, and lifting bundles of rocks while his opponent used steroids and the most advanced training practices. Yet in the end, Rocky still won: hard, grueling exercises, both then and now, prevailed over the finicky, artisanal workouts that have become so popular as of late. If you have n..
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Building Products at SoundCloud—Part II: Breaking the Monolith
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developers.soundcloud.com
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12 years ago
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eng
In the previous post, we talked about how we enabled our teams to build microservices in Scala, Clojure, and JRuby without coupling them…
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Building Products at SoundCloud—Part II: Breaking the Monolith
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developers.soundcloud.com
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12 years ago
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eng
In the previous post, we talked about how we enabled our teams to build microservices in Scala, Clojure, and JRuby without coupling them…
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For those of us who are not familiar with the Theory of Constraints, in simple terms it talks about identifying and removing bottlenecks from environments while trying to take an overall view of the system rather than optimize locally. Local optimization is something we do in everyday life. I would rather not have garbage on my doorstep, but its alright if its on my neighbor’s, which still makes the neighborhood, and the city, stink.
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I’m too sleepy to do any proper work on Gastropoda today. I was hoping to implement the first food item, but yeah…that’s not happening. This morning I decided to head to the office early to get some work done on a largeish task while I had some distraction-free time. I did get a lot done, but waking up at 4am also meant that I was completely beat by about 1. Now I’m in bed, half asleep, wishing someone would bring me some cheese.
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Earlier this week, AdRoll hosted a group of Hadoop users and developers for their monthly meetup . A member of our data team presented AdRoll’s infrastructure and described how we combine Hadoop with Storm and HBase to achieve both high accuracy and low latency. Here are the slides from that talk.
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A few days ago I asked if those who speak out critically of the attention WWDC garners changed their opinions with last week’s impressive roster of announcements; looks like it changed at least one person’s mind, and rightfully so. Adam’s more favorable opinion of WWDC is not the only noteworthy aspect of this piece, however: I believe he hit the nail squarely on the head when describing Apple’s current and future relationship with Google....
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git is a fantastic choice for tracking the evolution of your code base and to collaborate efficiently with your peers. But what happens when the repository you want to track is really huge? via How to handle big repositories with git – Atlassian Blogs .
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Building Products at SoundCloud —Part I: Dealing with the Monolith
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developers.soundcloud.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Most of SoundCloud’s products are written in Scala, Clojure, or JRuby. This wasn’t always the case. Like other start-ups, SoundCloud was…
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Building Products at SoundCloud —Part I: Dealing with the Monolith
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developers.soundcloud.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Most of SoundCloud’s products are written in Scala, Clojure, or JRuby. This wasn’t always the case. Like other start-ups, SoundCloud was…
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After posting a Rust translation of some k -nearest neighbour code , I got a few comments asking “how would you handle errors if you wanted to?”. This is the perfect chance to briefly demonstrate a few idioms. See my previous post for context and the original code; like with the code in that post, this code compiles with rustc 0.11.0-pre-nightly (e55f64f 2014-06-09 01:11:58 -0700) What type of error handling to use? The “canonic....
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When I tell you a story of a visually impaired man lost in a hotel without braille signage, or one of a woman in a wheelchair unable to enter a local restaurant or use their bathroom, the reaction is predictable. You recognize it as unfair, wrong — not just because it's illegal, but because access is a basic human right. We don't think about the Web this way. We should. These same people with disabilities — people who use keyboards for navi..
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The Gigant Awoke: He'll be Watching During the World Cup
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www.thoughtworks.com
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12 years ago
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eng
On May 12 a colleague sent an email mentioning the #VaiMudarNaCopa ("#It'sGoingToChangeInTheWorldCup) Hackaton, an initiative created by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The email asked participants to create either web or mobile apps that would support peaceful and democratic protest movements during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil.
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I believe that the Testing Pyramid is one of the best analogies to help a team develop a strategy for writing tests in a reliable and scalable manner. I have used it many times, and have found its application to be immensely helpful.
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Over the past few years I’ve noticed a race towards hi-fi prototyping. In addition to more and more designers picking up HTML, CSS and JavaScript, software companies have been working hard to lower the barrier to entry. With tools like Axure or iRise almost anyone with an eye for design can pull together near-real functional prototypes.
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git is a fantastic choice for tracking the evolution of your code base and to collaborate efficiently with your peers. But what happens when the repository you want to track is really huge? via How to handle big repositories with git – Atlassian Blogs .
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I’ve decided that it’s about time to start recording event histories for snails. I keep going back to the database and checking which event ran on which snail by IDs and such and it’s getting to be a hassle. I’d rather just be able to go to the snail’s profile page and see all the important stuff that’s happened to it. Since this was always meant to be a feature anyway, I figured I may as well do it now.
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In my voyages around the internet, I came across a pair of blog posts which compare the implementation of a k -nearest neighbour ( k -NN) classifier in F# and OCaml. I couldn’t resist writing the code into Rust to see how it fared. Rust is a memory-safe systems language under heavy development; this code compiles with the latest nightly (as of 2014-06-10 12:00 UTC), specifically rustc 0.11.0-pre-nightly (e55f64f 2014-06-09 01:11:....
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Changing the Face of IT: 5 Talks Accepted at Grace Hopper
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www.thoughtworks.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Technology (GHC) is an amazing gathering of almost ~5,000 technologists (90% identify as female) ranging from college students to professionals to professors. We have chosen to support this conference for the past 8 years, since the Anita Borg Institute’s mission clearly aligns with our values and our own mission to advocate on behalf of women in this industry.
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Finally the new graphics pipeline is starting to trickle into the JavaSE port and the iOS port & once we iron those two out it should make its way into the Android port. With this in place we are finally at a point of functionality similar to JavaFX but without the overhead and performance implications that FX carries with it. The new pipeline includes new API’s for shapes, affine/perspective transforms and more. Notice that unless you ..
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A few days ago, shortly after watching the WWDC keynote, I made a short quip on Twitter that went completely unnoticed at the time: “Posit: Apple doesn’t need to build low-end phones: it has Android.” I expected to get some pushback on that statement, and so partly because I did not and partly because I believe it an observation worth exploring, I have decided to expand upon it today. Permalink.
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Alright Internet, we need to talk. You've grown up quite a bit over the last several years, but I've never taken the time to have thetalk with you. You know the one. The safe passwords talk. Your requirements for a minimum length, and a diversity of characters in passwords made many classes of brute force attack more difficult. You've gotten a bit carried away though, it seems. You're actually making the internet a more untrustable place.
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Query an NTP server from Python This code has been updated to support Python 3. Thanks to @MarqueIV for noticing that it needed updating. I came across a need to query an NTP server to get the current time from a python script. There are some great python modules you can install which will take care of the heavy lifting (one great one is ntplib), but I wanted to be able to do these NTP queries without requiring the host to install 3rd party..
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There has been a lot of coverage recently about a chat-bot “ Eugene Goostman ” passing a variance of the Turing test by convincing 30% of the testers that it was indeed a human by posing as Ukrainian 13 year old boy (to make misspellings and grammar mistakes forgivable I suppose). Naturally I had to give it a try and frankly I can’t see how something like this could convince anyone that its a living human being. I asked a few questions su..
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In the 1980s, email remained a luxury for a small number of larger organizations and universities. Mobile email did not exist. Instead, pagers and cellular telephones were the primary tools for mobile communication. However, in the early 1990s, email rose to prominence with the commercialization of the Internet. Although early smartphones did exist at this time (e.g. IBM’s Simon), email was not considered a mobile technology. But by the ..
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In the 1980s, email remained a luxury for a small number of larger organizations and universities. Mobile email did not exist. Instead, pagers and cellular telephones were the primary tools for mobile communication. However, in the early 1990s, email rose to prominence with the commercialization of the Internet. Although early smartphones did exist at this time (e.g. IBM’s Simon), email was not considered a mobile technology. But by the ..
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Chris DeLeon of HobbyGameDev has written a post all about the importance of starting simple in game development , and of picking projects that make you reach as opposed to scramble in terms of their complexity versus your current skillset.
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