Recent Technology

• Time Machine vs. ZFS + rsync

  Update: I actually got the fslogger thing at the end of this entry working so I can do incremental backups. Not really a product yet but it isn’t hard to do. Here is the super rough version of it.
  I can’t stand inefficiency. Time Machine is fundamentally a very inefficient mechanism for backing [...]

  October 30th, 2008

• Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) launch today

  Since I moved into the platform group at the beginning of the year I had worked with the YAP and YQL teams to help them define their strategy and direction but without being part of the day-to-day operations. In August, the head of the Y!OS project asked me to step in to take them [...]

  October 28th, 2008

• 2008 Olympic Medal Counts by Population

  There are obviously a lot of ways to measure how well a country did at the Olympics. This post takes a view that we should look at how many people the country had to draw on in order to send the athletes to China to compete. There are a lot of problems with this [...]

  August 24th, 2008

• Yuil is dead! 4hoursearch is now online.

  As this was really just a demonstration of the power of Yahoo! BOSS, I have brought the site back as a demonstration site. Additionally, Yahoo! is making the source code to the new site available so anyone with a knack for Python, HTML and CSS can take a swipe at making a better search experience. [...]

  August 1st, 2008

• Yahoo! BOSS is easy — meet Yuil

  Updated Yet Again: Relaunched as 4hoursearch including the source code. See this blog entry.
  Updated Again: Yuil is dead. However, you can always get the same great search results here.
  Updated: Using Glue I was able to add some simple category functionality.
  I’m sure everyone saw the recent announcement of a new search engine, Cuil. I thought [...]

  July 30th, 2008

• Better Javadoc results using SearchMonkey

  When you are searching for things like java.util.HashMap one of the issues that you run into is that it will give you the result with the highest rank which more often than not is the 1.4.2 version of the documentation.  I’ve moved on from that version of Java and would much rather see results for [...]

  May 19th, 2008

• Idiomatic Python?

  I’ve been working my way through compiling Java into Python code but the Python back end of my isn’t that good (my brain). I would call my stage of Python development the “magic incantation” stage. This is the stage where you really aren’t comfortable yet with the way things work in a new [...]

  April 23rd, 2008

• Tivo targeted advertising

  .flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
  .flickr-yourcomment { }
  .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
  .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

  Tivo targeted advertising, originally uploaded by Sam Pullara.

  This looks like it might be both effective and also something that TV advertisers would like to buy.

  April 23rd, 2008

• Using Google App Engine to Extend Yahoo! Pipes

  Update: A commenter pointed out that you can
  from django.utils import simplejson
  instead of including it. Makes this even easier.
  Yahoo! Pipes has always been a great tool for manipulating data but often you have to go to great contortions to get it to do what you want because of its very simple data flow programming [...]

  April 13th, 2008

• JPA 2.0 with Criteria

  (see: JSR 317 Persistently Improving)
  I love the idea of adding a criteria API to JPA, the only thing I hope that they do differently than Hibernate is to implement that API in addition to string queries.  In Gauntlet we had issues where we wanted to use EJB-QL for selecting the right data and then a criteria-like [...]

  March 15th, 2008