Open Query blog

“This email already isn’t using, as far as something of necessity you have need of, so hypotenuse Your enamel on my new email address: …” /me sighs

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“Pageviews per kilowatt-hour (kWh)” Noted by Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), they keep getting kicked out of colocation sites. I’ve heard this a lot lately, the biggest headache at highly scaled sites is the power consumption of all the server hardware. Perhaps it’s simply a side-effect of the horizontal scaling (scale-out): lots of cheaper machines, rather than [...]

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This morning’s elevator talk snippet (at OSCON) “So, which database do you use?” “Yes.” Turns out this company uses pretty much (each where appropriate) all – except Sybase, for whatever reason… It was someone from whitepages.com. Right now I’m in Tim O’Reilly’s executive briefing which is a new separate event at OSCON. The first panel [...]

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I’m scribbling this while temporarily stranded in Vancouver, Washington. The train had electric trouble so the aircon and toilets didn’t work (and it’s quite a hot day). Now go on train-sceptics, have your laugh! But I’ve seen similar stuff happen in other countries, and with airlines also. I’m quite entertained here, I like watching people [...]

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Pia Waugh recently wrote an excellent article on economic and social reasons for using FOSS. It’s for Australia, but of course it applies almost everywhere. You may find it useful! As Pia says, “getting the right information to the right people in the right order to get a right outcome.” or as I generally note, [...]

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Yes, apparently it’s quite unusual to use a train in the US. But consider this… for a trip of upto a few hours, it might even be faster if you take into account having to be at the airport early, etc. Much less hassle, more seat space, and with a business class seat you even [...]

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You’re probably all aware of my opinion regarding software patents… apart from all the other arguments against, purely looking at “time to market” and effective use of limited resources, it makes no business sense spendingwasting time on software patents. Just be faster. I heard the following recently, and I think it’s an interesting observation: An [...]

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linux.conf.au is one of the best technical Open Source conferences on the planet (not just Linux). Speakers such as Andrew Tridgell, Alan Cox, Eben Moglen and Van Jacobson are there. Even Linus sometimes shows up. But apart from those famous faces, there are so many excellent people there every year – it’s fantastic. Plenty of [...]

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Last week I scribled some thoughts on presentation slides, and got some very good comments. Thanks! One comment referred to Guy Kawasaki and something he wrote blogged last year: The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. [...]

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