Jeremy Zawodny's blog
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/
Random thoughts on technology, aviation, and life in general...
Last checked about 11 hours ago.
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post frequency (last month)
latest 15 posts
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6.2Don't Bet on Moore Saving Your Ass
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5.7Twitter as a Dynamic DNS Service
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2.9Talk Announcement: MySQL and Search at Craigslist
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7.4The New MySQL Landscape
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2.5My Dumb Cat Video
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5.5gzip and hard links. I don't get it.
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1.6Opa! is Good Greek Food in Willow Glen
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5.9Bash Trick: Watching Multiple Background Jobs
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6.7TV Watching and Happiness
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7.1Asynchronous MySQL Client in Perl
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5.5Post-Election Thoughts: Equal but Not
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6.0Kick Ass Fonts in Ubuntu: 3 Easy Steps
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2.9Random Updates
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6.3Yahoo! Search Taste Test
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5.2Great HTPC Wireless Keyboard: Adesso WKB-4000US
Wednesday January 7th, 2009
6.2
Don't Bet on Moore Saving Your Ass
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 2 days ago,
0 comments 
Over on the 37signals blog, DHH writes Mr. Moore gets to punt on sharding. His argument is basically that if you continually delay fixing your data storage and retrieval layer, Moore's Law will be there to save our ass--over and over again. Bzzzt. Wrong answer. Depending on future improvements to fix your own bad planning is a risky way to build an on-line service--especially one you expect to grow and charge money for. It's easy to forget history in this...
Tuesday December 30th, 2008
5.7
Twitter as a Dynamic DNS Service
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 10 days ago,
0 comments
I occasionally wish to know the IP address of my home Cable Modem or DSL connection but don't really care if it's available in DNS or not. It occurred to me that if I could programmatically detect the IP change, I'd be able to notify myself via Twitter. At first, I wanted a simple web service that'd tell me my IP address--something like WhatIsMyIP.com but an API suitable for simple scripting. Not finding anything, I created this massive PHP script...
Friday December 19th, 2008
2.9
Talk Announcement: MySQL and Search at Craigslist
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 21 days ago,
0 comments
I recently learned that my talk has been accepted for the 2009 MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. It is currently scheduled for Tuesday the 21st and titled MySQL and Search at Craigslist. Here's the abstract (which I've promised to expand upon soon): Millions of people search for things every day on craigslist: tickets, cars, garage sales, jobs, events, and so on. This talk will look at the recent evolution of database and search architecture at Craigslist, including performance, caching,...
Monday December 8th, 2008
7.4
The New MySQL Landscape
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 1 month ago,
0 comments
Interesting things are afoot in the MySQL world. You see, it used to be that the MySQL world consisted of about 20-40 employees of MySQL AB (this funny distributed Sweedish company that built and supported the open source MySQL database server), a tiny handful of MySQL mailing lists, and large databases were counted in gigabytes not terabytes. A Pentium III was still a decent server. Replication was a new feature! Hey, anyone remember the Gemini storage engine? :-) How times...
Friday December 5th, 2008
2.5
My Dumb Cat Video
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 1 month ago,
0 comments
It's Friday and this is the Internet, so I present to you Cats Eating Chicken, or "My Dumb Cat Video" (embedded below too). The background is that we had a bit of leftover grilled chicken the other night and decided to bust it up and feed it to the cats. Amusingly, they all got together to partake of the feast, but a couple of them got curious about the camera too. Both Timmy (white and grey) and Thunder (mostly grey)...
Wednesday December 3rd, 2008
5.5
gzip and hard links. I don't get it.
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 1 month ago,
0 comments
I recently was looking to make compressed backups of some files that exist in a tree that's actually a set of hard links (rsnapshot or rsnap style) to a canonical set of files. In other words, I have a data directory and a data.previous directory. I would like to make a backup of the stuff in data.previous, most of the files being unchanged from data. And I'd like to do this without using lots of disk space. The funny thing...
Sunday November 23rd, 2008
1.6
Opa! is Good Greek Food in Willow Glen
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 1 month ago,
0 comments
A month or so ago, the long under-construction Opa! opened its doors on Lincoln Ave in downtown Willow Glen. Wanting to try it for a while, we walked down on Friday night for dinner. And we were not disappointed. The Good The menu is straightforward and has a good variety of Greek food. We ordered the Keftedes (Greek Meatballs) as an appetizer. The dish consisted of two well prepared meatballs and an excellent sauce. For the main courses, we selected...
Friday November 21st, 2008
5.9
Bash Trick: Watching Multiple Background Jobs
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 1 month ago,
0 comments
I recently had a need to add some error checking to a bash script that runs multiple copies of a Perl script in parallel to better utilize a multi-core server. I wanted a way to run these four processes in the background and gather up their exit values. Then, if any of them failed, I'd prematurely exit the bash script and report the error. After a bit of reading bash docs, I came across some built-ins that I hadn't previously...
Monday November 17th, 2008
6.7
TV Watching and Happiness
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 1 month ago,
0 comments
In one of those "well, duh!" moments the other day, I came across a headline on Slashdot that said Unhappy People Watch More TV. Given that I mostly stopped watching TV quite some time ago and consider it to be one of the more rude devices in our culture, I clicked thru to read about how others have discovered what I'd already guessed was true... A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch...
Friday November 14th, 2008
7.1
Asynchronous MySQL Client in Perl
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 1 month ago,
0 comments
I recently found myself wishing for an async library for MySQL. My goal is to be able to fire off queries to a group of federated servers in parallel and aggregate the results in my code. With the standard client (DBD::mysql), I'd have to query the servers one at a time. If there are 10 servers and each query takes 0.5 seconds, my code would stall for 5 seconds. But by using an async library, I could fire off all...
Thursday November 13th, 2008
5.5
Post-Election Thoughts: Equal but Not
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 1 month ago,
0 comments
I'm happy that Barack Obama won the election. I think it's time to stir things up a bit. What really bothers me is that fact that we still don't have equal voting in this country. We certainly have the technology to share vote counts quickly and efficiently, so who not just do that? Why screw around with an electoral college anymore? It seems disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst to call Obama's victory a "landslide" when the...
Wednesday October 22nd, 2008
6.0
Kick Ass Fonts in Ubuntu: 3 Easy Steps
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 2 months ago,
0 comments
A few days ago I made yet another tweak to my Ubuntu laptop to make the fonts look a little better. The result is that I'm now quite happy--impressed even. Here are the three things I've done to make my day-to-day work easy on the eye. First, enable subpixel smoothing in the System > Appearance control panel. For a long time that's all I had done was was reasonably happy. Things looked okay but not great. But I used GNU...
2.9
Random Updates
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 2 months ago,
0 comments
I've got several random things to say to the interwebs but none of them merit a blog post individually... First off, I love data. But I hate the fact that the spreadsheet in OpenOffice 2.x and Gnumeric both have row limits of 65,536. I don't know who missed the boat on 32 and 64 bit CPUs, but it's rather annoying! And, yes, twitter people, I know that 65,536 is a 16 bit limit--not 8. I was trying to make a...
Wednesday October 15th, 2008
6.3
Yahoo! Search Taste Test
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 2 months ago,
0 comments
In today's coverage of the new Yahoo! Search radio advertisements, Erick Schonfeld at TechCruch says: So can an advertising campaign change any of that? Search is not like a soft drink. People use the search engine that they think can do the best job in helping them find things. Now, maybe Google has brainwashed all of us to believe that it does indeed produce more relevant results. And in a blind taste-test more people might choose Yahoo's results. But if...
Wednesday October 8th, 2008
5.2
Great HTPC Wireless Keyboard: Adesso WKB-4000US
From Jeremy Zawodny's blog, 3 months ago,
0 comments
A few weeks ago I asked for HTPC Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Recommendations and got some excellent suggestions. After reading reviews on-line and checking out the various specs, I settled on the Adesso WKB-4000US. I decided on this keyboard partly because I've liked previous Adesso keyboards and partly because it seemed to be the right combination of price, size, and range for our use. I was not disappointed. The keyboard feels very solid--not cheap at all. Range is excellent and...