-
Double NAT, 40 Terabytes, and a Christmas Miracle
I spent my Christmas downtime replacing a fragile, port-forwarded network with a resilient Tailscale mesh. I managed to overcome double NAT headaches to sync Synology units peer-to-peer, fixed the inevitable MTU “black holes,” and automated the DSM 7 sandboxing hurdles to build a private, encrypted family network.
-
“Sam Walton: Made In America” by Sam Walton
I’ve recently finished a fascinating book on the history of Walmart, as told by its founder, Sam Walton. Written in the last year before he died in 1992. At that time Walmart was a $53billion turnover company, and for some context, if you had bought $100 shares at its initial IPO in the early 1970’s, they would be worth $3.8million today (the shares split so many times over the years).…
-
“Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think” by: Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier
This book was recommended to me by a colleague and after a few days it was read cover-2-cover and only now am I reflecting back on its message. First thing, the title is completely misleading. Yes the authors talk a lot about “big data”, but that I feel misses the message of the book as a whole, which is the historical look at how data has shaped our society and…
-
Yahoo ‘to buy Tumblr for $1.1bn’
Yahoo’s board has approved a deal to buy New York-based blogging service Tumblr for $1.1bn (£725m), US media reports say. The acquisition is expected to be announced as early as Monday. Once more I have done it again; signed up for a service and in a matter of days learn it is to be acquired. I did the precise thing with posterous just before Twitter purchased them and ran it…
-
NetworkSolutions – is there any real point of them?
I have been a loyal user of NetworkSolutions for near on 10 years. At my usage peak I had well over a 100 domains managed through them. However, of late I have been slowly transferring blocks of them over to GoDaddy. Why? Simple. Their user interface is an abortion of Web2,0 magnitude. Too many upsells, too confusing, most importantly, it doesn’t work half the time! Couple all of that with…
-
Free Yourself from Conventional Thinking
The first step is to consider the way you have always done business — and stop. Failing to do so not only prevents truly innovative thinking; it also ensures failure. An excellent piece on what it means to break away from the conventional wisdom and stop repeating the same tasks. If your company tells you that they will get it next year and this year it’s too late, then…
-
patrickborn: Fractured Prune Donuts #lancaster #donuts #powerrings Lancaster, PA 3 out of 5 on the donut scale One of our chaps brought in 3 boxes of wonderful doughnuts which is just the sort of thing you need to power through the mornings worth of meetings. Development is not always cutting code.
-
Dying Careers and their alternatives
http://education.yahoo.net/articles/careers_dead_by_2020.htm?kid=1LFZ5 Fascinating list this, particular when they advise that instead of going into semi-conductors you may want to look at Database Administration instead. Where is the relationship to semi-conductors? You may as well said “Sheep Herding” – which incidentally is my own pipe-dream should this computer game finish. Dying Careers and their alternatives
-
Tumblr Engineering: Open Source – Memcache Top
mobocracy: We rely on memcache pretty heavily at Tumblr, with over 10TB of cache memory available across the stack. One of the things we’ve historically had a challenging time with at Tumblr is finding hot keys. A hot key is a memcache key getting dramatically more activity than other keys…. I do love a good scaling story. Hardware these days is so cheap that solutions such as a 10TB memory…
the legend that is, Alan Williamson
For over 20 years, I’ve shared my thoughts whenever the muse strikes. It’s unpredictable, honest, unedited, and occasionally witty. I’m living the best years of my life, working harder than ever, and enjoying every second.
