I have never written a political blog, and this isn’t a trend, but I need to say this. I haven’t heard Obama’s address to congress yet, so this has not been influenced by that.
I have posted this on both facebook and twitter, “I will be proud to pay more taxes if it means someone less fortunate than I receives health care.” I don’t care what administration is in office or what majority passes it. This is not political, it’s personal.
I want memcached, but rather than allocating memory, it stores it on disk. This should be out there, I just haven’t seen it.
The use case would be for people with low-memory virtual machines who can benefit from caching, but do not have the memory to allocate to it. I guess technically it would work by simply using regular memcached and taking the disk page hit if it happens - perhaps I just solved my problem.
I know there is memcachedb, but that keeps things around forever without expiring. I think the housekeeping to expire keys is very difficult. I prefer to prepend a sequence number to items and allow the cache expiring to get rid of keys that no are no longer needed.
The idea with diskcached would be that you could allocate gigabytes of disk space and have a very low memory footprint. It would be orders of magnitude slower than real memcached, but if it’s faster than the time it takes to compute the data, then it’s worth it.
I am working on a database system called Buckets. The idea behind this are structured data records that are bound together through (optionally) classified associations. The goal of this is to have a structured and interlinked set of data records to organize information. Here’s an example of something I’m doing where I could use this system… I’m dealing with an external company to integrate their product with ours. Despite documented standards, there are always issues with integration. So I’ve started a Word document to keep track of issues that come up and how they are being resolved. Word isn’t the right tool. Excel isn’t either. And Access is a huge overkill as it will take more time to setup the database than will gain from having it. What I need is something in-between. Something that will allow me to capture pieces of data and have that data linked together in a meaningful way. Let’s look at what I’m doing now. The top of the document has a title and a short description of the purpose of this document. Really, this is an IntegrationDocumention record with two fields, Title and Description. Next I have a heading for each issue. I manually timestamp when this issue happened and have a description of what the issue is. In our database, this might be an Issue record with two fields, Title and Description. For each issue, there is an ongoing discussion of details and resolution options. Some of this is cut-and-paste from e-mails, some of it is snippets of documentation, some might just be off-the-cuff thoughts of what we can try or what we have talked about. There might be phone conversation notes (or audio) too. In this Word document, it’s just free-form text that sometimes uses sub-headings to help separate thoughts. In our database, all of these things might be stored in a variety of record types such as Comment, Note, Audio, Picture and so on. The problem with Word is I can collect all of this information, but there is no structure. There is nothing that separates one thought from another besides formatting. If you used Excel, you could create an issue spreadsheet with rows for each issue and columns for information collected, but it doesn’t allow for large, possibly interlinked, data to be put in there. A hack is the use columns titled (comment1, comment2, comment3), but that’s just lame and doesn’t really help. So going back to Buckets, we have defined the record types that we want to keep along with data in each record that we want to collect. The parent-child relationship is simple IntegrationDocumentation -> Issue. Issue -> Comment,Note,Audio,Picture. (where -> means has_many) We might want to have an additional level between IntegrationDocumentation and Issue for unresolved and resolved issues. Or an Issue might just have an association kind of “resolved” or “unresolved” that can be queried and displayed. In the former solution, you have a “bucket” of unresolved issues and a “bucket” of resolved issues. By virtue of an issue being in one of these buckets, it denotes both state and context.
Disclaimer: This is not actually an article on guitars. Read on.
When you walk into a guitar store, unless you are Slash your guitar skills are unknown. Once you pick up a guitar, plug it into an amp for all to hear, and hit the strings for the first time, the first thing you play defines you as a player. If you start out with Smoke on the Water or Stairway to heaven, you will be banished and forever defined as one of those guys. But if you have a defining guitar lick that makes people stop and listen you can set the bar high from the beginning.
Same is true in business and social encounters. The first thing out of your mouth will set the bar for how other people view you. If your opening comment is obvious or immature, then it will take a lot of work to regain the respect and reputation that you want to have. But if the first thing you have to say makes people stop and listen and think, then you got something.
I recently joined a paper committee for a large technical conference. This conference is THE conference for my industry and being on the committee is a big deal. The committee meets 2 times a year before the actual conference to do paper abstract and paper reviews. Our committee has about 30 people and at the first meeting, almost nobody knew me. This was my defining moment. When we started the abstract review, I was prepared, had written notes, and was the first one to voice my opinion. Every abstract I had constructive information to present in spite of being a “freshman” member of the committee. Being outgoing is not my nature, but I had to establish my position as a valuable contributor.
At the dinner in the evening, I received several positive comments from people who didn’t know me. Some were also first time members who assumed I must have been a seasoned veteran.
When you are in a situation where you will define yourself, make sure what you have to say is what you want people to hear from you. Sometimes that means to be prepared, but often it may mean to stay quiet until you have the right thing to say.
What is your defining guitar lick?
Love this idea.
In our cafeteria there are table tents explaining the causes and dangers if diabetes. XX number of people have it, YY number of people die from it, and so on.
After breakfast, they often put out leftover food that was not sold. Surrounding the table tent explaining the causes and dangers of diabetes are 4 chocolate covered doughnuts.
This is just so cool.
I finished Gran Torino tonight. Very good movie. Clint Eastwood should be proud if he goes out with this one.
We are vacationing in Cape Vincent, NY right now. Right across the river is a Canadian island called Wolf Island. On this island are 50+ windmills that likely provide most of the power for the island.
From the shores of Cape Vincent you can see Wolf Island across the river. My first reaction was startling. There are a lot of windmills visible and I must say I can see how people might think of them as an eye sore. I think the look of windmills is the underlying complaint people have against them.
However, the existence of these windmills quickly turned from being startling to being beautiful. These devices are taking what naturally passes by them and turns that energy into a form we can use. I still see them, obviously, but they no longer are objectionable. In fact, they are beautiful.
