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Observations from a West Coast family

A few hours at Maker Faire 2009

30 May 2009

We got to this year’s Maker Faire fairly early, and saw the many cool things people have built. (It was our first Maker Faire, and we underestimated the event’s popularity.)

Benjamin, who’s recently become an enthusiastic chess player, got to face off against the chess playing robot: B Hahn v. chessplayingrobot.com, Maker Faire 2009, San Mateo, CA, USA
Ben attempted a Scholar’s Mate, was stymied, and then had to go on defense; I suspect he’s been winning at school with that one.

Nathaniel and I were pressed against the barriers to see the lightning demonstration: Lightning demonstration at the Maker Faire 2009
Cool.

At an event where most exhibitors have made or built something physical, I must comment that a purely virtual or computational exhibit underwhelms.

Bookmarks

Andrew Moore's "set of tutorials on many aspects of statistical data mining, including the foundations of probability, the foundations of statistical data analysis, and most of the classic machine learning and data mining algorithms."

"Simple Web Indexing System for Humans - Enhanced". Comparable to htdig.

Recent results from Yahoo!'s sorting benchmark run.

A useful set of instructions on Hadoop setup and issues.

"jsPDF generates PDF documents using nothing but Javascript." Neat.

Hiroshi's made a Windows .NET utility that lets you burn the OpenSolaris USB image to a stick without needing to run OpenSolaris.

Michal gives another one-click example: he's made a p5i file with the base dependencies for building OpenSolaris's GNOME consolidation.

John gives some screenshots from our one-click install/add publisher support. Most of the sun.com properties now support .p5i files and their application/vnd.pkg5.info MIME type now, so if you want to share packages–or give an initial configuration for some examples–your users are only a click away.

Zhong builds an attractive home NAS box with 2008.11 and a dual-core Atom–the 330.

Shawn explains why we prefer publisher to authority as a term for a producer and distributor of packages.

Information and blog on formatting books for the Amazon Kindle. The author runs a consulting service; site contains his tips, etc.

Whoosh: a fast pure-Python search engine. "Whoosh is as fast or faster at indexing as other Python search libraries that wrap C or Java libraries (e.g. PyLucene?, Xappy), and not that much slower at searching."

The original post proposing continuous deployment; comments interesting, too.

IMVU deploys to production after passing its continuous integration tests.

"Voldemort is a distributed key-value storage system." Deeper down, we find: "Replication within the cluster handles the case of data loss on a single server, but bugs can still lead to global data corruption or data pollution. To handle this scenario the best option is ZFS filesystem snapshots."

Using FUSE and s3fs on 2008.11 to access Amazon S3 storage with filesystem operations.

Exploring ZFS on 2008.11 as a "dream backup service". Uses VirtualBox to test various configuration options.

The secret is the libusb-based application, scanbuttond. Useful invocations of SANE utilities without xsane. scanbuttond works fine on OpenSolaris 2008.11.

IBM's Data Explorer (which I used on an SGI workstation years ago) is now an open source project.

Explains the configuration for content handling, such that you can adjust Firefox to subscribe a feed in Google Reader through a direct link.

Essay on the impacts of some of setuptools on distributions. I've been worrying about some of these aspects, too; eggs don't seem right for distributors, even if they're convenient for users.

We’ll see

11 December 2008

Two days' worth?  Here?

Two days' worth? Here?

I think we’ve had two evenings with short snow—without accumulation—and one significant hailstorm—with accumulation—in eleven years here. Intriguing.


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