jna's random musings.

You! Stuck in a hotel? Want Wi-Fi?

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:55:32 -0700

You! Stuck in a hotel? Want Wi-Fi?:

Here’s two scripts you can run if you have a 3G card, and a few friends stuck in the hotel room with you who want WiFi.

First, turn your laptop into an access point. These scripts work on MacOS X…

Two great talks for Wednesday

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:11:39 -0700

Two great talks for Wednesday:

Two great presentations I’ve recently read and want to share with you:

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“.

Read that, perhaps while…

Velocity 2009

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:52:14 -0700

Velocity 2009:

Last Tuesday, I was part of the Velocity 2009 Keynote, where I gave a talk entitled, “Fixing Twitter”. I covered the last year or so of work in improving Twitter to deal with the massive traffic and…

Predicting the End of the World with Mathematica

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:02:43 -0700

Predicting the End of the World with Mathematica:

Frequently you want to predict when things are going to happen, and if it’s not the end of the world, it might be something occurring a bit sooner, such as your disk filling up.

First capture some…

Memcached and MySQL - What good is it?

Sun, 17 May 2009 13:22:30 -0700

Memcached and MySQL - What good is it?:

I posted this in response to a post on GigaOM, but it was such a long comment, I felt that it was worthy as a post on it’s own.

The workloads of social networking sites fall mostly into the…

Announcing mod_memcache_block

Fri, 08 May 2009 11:44:23 -0700

Announcing mod_memcache_block:

I’m announcing the release of mod_memcache_block, a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code.

For many years I’ve had a need for a module like this —…

Velocity Preview

Thu, 07 May 2009 11:44:22 -0700

Velocity Preview:

There’s a small interview with me in today’s O’Reilly radar, where I talk about some of the things that I’ll be presenting as part of my Velocity 2009 talk. You can listen to, and read the…

It's not fair.

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:38:31 -0700

There’s so much porn out there that makes my people sick.

By that, I mean, body piercers, goths, punks, emo kids, and friends. So many jock douchebags that seem surprised when they meet a girl with a nipple piercing, or more, here and there.

Porn seems to cater to this, in a “that freaky goth girl does weird sex shit.” It’s really, really sad. Please stop!

Using GPS to enhance social networking

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:37:25 -0800

Using GPS to enhance social networking:

A bit of last-minute news, but I’ll be on a panel at SXSW Interactive: “Using GPS & Location to Enhance Social Networking”.

First there were social networks, and then there were location-based…

Twitter in New York magazine

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:32:47 -0800

Twitter in New York magazine:

Normally I don’t repost Twiter articles here but this one on the New York magazine was wistful, fair, balanced, and gave a good representation of what it’s like to work here.

The reporter was in…

Find all the virtual hosts on a single IP

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:27:57 -0800

Find all the virtual hosts on a single IP:

: Image via Wikipedia

Since people started using virtual hosts by name with Apache HTTPD and other web servers, it has become very difficult to figure out which virtual…

Finding usernames through iTunes DAAP

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:05:44 -0800

Finding usernames through iTunes DAAP:

Often on our local network, someone will start using up all of our outbound Internet bandwidth, and this leads to the network administrator’s dilemma:

How do we find the user in question so we can…

Netgear fixes WGR3500 bandwidth issues, somewhat.

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:04:54 -0800

Netgear fixes WGR3500 bandwidth issues, somewhat.:

On this page, Netgear releases Firmware version 1.0.30 for the WNR3500 router.

In my previous Apple Macbook Pro to Local network host (Mac Mini) testing, my top connection speed was around 2.4…

MacWorld 2009 is Upon Us

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:13:42 -0800

MacWorld 2009 is Upon Us:

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Macworld 2009 is this week in my home town of San Francisco, and while we won’t have Jobs’ famous Keynote speech nor the…

Photocasting to iPhoto with Ruby

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:05:50 -0800

Photocasting to iPhoto with Ruby:

Today we’re going to teach you how to deal with having too many computers. Moving media around is a living hell because iPhoto and iTunes assume that you only ever possess one library. Sure, you can…

Image via Wikipedia Michael Feranti wrote this song years ago as...

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:54:00 -0800

Image via Wikipedia

Michael Feranti wrote this song years ago as part of The Disposable Hereos of Hiphopracy. I’ve probably listened to the album a few hundred times. The band was up-front, political, and spoke out on issues such as homophobia, which is the focus of this song.

Wikipedia sums up this song, far better than I can:

“Language of Violence” tells the story of a 15 year old boy who is beaten to death for his being gay by homophobes, and the subsequent ironic treatment of the murderers once sent to prison as a form of natural justice.

Outgoing blacklists, or, stop the bouncing.

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:01:51 -0800

Outgoing blacklists, or, stop the bouncing.:

At Twitter, we have many users which sign up for the service and mistype or enter invalid email addresses. Our product group doesn’t want us to use email verification, and for the most part, we…

Facial recognition and video search

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:01:45 -0800

Facial recognition and video search:

Viewdle, a video search engine, launched recently, and won the 2008 LeWeb Gold prize . It’s very similar to a technology that casinos have had for years. In previous times they’d look up…

autism.

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:52:00 -0800

evacide: Clearly, I need a big, dorky tricycle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/05/BA6J14I8QT.DTL

John Adams: Big dorky tricycle reads ‘austic child to me’, because a family friend, Artie, rode one. Now, Artie was pretty fucking amazing.

There were these big books of police scanner frequencies, back when you could listen to the police on scanners; It was all analog back then, and they didn’t use encrypted, trunked digital communications.

He liked ham radio and listening to the police; Maps too, lots of maps! You could give him a zipcode and he’d give you all of the police, fire, and emergency frequencies for that area. Pages and pages of them and he wouldn’t stop until you made him. All while sitting on a large blue tricycle. He would ride the bicycle and watch firemen do their work. The tricycle would nearly always have a battery, scanner, and set of radios in the back. Sort of an autistic Desmond Crisis, if you will.

When I was 8 years old this blew my mind because I didn’t understand what autism was, but now I do and it still fascinates me. I think when I was young I probably thought in my mind “retard” but now I know that was wrong.

He was actually a brilliant mind trapped in an unfortunate body.

Wireless performance woes, continued…

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:09:22 -0800

Wireless performance woes, continued…:

: Image via Wikipedia

Lately I’ve been examining the actual performance charastics of wireless networking devices.

I recently purchased a Netgear WNR3500, and testing…