2011 Archive

Saturday, October 1, 2011

It has long bugged many of the Webmachine hackers that this relationship with Alan Dean's HTTP flowchart is one-way. Webmachine was made from that graph, but that graph wasn't made from Webmachine. I decided to change that in my evenings last week.

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Friday, March 4, 2011

If you were interested in my last bit of alternative code-geekery, you may also be interested to hear that I've pushed that NerdKit Gaming code farther. If you browse the github repository now, you'll find that the game also includes a highscore board, saved in EEPROM so it persists across reboot. It also features a power-saving mode that kicks in if you don't touch any buttons for about a minute. Key-repeat now also allows the player to hold a button down, instead of pressing it repeatedly, in order to move the cursor multiple spaces.

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Friday, February 18, 2011

If you have been following my posts about using Riak's map/reduce system to compute baseball statistics via the luwak_mr library, or if they're still sitting in your ‘read later’ pile, you may be interested in a presentation I gave yesterday on the same topic.

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Monday, February 14, 2011

Contrary to the evidence on this blog, not all of the code I write is in Erlang. It's not even all web-based or dealing with distributed systems. In fact, this week I spent my evenings writing C for an embedded device.

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

I think I can be more specific about one component of readability that holds sway over the rest: naming. Partially the quality of each name, but also the ratio of named to unnamed things. But most important of all, the ratio of named to unnamed verbs.

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Wednesday, January 26, 2011

If you enjoyed my last post on the Basho Blog, about computing baseball stats using Riak's map/reduce, you may also enjoy my followup post about dealing with (or avoiding) records that have been split across block boundaries.

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Thursday, January 20, 2011

The luwak_mr tool I wrote about last weekend kept my imagination chugging this week. The result? I've learned a bit about baseball, and written code to compute batting average using luwak_mr (and Riak map/reduce, of course).

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Sunday, January 16, 2011

I was inspired, this weekend, by off-list discussion of Luwak and by Guy Steele's talk How to Think about Parallel Programming—Not!. The two seemed naturally attracted, and thus I created the luwak_mr module.

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