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Updated April 26, 2011 I’ve been trying off and on for a few weeks, as I have free time with work and family (now with two kids), to install Gentoo on my Dell XPS15 laptop. Until recently, I had gotten the OS installed, including grub, in a tri-boot Gentoo/Ubuntu 10.10/Windows 7 configuration, and Gentoo was smart enough to start in text mode with the framebuffer on, so I got a full 1920x1080 with small text, and very little running in terms of services.
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Here’s a flash movie/documentary that some guys made about the little town I grew up in, Pine Point, NWT. The town no longer exists, and this is a really great flashback.
http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/pinepoint
Having looked through it several times, I’ve found pictures of my dad, my sister and I, and several friends. The Hyrniuk brothers who were part of the project were my next door neighbors.
Here’s Richard Cloutier’s site, which he designs and maintains using voice recognition software: http://pinepointrevisited.
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I hate tax season.
We paid Karin Langwasser’s office $350 for a 15-minute tax appointment this year.
(Google Place page)
In the past, they handled my freelance business taxes, but I closed that down TWO YEARS ago, and last year’s tax prep bill was still $400 “just in case they missed anything…” Our tax prep representative this year had no good reason to explain why our bill was only $50 less, and told us we had to pay $350.
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Well, it was worth a shot.
I spent some time at work over lunch trying to get HAProxy set up in such a way that we could have a wildcard SSL certificate on several Amazon EC2 instances, answering to different domains, and let HAProxy route the traffic accordingly.
Unfortunately, SSL certificates still appear to require separate IP addresses per host that you’re securing. And since we can’t assign multiple Elastic IP addresses to our HAProxy instance at Amazon, I’m at a bit of a loss for how to run a software proxy server to manage multiple secured domains.
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Tonight, I installed Google Books for the fourth time on my Samsung Nexus S. I've never manually uninstalled it. In fact, whenever I see that there's an update for it available, I go to my app dock and sure enough, I see it listed as an installed app, I can open it and continue to read a free Sherlock Holmes novel where I last left off. Is this another bug in Gingerbread, or is it a fault with Google Books?
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I tinkered with PostgreSQL’s full-text-search (FTS) capabilities and I’m pretty impressed. On a table with 1.2 million rows of user profile information, I can do a token-based FTS search for usernames in under 90 milliseconds on a small-ish AWS instance. Unfortunately, the FTS token system doesn’t recognize MixedCaseUsernames, or numbers between words, as word separators. I did, however, fall quickly in love with the marker tag system which tells Postgres to prepend and append HTML 4 bold tags around matching portions of text.
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A colleague sent me a link to a bunch of photos from Facebook offices around the world.
In one of the photos, you can read a sign on the wall which says “done is better than perfect” and I’ve decided that this will be my motto for 2011. (Update 2016: it’s become more of a permanent goal for my work now)
A part of me is a struggling perfectionist, perhaps with a hint of OCD.
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When I was a senior engineer at The Rubicon Project, I inherited some Perl code to analyze log data for online advertising impressions. It eventually hit a maximum on the multi-core systems I had at my disposal and so rewrote my code to use threads. In Perl. Yes, you read that correctly.
It was actually one of my prouder engineering feats in my career, to scale some software that could analyze a few million ad impressions per day to scale up to handling more than a billion data points per day.
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Besides giving away an HTC EVO 4G to all attendees, here’s the big news announced about Android 2.2 Froyo at Google IO today:
Features Announced At Google IO Just-in-Time compiler confirmed Microsoft Exchange integration including auto-discovery and remote wipe New services just as data backup APIs for carriers to move your data from one device to another Tethering announced for Wifi and USB, shown in demo, pokes fun at iPad; no word on whether carriers can disable it 2x-3x performance boost in the Browser, new Javascript engine is SO much faster Optimizations for using the camera, orientation (accelerometers) within the browser Speech control and recognition is so much smoother, including Mandarin and Japanese, including speech recognition to make phone calls Real-time language translation Announced support for Flash Player 10.
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