Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

ICWSM was a great conference. I was finally able to hang out with some of our customers (and potential customers).
It turns out that a bunch of the papers are online. There were some really good talks over the last few days.
Heading back to SF tonight.

Storage Mojo points out the following paper:
Which I have to admit, is pretty cool.
…is a distributed network of intelligent, disk-based, storage appliances that stores data reliably and energy-efficiently. While existing MAID systems keep disks idle to save energy, Pergamum adds NVRAM at each node to store data signa- tures, metadata, and other small items, allowing [...]

Check out this funny class namer. I like SingletonRecordConcatenator…

There are plenty of technical reasons to forgo using Rackspace in favor of another blog host.
Yet another reason is that they have a tendency to censor their customer base:
Last week, it all got weirder. Hosting service GoDaddy mysteriously terminated Sesto’s account, and pulled RateMyCop.com offline. GoDaddy has offered several explanations to Wired’s ThreatLevel blog, but [...]

Here’s an idea I had the other day while talking to Jonathan.
Engineers often know that when designing a database that the filesystem should NOT update the ‘atime’ filesystem attribute.
This can be expensive. On DBs that use LOTs of small files this can be a few orders of magnitude slower.
The problem is that the designer [...]

Looks like I’m heading up to Seattle for about nine days. If anyone wants to meet for a geek lunch let me know. Seattle seems to have some smart people…
Current plans are to head to Mount Rainer on the weekend.
Any other suggestions while I’m there?

The Read Write Web has a good post about crgslst, a new search service for Craigslist:
Denver, Colorado based Superhero.es has built crgslst, a very slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist. Craigslist itself doesn’t offer a multi-search service. By combining the publicly available RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX, crgslst fills this need “so fast, we [...]

I don’t know about you but I could hardly see these Chinese bike snipers with those plants tied to their heads!

Sweet! I met the requirements! Which apparently consist of paying them $50.
And yes, I made myself a Lord.
Can anyone explain to me WHY I should join the ACM other than conference rebates? It really makes me sick that they keep all this research behind a pay firewall. [...]

I finally figured out how to run with a custom page size on InnoDB. It looks like there’s a bug with innodb_file_per_table and 8k pages in MySQL 4.1 through 5.1. On a whim I just decided to try a very basic configuration and it worked.
Now comes the real fun. It turns out that [...]

I just pushed a new release of Log5j (1.2) which fixes a strange VM bug on JDK 1.6.
Occasionally the VM would throw a class cast exception during initialization. I think this was some sort of internal race condition in log4j which I haven’t yet wrapped my head around.
The fix just involves creating one LoggerFactory [...]

Shark officially jumped:
Office Master is a wise and highly decorated veteran warrior. He is a legend in his own time. just the mention of his name will certainly follow with tales of heroism. His wisdom and skills of collaboration are highly sought after. And although Office Master has some years under his belt he seems [...]

I just went through and tested WordPress, Pownce, Twitter, MSN Spaces, and they all failed.
I wanted to create a username of ‘βυrτοπατοr’ which is my normal username but using the Greek alphabet.
Specifically the characters beta, upsilon, tau, omicon, pi, and alpha.
However, none of these sites would work with Unicode.
There’s one that worked like [...]

Digg has lame HTTP error handling.
Fetch any Digg page which should 404:
Let’s try to fetch http://digg.com/asdfffffffffsdf (which surely won’t exist).

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://digg.com/error

FOUND? Are you sure?
Let’s check out http://digg.com/error

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

What? Wait. I’m not sure I follow. You just told me you found a page called http://digg.com/asdfffffffffsdf which is located [...]

Looks like S3 was hit with a major system outage.
Placing all this Internet infrastructure in one place is dangerous (though potentially cost effective).
A few months back 365 Main was hit with a similar problem which knocked out Six Apart, Technorati, and Craigslist.
Update: Well that exploded. Everyone seems to be covering this story now.

The Democrats were elected to REMOVE bush from power. Not to protect him.
But that’s just what Pelosi is doing:
Before the Nevada primary, [Presidential candidate] Dennis [Kucinich] was visited by representatives of Nancy Pelosi and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — AIPAC. They told Dennis that if he would drop his campaigns to impeach [...]

Check this out.
Meta Filter STEALS a whole blog post from me!
Theirs:

Mine:

Uncool guys! Very uncool! They link to me of course, but only after they steal 95% of the content I wrote.
Update:
I can’t even comment on the post because they’ve archived it and comments are closed.
Classy!

It worked. At least I think it did….
That’s awesome.

I’m fascinated by intelligence in non-simian species. The Octopus and Crow are two animals that have vastly higher intelligence than a lay man would assume.
I spent some time tonight doing research and found some interesting content on the subject.
For example. This crow is smart enough to form a tool from [...]