Good bye Mountain View
It has been a great two weeks out here in the office. I've gotten to see a lot of people face to face and had some useful meetings about my projects. I just kicked off another round of massive data...
View ArticleOpen Source Hardware
I thought that this article in Slate about Open Source Hardware was a fun read and worth sharing.There is an interesting similarity in the way that Arduino handles open sourcing of their design but...
View ArticleThe best DHTML date range picker I've ever seen
Filament Group's Date Range PickerIt uses jQuery and a JavaScript date parsing library by the name of Date.js. This thing is simply amazing. Some of the reasons I think so:The developer can configure...
View ArticleDon't listen to bash, it will lie to you!
Remember folks, if you mv a directory, and there is a bash shell currently in that directory, the bash prompt will not update to reflect the new name until you cd out of the directory and then back...
View ArticlePerformance improvements at the cost of complexity
I discovered something that I feel is a bit of a bug in the Sun Java implementation. If you pass in a string to the method InetAddress.getByName(), it does a bunch of testing to see if it is a domain...
View ArticleAll hail Ken Kovash!
It may be showing my ignorance, but I was unaware until recently of the officially recognized day for celebrating the man, the myth, and the math that is Ken Kovash. To think that all the time leading...
View ArticleBash functions for going up to a directory
Sometimes, if I'm in a really deep directory, I don't want to cd from / nor do I want to cd ../../../..I just want to either go up 5 directories, or maybe I want to go up to the parent directory "src"...
View ArticleWillingness to be a little evil
I have been a supporter of Firefox and Mozilla for several years now, and while I don't write patches and fix bugs, a major part of that support is educating people about Mozilla, open source, and user...
View ArticleTinyArro.ws URLs
A friend just released an URL shrinking service that I enjoy: tinyarro.ws (more nifty when written as ➡.ws).It has a few great features over the current main stream shrinkers:1. Cool/fun URLs (e.g....
View ArticleCounting unique visitors in SQL
A lot of web metrics solutions out there like NetTracker or Omniture allow you to perform analysis on the number of unique visitors over time. This is a pretty important metric to a lot of companies,...
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Ways to visualize and share data
Mozilla needs to be able to provide useful extracts of data such as download trends, etc. and allow the community to perform their own analysis on them, so I'm always keeping a lookout for useful tools...
View ArticleInteresting crowd-sourced solution sites
A good friend of mine runs the site bug.gd (and it's more professional pseudonym, errorhelp.com). This service provides something that is slightly missing from the typical Google search for an error...
View ArticleI've always thought my job was fun. Now I hear it is sexy too!
I just finished reading this lovely little post from the company dataspora titled The Three Sexy Skills of Data Geeks.By far, my favorite quote was, "A good data munger excels at turning coffee into...
View ArticleShell script analytics
I just made a rather lengthy post on the Mozilla blog of data about shell script analytics. I'll try hard not to cross post stuff like this too often, but I thought I'd allow myself the spam this time...
View ArticleUbuntu screen-profiles customization
I recently loaded Ubuntu server 9.04 onto a new machine and encountered Ubuntu's screen-profiles.In general, I like it. I had one problem and one customization that I wanted to share:I use Mac OS X's...
View ArticleAdvice regarding using Travelex Cash Passport cards for travel
If you are a traveling to Europe and considering getting one of these debit cards to make life easier for you while there, my advice is don't! Figure out which of your credit cards charges the least...
View ArticlePerformance of Rhino JS engine and Janino library in Kettle
My friend Roland Bouman made an interesting blog post regarding the performance of a bit of JavaScript for Kettle that he saw on a different blog.Given the large amounts of data that I am shoving...
View ArticleSSH magic
I use SSH on a daily basis. Most of the machines I connect to can be accessed in one of two ways:OpenSSL VPNSSH to a jumphost then SSH from there to the desired machineI wanted to share the...
View ArticleDear LazyWeb
I'd like to help the Thunderbird community out by posting a series of quick video demonstrations of how I use Thunderbird + Lightning in my daily work.In order to do this though, I need an...
View ArticleMicrosoft's random browser ballot
When I saw what the page was supposed to do, (first five and last five sets displayed in random order) the first thing I thought was, "Man, I hope they tested the fool out of that or someone will make...
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