Gun control in America

April 24, 2007 – 3:25 pm
I'm sure you could take a guess and figure out that I am an atheist, a libertarian, and generally considered a nut job by my peers. I find it interesting how seemingly separate areas of ideology (religion and politics) so often intersect when you become a free thinker. Almost every libertarian I know is an atheist, and almost every atheist I know has at least a slight libertarian bent. I mentioned in an earlier post that I had been reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I just finished the "John Galt Speaks" chapter, which is essentially a 58 page monologue describing Ayn Rand's theory of Objectivism. It amazed me that this book, and this philosophy which was written over 50 years ago, describes exactly what I believe today. It amazed me that Ayn Rand was essentially an atheist libertarian, before it was socially accepted to be so (Not that it ...

Posted in Libertarian, atheist, gun control, virginia tech | 14 Comments »

10 steps to organize your digital life on OS X and Windows

April 10, 2007 – 10:30 pm
In meat space my wife and I are far from organized. It's a real problem because we are always losing important things like our car keys. Unfortunately, this how-to won't help me solve that problem. In the digital world however, I'm extremely anal retentive and organized. Everything is in its place and easily searchable. It allows me to be much more productive since I don't have to waste my time trying to find things. I'm using a Mac and OS X Tiger at home and Windows XP in my day job at work, so that even further complicates my digital lifestyle. A lot of these tips can be platform agnostic and work under Windows and Linux as well. These suggestions work hand in hand with an indexed search capability. In OS X we have the built in, and fantastic, Spotlight. On ...

Posted in apple, gallery, organize, projects | 1 Comment »

Penn and Teller: Bullshit! Wal-Mart

April 5, 2007 – 10:14 pm
I have to admit, I'm a huge fan of Penn and Teller. When I heard that they were going to be covering Wal-Mart on an upcoming episode of Bullshit I was extremely excited. Like many small and medium size towns across the country, Wal-Mart hysteria has come to my home town of Longmont, Colorado and I was in the front lines of the debate. Back in 2003 I had decided to run for City Council here in Longmont, and at that time Longmont was looking to annex a plot of land right outside of town by request of the Wal-Mart corporation. The plan was to build a new Super Wal-Mart store on the lot, and the city wanted to get the tax revenue. Typical to these decisions, the public outcry was immense. The anti Wal-Mart groups arranged speakers from all across the country to come and ...

Posted in Libertarian, Penn and Teller, Wal-Mart, capitalism | 17 Comments »

Outsourcing to India, the other perspective.

April 5, 2007 – 3:51 pm
I recently had the opportunity to visit Delhi on a business trip for a couple of weeks. It was an eye opening experience for me to say the least. It is shocking to see just how different the two cultures are. The extreme poverty next to the extreme wealth. It's inspiring to see the opportunities in India that the globalization of the world has made available to them. The fact remains that just a few years ago this was considered a third world country, and you can see why. Much of the city has no running water or sewage. What water is available is contaminated with hundreds of different types of potentially deadly bacteria. What sewage is available is dumped straight into the Yamuna river, which coincidently happens to also be their only source of water. The air is full of ...

Posted in Delhi, India, outsource | 1 Comment »

Contact

March 28, 2007 – 8:59 pm

Posted in uncategorized | No Comments »

What is Web 3.0? A review of the ICWSM

March 27, 2007 – 10:03 pm
What is Web 3.0? Just when you started to get used to the idea of Web 2.0, the trend setters on the web start tossing around the term Web 3.0. Can't they just let us get used to one version before pushing another one on us? Fortunately Web 3.0 is in its infancy, and nobody is certain of what it really means at this point. The direction of the internet and its users is a fickle thing. It's hard to predict what they are going to want and use. The next big thing is all about the right idea, in the right place, at the right time. I've been attending the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media conference the last couple days and listening to some of these visionaries talk. While there certainly is no consensus about what the future holds, there are definitely some key trends to take note of. ...

Posted in ICWSM, blogging, twitter, web 3.0 | 4 Comments »

Optimizing Wordpress and LAMP to survive the Digg effect

March 26, 2007 – 7:40 pm
Anyone who has used digg for any amount of time has certainly come across a dead link. Invariably you click on the comment link hoping someone has posted a mirror of the content. You head over to duggmirror or coral cache to view the content. During the peak time right after an article hits the digg homepage, a given site might receive as many as 100 page loads per minute. If this page is hosted on Wordpress, or other MySQL based blog platform, combined with shared hosting, it's a recipe for a crash. Your site will go down in flames and you won't have a chance of recovering until the load goes back to a lower level. Recently I had an article hit the front page of Digg. I was lucky because I had already done a number of things to optimize my server so ...

Posted in Digg, LAMP, projects | 6 Comments »

Scalable story promotion

March 26, 2007 – 4:14 pm
I had some thoughts on the idea of scalable story promotion for the open source Pligg system. I thought I would share them here I've been thinking about the best way to handle promoting a story/article from a queued status onto the main page and I've had a few thoughts I wanted to share with everyone. The current scheme for promotion is very simple. Number of votes passing a defined threshold in the config file (and the story is fresher than X days). While this will work for very low volume sites, it doesn't exactly scale well. In a site with a large number of users, and one would assume proportionately a large number of votes, this breaks down. Our ideal system would be able to quickly determine that a story is of high value and promote it to the homepage based on the frequency of votes as compared to a ...

Posted in Digg, projects | 2 Comments »

Setting up an automated workflow to convert files for Apple TV on OS X

March 23, 2007 – 8:45 pm
With the arrival of my Apple TV yesterday I needed a solution to get my Xvix/WMV/Divx files converted and imported into iTunes so that I can watch them. I already have Quicktime Pro, which with the recent release added the ability to "Export to Apple TV". Since I have a lot of files, and no desire to sit around and convert these one at a time, it seemed like a perfect job for automator. I figured someone out there at some point had to have done something similar so I did a bit of google searching and found the required automator actions. Using the actions I found combined with the sample workflow they have already created for you, it is trivial to set-up a workflow that will convert to the Apple TV format and then import the file into your iTunes library. With a slight ...

Posted in apple, projects | 66 Comments »

Updates

March 15, 2007 – 3:08 pm
Amy has started a new weight loss blog again. Check it out at http://blogginglight.com/. Also, my project is moving forward, slowly. I've updated the domain name and you can now find it over at http://minefeed.com/.

Posted in projects | No Comments »