Developer Blog
October 16, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
This made me laugh: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevron/1572812750/
Just an example of the sleeping arrangements at BarCampMilwaukee2. It’s part of the charm.
The missing pillow wasn’t BarCamp’s fault… BarCamp didn’t steal it or anything.
Check out the Flickr photostream from the BarCamp at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/barcampmilwaukee2/
There are nearly 1500 photos tagged barcampmilwaukee2.
Filed in: Developer Blog barcampmilwaukee2
October 15, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
A full recap of the BarCampMilwaukee2 event is forthcoming. I’m currently parsing through the details in my head in an attempt to create as thorough a writeup as possible.
My computer is still in a state of flux. I had to go out and purchase a notebook cooler (which works fabulously! Running on low speed the CPU is around 50 C… a little bit high, but at least it isn’t self-destructing) in order to use it. At some point I’ll need to invoke a service call to Dell to either get it fixed or to get the computer replaced.
In short, the BarCamp was a blast. There were a lot of really great people there, great discussions, good food, and good video gaming.
Filed in: Developer Blog barcampmilwaukee2
October 13, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
The event has started. Food is flowing. Sessions start at 1pm.
I hope my computer makes it. For some reason, it doesn’t seem like my fan is running.
Filed in: Developer Blog barcampmilwaukee2
October 12, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
BarCampMilwaukee2 starts tomorrow morning at 10am. I’ll be up long before the crack of dawn to finish getting all my stuff together and drive over to Milwaukee.
If my health holds out (of course I’d come down with a nasty cold the afternoon before the event!) I’ll remain semi-coherent and be able to give some presentations, enjoy some food, good company, and learn lots.
I’m going to attempt to either semi-liveblog here or on Twitter. It depends upon whether I can find time to fix my command-line Ruby Twitter sending program so that I don’t have to use the Twitter website to post.
There’s still time to come on out. It runs until Sunday at 4pm. The official website is www.barcampmilwaukee.com. If you’re not pre-registered you’ll have to show up during the day to get registered, otherwise you won’t be able to get into the venue in the evening.
Filed in: Developer Blog barcampmilwaukee2
September 25, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
I’ve been a big fan of Google for many years. Their research seems to be top notch and they come up with some amazing things. What I’m less thrilled about is their data capacity and yen to index everything. I’m not too cool with that. I like their online apps, but I don’t want them to be storing all my data.
That said, I actually started to use the Google Calendar. It’s rather handy, can email me notifications, and has a slick as vegetable oil webtastic 2.0 interface. I can choose to share my entire calendar with the world, share with people that I list, or keep everything private while sharing single calendar items.
Too much fun.
Filed in: Developer Blog
September 11, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
The location for BarCampMilwaukee2 has changed. It will now be held at the Schlitz Park Center in Milwaukee. The new Bucketworks location was not going to be finished in time for the BarCamp. Check out the video link on the front page of the BarCamp website (http://www.barcampmilwaukee.com) to see the new location. It looks real nice.
Filed in: Developer Blog
September 6, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
I was checking out the Hibernate website (http://www.hibernate.org) and saw something called Hibernate Shards. I thought it sounded interesting so I investigated further.
It seems that some engineers at Google started a project in their 20% time to add functionality to Hibernate to deal with sharding.
It’s an interesting idea. Shards is just Google-speak for horizontal data partitioning. Typical vertical data partitioning will group data rows together in the same table based on some kind of criteria. The theory being that by grouping the data together based upon what you’re searching for, the database will be more efficient when performing the search and returning the data.
Horizontal partitioning is similar except that the data is spread across multiple tables with the same layout.
Hibernate Shards is great in that it abstracts out behind the scenes the strategies for which tables to search when performing a query and which table to insert new data into based upon the strategy you’ve chosen. It will automatically union all the returned rows together if it needs to retrieve data from multiple shards (tables).
It’s an interesting concept. I wonder if we’ll see it in use more and more as a data partitioning scheme.
Filed in: Developer Blog java
August 26, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
For those not in the know, Twitter seems to be the “next new thing” in the social connectivity realm of the interweb. I’m more than a little skeptical of the usefulness of the tool. The gist of it is that you can post small messages (160 characters or less) to Twitter for your friends (and the world if you so choose) to see. In the great interconnectedness of the world, everyone can stay up-to-date to what you are doing. You can hook up your IM programs and your SMS phone to send to Twitter.
I decided to setup a Twitter account just to see what I think about it (http://twitter.com/sfradkin). I haven’t actually started to post anything on there yet, but I’ve noticed a few things. Twitter seems to work really well if you’re able to update during most of the day. I’m not the kind of person who is going to do this. I don’t use IM for anything, nor do I use SMS messaging on my cell phone. I don’t see myself posting updates while I’m at work since that seems rather unprofessional, and I’m usually away from my computer for the vast majority of the rest of the day.
But, I’ll give it a go and see what happens. It may prove to be more interesting than my first impressions have made it.
Filed in: Developer Blog
