Jeremy Zawodny's blog

Random thoughts on technology, aviation, and life in general...

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  • Breaking Into My Own House

    kitchen and back door/patio Earlier this week, an odd thing happened. The main lock on my sliding patio door stopped latching. It was probably the result of the house settling or maybe the wood shifting around now that we're finally getting some seasonal rain. Either way, it was rather annoying and had been bothering me all week.

    This afternoon I got out the tools and decided to fix it. I needed to move the metal receiver that the latch grabs onto so that it'd actually latch again. While I thought that would entail drilling into the metal frame, it turned out that I was able to reuse a previous set of holes (apparently this has happened before) and get by with a little bit of Dremel work.

    No problem, right?

    Everything was fine until about an hour ago. I had cleaned out my closet and was taking bags of clothes into the garage so that I might drop them off at Goodwill this week. On may way out the door, I gave it a bit of a push and it slid as usual before stopping in the closed position.

    You can see where this is going, right?

    Well, the funny thing is that just as the door was closing, I thought to myself "that'd be funny if the door locked behind me... you know, because I fixed the lock soooo well..."

    Sure enough, when I came back to the door and gave it a tug it wouldn't move. At all. And, of course, it was raining outside. So there I was, locked out of my own house. It was at that moment I decided that I really ought to keep a spare key hidden in the garage.

    Anyway, I wandered back into the garage, grabbed a few tools and began to take the lock apart from the outside. Much to my surprise, it was relatively easy to take apart and I was back inside in no more than three minutes.

    Happy with my quick recovery, I stored a spare key in the garage, put the lock back together, and began to ponder getting better locks. If I can get in without trying very hard, there's not much to stop a determined person. (Not that I wasn't determined, but you know what I mean.)

    Thinking back a bit, I realized that this hadn't happened since about 1998 when I lived in my little house in Ohio. I guess every 8-9 years isn't so bad.

    Anyone know a good lock specialist? ;-)

    (comments)




  • LAMP Engineer Needed in Berkeley, California for MyBlogLog

    MyBlogLog The MyBlogLog team is looking to grow and we could use a few good engineers. We're currently on the hunt for a good general purpose LAMP engineer: someone who knows their Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL, and related stuff.

    This job is ideal for someone who lives in San Francisco, Berkeley, or Oakland and wants to work on a small team that's continuing to build a service that's growing very quickly and has very passionate users. We have lot of new hardware to play with, a great office, and tons of ideas about where to take the service.

    The Yahoo! office is located on University Ave, just a few blocks from campus and the local BART station. There's also an amazing selection of eateries just outside the front door.

    Send me your resume if you're interested.

    We're also looking for a Community Manager, so if that's more your style, get in touch.

    Of course, these jobs are also open to existing Yahoos. So if you've been around Yahoo! a year or two and would like to try out something different (and maybe reduce your commute), please get in touch. Oh, while I'm at it... we're looking for a good operations engineer too--ideally someone who already knows Yahoo systems well. :-)

    [Notes: MyBlogLog was acquired by Yahoo! back in early January and I've been working with the team closely ever since then, so I might be a bit biased. Or just well informed. :-)]

    (comments)




  • Yahoo! Pipes: Unlocking the Data Web

    Yahoo! Pipes For far too long now RSS has been used in ways that don't really tap its true potential. Being able to syndicate my favorite headlines or blog posts is great. In fact, it helped to kick off a revolution in personal on-line publishing that is still growing and evolving. But I want so much more.

    It's not for lack of vision. Back in 2005, Adam Bosworth painted a vision that eventually manifested itself as GData. I wrote about that a bit in Google's GData, MySQL, and the Future of on-line Databases.

    It's not for lack of data either. You can get RSS output from lots of non-news and non-blog stuff. Everything from classifieds on eBay and craigslist to Bugzilla, Wikis, and so on.

    The problem has been a lack of good tools for pulling it all together. In the Unix world, we often connect sources of data to filters and utilities using pipes. A pipe is a way of constructing ad-hoc workflows composed of any number of inputs, filters, and manipulation tools. And the beauty of the whole system is that they all use a very simple input and output method, so there's a nearly infinite set of ways you can combine and recombine them.

    On the web, however, it's harder. There are data sources and feeds, but until now we've had no pipes! Pulling together and integrating data sources using JavaScript isn't on the client for the faint of heart. The browser isn't the same as a Unix command-line, so building mashups has been more frustrating and time consuming that it needs to be--especially for Unix people like me.

    Yahoo! Pipes is one of a very small set of completely amazing on-line data manipulation and data mashup environments that can really change the way we work with on-line data sources. (The others are DabbleDB and Dapper.)

    Yahoo! Pipes is...

    Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

    So if you're interested in an interactive on-line data mashup construction set, check it out and have a look at the existing pipes developers have created. I think it's one of the coolest web apps we've released in a long time, and I'm not just saying that because I know the guys who built it. Not only does it make hard things easy (like Perl has done for years), the user interface kicks ass too. It's exciting both from a technological point of view and because of the implications for the web as a whole. :-)

    For another great take on this, check out what Tim O'Reilly has to say about Pipes. I don't think he's over-selling it by calling Pipes "milestone in the history of the internet." It's seriously cool stuff.

    I'm hoping we can pull together some demos and interviews with the team next week. Watch the Yahoo! Developer Network blog for more...

    See Also:

    Update @7:20am on Feb 8th: Pipes is currently down. There's a lot of interest, so things are getting tweaked on the backend. I'll post more when we have an update.

    Update @7:00am on Feb 9th: Pipes is alive and tuned! Try it out.

    (comments)




  • OSCON 2007 Talk Proposal: From Open Source to Open APIs

    Riffing off Automattic CEO Toni Schneider's recent post Open Source vs. Open APIs, I've submitted a talk proposal for the 2007 O'Reilly Open Source Convention titled From Open Source to Open APIs. Toni and I will co-present the session which has this abstract:

    When openness moves up the stack, opportunity knocks...
    The advent of hosted web applications and services that communicate primarily over HTTP kicked off a revolution that has resulted in a growing ecology of Open APIs. Just as Open Source Software spawned entirely new businesses (and business models), Open APIs offer just as much potential—maybe even more in our increasingly networked world.
    But at the same time, OpenAPIs are very different creatures from downloadable Open Source Software. This presentation, inspired by Toni Schneider's blog post titled "Open Source vs. Open APIs" (http://toni.schneidersf.com/2007/01/30/open-source-vs-open-apis/), looks those differences and what they mean for those producing and consuming them. We will include real-life experiences from Automattic and Yahoo!

    What do you think? Is it interesting? Would you attend? Are there specific things you'd like to see us talk about?

    (comments)




  • How to deal with slow HTTP clients?

    Every now and then a bunch of really slow HTTP clients decide to suck down pages off my web site. This is bad because when enough of them do this, it dramatically lowers the number of free Apache processes available to handle requests from the rest of the world. I don't know if it's some lame DDoS attack or just really slow clients.

    In years gone by, I know that lingerd was a solution to this problem. But there doesn’t appear to be much activity around it these days. In fact, the lack of a lingerd package in Debian (there is an old unofficial packagae) suggests that there are better methods.

    I've been using mod_limitipconn to partly deal with the problem, but I need to keep that number high enough that it doesn't penalize normal browsers. That makes it a sort of half-assed solution.

    It occurs to me that I could put Squid in front of Apache, but that seems a little heavyweight. Or maybe my impressions of Squid are skewed.

    Anyway, I'm looking for ideas or pointers to the obvious thing I've missed.

    Ideas?

    (comments)




  • How To Pass Your FAA Checkride

    Earlier today, after several paperwork and weather delays, I passed my FAA Practical Test (or checkride) for the Private Pilot Single Engine Land certificate with Dave Morss In N5156X.

    Flying Citabria N5156X on my First Solo Cross Country Flight While I'm not going to re-write the details of the experience or claim that I did everything perfectly, I'd like to pass along a few tips to anyone planning to take the test.

    Preparation

    Simply put, it's all about preparation. The more practice you have, the more you've been flying recently, and the more you've studied the required material, the more routine the whole experience will seem.

    1. Learn The Practical Test Standards (PTS)
      These are the rules that tell you what to expect and govern how the Designated Pilot Examiner (DPE) will judge your performance. If you know them well, there should be no surprises on the Big Day.
    2. Learn The Required Knowledge
      Of all the books I've tried, the most well organized and comprehensive is published by the government. The FAA publication FAA-H-8083-25, otherwise known as the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (available from Amazon.com in print form), is incredibly helpful. Not only that, but it's available for free on-line. Your tax dollars at work.
    3. Use VideosIn addition to all the reading, I'm a big fan of using DVDs to reinforce what I need to know. I wrote about this previously in FAA Private Pilot Test Prep DVDs from King Schools vs. Sporty's, but the quick version is this: get the King Schools DVDs. They're a little cheesy but very useful.
    4. Practice, Practice, Practice.
      Simply put, fly a lot. And try to get to the point that you're doing all the required maneuvers well within the tolerances specified in the PTS (see point #1). Then you'll have some wiggle room when it comes to the test day and you're a bit nervous.
    5. Reconnaissance
      Find out what you can in advance about your DPE. Ask others who've had check rides with him or her recently. Are there particular areas that seem to get more attention? Brush up on those.
    6. Get Organized
      Make a list of all the materials you need for the Big Day and have them together the night before. You don't want to be scrambling around looking for paperwork on the morning of your test.

    Checkride Supplies

    Of course, I had help...

    Thanks to the instructors at Amelia Reid Aviation who've been flying with me off an on for the last year or so, especially Jim Grant and Dave Gray. If you're looking for primary flight training or tailwheel transition in the Bay Area, I highly recommend them. Thanks also to Al, the resident mechanical genius, for keeping the plane in flying shape. :-)

    Other pilots reading this, please add your comments below. What did you do that really helped in preparation for your checkride.

    See Also

    Others posts about my flight training:

    What'd I miss?

    (comments)




  • Ask Don MacAskill about Amazon S3

    Don MacAskill, the founder of SmugMug, is preparing a talk on Amazon's S3 storage service for O'Reilly's ETech conference. He's written about it several times in the past:

    And now he's looking for ideas of questions you'd like to see answered in his talk. Drop a comment on his blog if you have one (or more).

    Also, I've written about S3 for non-business use in the past:

    And have some more on that coming soon if I can find the time to write it up.

    (comments)




  • On-line Dating and Lies

    I don't remember how I stumbled upon The Truth about Online Dating in Scientific American, but it's an entertaining read.

    Before I get into it, though, I must admit that I've never played the on-line dating game. I've never been comfortable with the idea or felt compelled to get past my resistance to the expectations and judgments involved.

    Anyway, numerous passages caught my eye.

    Apparently there are folks who never use their real photos and even take to changing them now and then, as one might in an advertising campaign:

    But Chris was not the woman in the online photos. This wasn't a question of an age discrepancy or a new hairdo. She was a completely different woman. Chris was in marketing, you see, and to her it was simply a good strategy to post photographs that would draw in as many "customers" as possible. I never said a word about the photos. I just enjoyed our conversation and the refreshments. A few weeks later I noticed that Chris had replaced the photos with those of yet another woman.

    And, of course, everyone is above average:

    If you are a Garrison Keillor fan, you have probably heard about the fictional Lake Wobegon on National Public Radio, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." In the online dating community, similar rules apply: in one study, only 1 percent of online daters listed their appearance as "less than average."

    And apparently there's a type of SEO that goes along with getting yourself to rank well in the dating search process:

    There are also straightforward, practical reasons for lying. One recent study showed that men claiming incomes exceeding $250,000 got 151 percent more replies than men claiming ­incomes less than $50,000, for example. Many women are quite open about listing much younger ages, often stating in the text of their profiles that they have listed a younger age to make sure they turn up in searches. (Because men often use age cutoffs in their searches, women who list ages above that cutoff will never be seen.)

    Nice.

    And what about those on-line tests that promise your "perfect mach"?

    I have been a researcher for about 30 years and a test designer for nearly half those years. When I see extravagant ads for online tests that promise to find people a soul mate, I find myself asking, "How on earth could such a test exist?"
    The truth is, it doesn't.
    For a psychometric evaluation to be taken seriously by scientists, the test itself needs to clear two hurdles. It needs to be shown to be reliable--which means, roughly, that you can count on it to produce stable results. And it needs to be shown to be a valid measure of what it is supposed to be measuring. With a test that matches people up, such validity would be established by showing that the resulting romantic pairings are actually successful.

    Have you tried on-line dating services? Did they work for you or someone you know?

    I have absolutely no idea how common it is among people I know. It really doesn't come up much in conversation.

    (comments)




  • Another day, another debate

    In today's episode of "bloggers take sides on some issue" I present the Flickr Old Skool Debate.

    In this corner, weighing in with a growing empire of blogging tools, is SixApart's Anil Dash who says I am okay with my Yahoo sign-in. He argues that this should come as no surprise and that this is really a small dust-up that involves a very minor number of loud people.

    In the other corner, weighing in with a photo sharing service of his own, is SmugMug's Don MacAskill who writes about The Dark Side of the Flickr Acquisition. In that post he and offers 50% off to Flickr refugees who sign up for SmugMug and suggests that SmugMug will never be bought because big companies don't "get" users of his site.

    Personally, I agree with both of them. This stuff is very tricky.

    You?

    (comments)




  • Should I Post It?

    Given the surprising attention attracted by yesterday's annoyance, I'm sitting on a blog post titled "Blogging Lessons" that starts out like this:

    Here's a list of things I've been meaning to write down for a while. They seem to creep back into mind now and then, often after dealing with a hot (or potentially hot) button issue.

    But can't decide if I should post it or not.

    Thoughts?

    Part of me thinks it's worth doing and folks will likely learn something, commiserate, or add their own lessons.

    Another part of me thinks that people will read too much into it, see themselves in one or more of the "lessons", and ultimately get [more] pissed off.

    Hmm.

    (comments)




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