Twitter certainly had such an easy win when, while at a fraction of the scale the service now operates at, one of their engineers rewrote their in-house Ruby-based message queue in Scala. That was great, but it was scaling in the small. Twitter is still fighting an uphill battle to scale in the large, because [...] [Posted: 28 Jul 2010]
I believe CS and Web Development currently select for certain masculine qualities that are largely unrelated to someone’s prowess as a coder. I believe it is these tangential code-cowboy qualities women are unable or unwilling to emulate, and not their skill or capacity for abstraction, problem solving, creative thinking, or communication — All of which [...] [Posted: 27 Jul 2010]
A short sale is going to be the only way for many people who bought at the peak and who are now underwater to move on with their lives if they have to relocate or downsize. From Jonathan J. Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel and a market analyst in New York City [...] [Posted: 25 Jul 2010]
Big Freedia and Galactic at the Fillmore from Big Freedia on Vimeo. As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing. Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity [...] [Posted: 24 Jul 2010]
Two years ago, I posted about CodeIgniter‘s “Disallowed Key Characters” error message, and one possible cause. Recently, I stumbled across another cause: disallowed characters in a POST array. In my case, I had single-quotes as part of the variable name. My fingers mixed up PHP array syntax and HTML form syntax. <!-- will cause the [...] [Posted: 21 Jul 2010]
We often talk about how stories change the world, but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed. Writer Elif Shafak in her TED talk The Politics of Fiction (embedded below). Shafak was prosecuted for her novel about a family’s women set against [...] [Posted: 19 Jul 2010]
Elaine Brown, a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. I attended a screening of 41st & Central last night, as part of the National Black Arts Festival. It’s a quite moving documentary about the rise of the Los Angeles branch of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, especially [...] [Posted: 17 Jul 2010]
I’ve avoided the temptation to say that, in the United States, poverty is white. It’s true, however, that there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks. While a larger percentage of the African-American population lives in poverty, the sheer number of poor whites — 24.1 million — overwhelms the number of poor blacks — 12.1 million. (Interestingly, there are also more poor [...] [Posted: 16 Jul 2010]
it’s increasingly obvious that western colonial expansion was about people wanting to get drunk, get high, and get rich. Jason to me in an instant message conversation after I mentioned that I had my first pisco sour last night. It’s a yummy drink. That’s also a true statement. Also see On sugar, rum and the [...] [Posted: 16 Jul 2010]