Monday, October 13, 2008

OpenSolaris at SmugMug

Don MacAskill has written about his experiences with Solaris and OpenSolaris at SmugMug. Most recently about his experiences using MySQL and OpenSolaris as a slave in one of SmugMug's production database clusters. Today Don published an update on MySQL, InnoDB and ZFS compression.

You may now be saying to yourself, yes but other people have posted about this already, and you would be correct. Aside from being interesting articles the second article uses a picture I took during the setup of network.com in Las Vegas :)

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Going to the start of the Marathon wish me luck

Race starts in 24 minutes...

Heading out to meet my pace group now. My support crew is here and ready to go.

The voice of the baby just wised me luck

Friday, October 10, 2008

Baltimore Marathon Live Tracking

The Marathon will have live results including split times somewhere on the Baltimore Marathon Site or at Active.com. I don't know for sure and I won't be checking from the course.

For all of you that follow me on twitter, you are obviously waiting for updates with baited breath, I haven't had the time to work out a way to update that I am sure won't end up as spam.
Instamapper is showing you the last time I had GPS Tracker running, when I ran 20 miles of the course in baltimore, but will update as soon as I start it back up on Saturday.

Non-Embedded: http://www.instamapper.com/ext?key=7514930745553215930
Mobile Tracking: http://mobile.instamapper.com/ext?key=7514930745553215930
GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com (Reload page for updates)

I will be wearing bib number Shawn (1117), my sisters Emily (21796) and Karina (31683) will both be running the Baltimore Half Marathon. I also run with a Garmin 305, after the race I will have detailed track information which I view with Ascent from Montebello Software. Ascent allows me to view my pace, heart rate and supporting data with a replay function to view recorded data with a map overlay.
After the race I will upload the recorded course to mapmyrun.com

Friday, October 3, 2008

Goose Grade, seriously?

What is Goose Grade?

Paraphrased from the video and my reading. Crowd-sourced (do people still say crowd-sourced?) review/editing of blog content. I have added the goose grade chicklet to my blog. It seems as if it has potential, particularly given my generally bad grammar/punctuation and spelling.

Suggestions for improvement

  • excerpt post title in goosegrade.com feed
  • excerpt feed needs to link to individual article not top level site
  • excerpt feed needs to ignore non-primary content feeds
    • alternately allow users to specify/override for the appropriate feed
  • excerpt feed needs to not post errors such as 403 or javascript problems
  • excerpt feed per-article images should be part of the article, not the first/only image on the page
  • excerpt feed I feel no desire to comment on the goosegrade.com site, it doesn't foster or enhance the conversation around a particular post
  • excerpt feed I am unable to see the value in the link to the goosegrade excerpt
  • console sliding animation is attractive but I am unsure that it enhances use
  • console drop downs truncate long site names
  • console/excerpt "Name of site" isn't especially useful as the target of the excerpt link
  • most pages would benefit from a more results/next page link
  • console I would expect website name to link to the user provided URL e.g. "blogs.sun.com/yakshaving" not blogs.sun.com as above, If I had used Yakshaving as the name instead would I have been presented with a broken link?
  • search shawn ferry (no quotes) seems likely to have matched shawnferry, but it doesn't
  • search does not seem to search inside user profile content
  • generated html should include alt and title text to help explain what goosegrade is and why someone might want to click (I made some up)

Please feel free to give it a shot by clicking on the goosegrade chicklet in the side bar (or the one I included specifically in this post).