darron froese

System administration, tricks and tips from an old school web-hacker.

The Ad Contrarian - Social Media's Massive Failure | Hmm - interesting.

The idea behind the program was that you, the consumer, got to engage with Pepsi by voting for the "Refresh" projects you deemed most worthy. There were also other opportunities to engage through an enormous online effort -- Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, website, blogs. Millions of dollars were also spent in what might be called "traditional advertising in support of social media." Skeptics (such as yours truly) have been eagerly awaiting a report card on this initiative as it is the first real test case for a major brand implementing a massive transfer of marketing resources from traditional advertising to social media.

Why you should be weird « Scott Berkun | More on the site - love it.

They told Van Gogh he used too much paint, and Englebart that the mouse was pointless. Galileo and Copernicus were called heretics for seeing the world for what it was. Dylan and Guthrie were told they couldn’t sing and that they had nothing to say. DaVinci’s helicopters and Tesla’s radio waves stayed in notebooks for years, as the ideas were too weird for ordinary minds to understand. via scottberkun.com

Difficult or Not, Follow Your Convictions - Tech News and Analysis | This is very cool.

Bill had been in San Francisco after attending the TED Conference. After our little lunch, he told me he was going to go home. For you and me, jumping on a plane would have been the normal course of action. Not for him; he doesn’t fly. “When I became an environmental diplomat, I took a stand not to fly again until we plant the trees we need to re-balance the planet,” he said.

An Atomic Rant « Nate Wiger vs Software | Race conditions aren't very fun.

Bottom line: Any operation that can alter a value must return that value in the same operation for it to be atomic. If you do a separate get then set, or set then get, you’re open to a race condition. There are very few systems that support an “increment and return” type operation, and Redis is one of them (Oracle sequences are another). via nateware.com

Making life easier with GIT SHAs in your HTTP Headers | Read the comments too.

Do you know what code is running on your servers? Perhaps someone deployed something in a weird way and circumvented your normal deploy-logging process. Maybe you suspect an application server didn't actually restart. Maybe you just want to know quickly because you're lazy. My answer to this question has been adding the Git SHA of the currently running code to the HTTP headers of my app via blog.andrewvc.com

A few decent Redis links - found some good stuff here this weekend.

http://simonwillison.net/static/2010/redis-tutorial/ http://www.scribd.com/doc/33531219/Redis-Presentation http://redis.io/topics/twitter-clone http://masonoise.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/updated-redis-cheat-sheet/ http://rediscookbook.org/index.html http://blog.mjrusso.com/2010/10/17/redis-from-the-ground-up.html

A List Apart - Articles - A Checklist for Content Work | Some good principles here.

In content strategy, there is no playbook of generic strategies you can pick from to assemble a plan for your client or project. Instead, our discipline rests on a series of core principles about what makes content effective—what makes it work, what makes it good. Content may need to have other qualities to work within a particular project, but this list is limited to qualities shared across all sorts of content.

Cypress CEO Responds to Nun's Urging a 'Politically Correct' Board Make - up | Love this guy.

A search based on these criteria usually yields a male who is 50-plus years old, has a Masters degree in an engineering science, and has moved up the managerial ladder to the top spot in one or more corporations. Unfortunately, there are currently few minorities and almost no women who chose to be engineering graduate students 30 years ago. (That picture will be dramatically different in 10 years, due to the greater diversification of graduate students in the '80s.