Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still. Even so, the data deluge is already starting to transform business, government, science and everyday life (see our special report in this issue).
This highly manual process is not super fun. So I wrote a quick script to take a look at my Bind configuration files and tell me who wasn't using me any more.
First of all, I had to get all of the zones from my zone files - that is a simple 1 liner:
Then I took that file and ran it through this simple Ruby script:
This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything — “Samsung SF-755p printer,” “Ed Hardy MySpace layouts,” or maybe even “capital Burkina Faso,” which just happens to share its name with this conference room.
Three mass graves were discovered in the sub district of Dubiz in Kirkuk. Announced the Kurdish daily news paper ASO on Sunday, Feb.21st. These graves are to be excavated by the Ministry of Anfaled and Martyrs of Kurdistan regional government in a near future.
“The graves are holding remnants of children from both Chamchamal and Garmyan areas”. Sayd Fazil Amin the head of KRG martyrs office in Kirkuk told ASO, these kids were taken into captivity during 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds.
A few months ago I was invited to dinner with the Geeks on a Plane crew when they stopped in Washington, and had the opportunity to meet one of my heroes, Eric Ries, author of the Startup Lessons Learned blog. His descriptions of lean startup techniques and philosophies have had a big influence on the way I design and build software.
Eric asked me what specific tools Rails developers could use when building a lean startup.
The war in Iraq will always be remembered for the failures of intelligence that preceded it and the insurgency that bedeviled coalition forces long after President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations. Amid all that disaster, the capture of Saddam Hussein has become a forgotten success story. It's an accomplishment that wasn't inevitable. In a five-part series that begins today, I'll explain how a handful of innovative American soldiers used the same theories that underpin Facebook to hunt down Saddam Hussein.
Many developments in computer science have nothing to do with the capabilities of computers, but with the way we use them.
A few years ago, an article on Airbag Industries1 inspired me to think about writing a blog with a unique design per post.
There are many benefits:
It encourages creativity both at the computer and away from it It’s like a code kata for design You can easily experiment with cutting-edge CSS3 features or just learn CSS2 You’ll learn how to build a style foundation for other designs in other applications On the downside, it takes more time than simply writing prose.
The only way to prevent a catastrophe, according to Johnson and Boone, is to cut deficits back and reform the financial system to avoid future hanky-panky. But neither is very optimistic it can be done. The actors benefiting from the short term bubbles are simply too powerful to keep anyone from wresting control of the wheel. And if the reformers ever succeed the money men will simply corrupt them all over again.
The world of scalable databases is not a simple one. They come in every race, creed, and color. Rick Cattell has brought some harmony to that world by publishing High Performance Scalable Data Stores, a nicely detailed one stop shop paper comparing scalable databases soley on the content of their character. Ironically, the first step in that evaluation is dividing the world into four groups:
Key-value stores: Redis, Scalaris, Voldmort, and Riak.
Who do you look up to in business? I'm going to shoot big. Richard Branson.
We flew Virgin here.
He was a great influence on me -- very young, reading an article with him about the simplicity of when you do everything yourself, you're a millionaire. When you inspire an army around you to do everything for you, you're a billionaire. You know? And I think that was a big turning point for me personally in the sense of like, man, you create and manage and creatively build a vision, and then you hunt down the strongest, brightest, most driven people to help push each one individually.