Last night was Yuri’s Night 2007, and it was pretty cool. It was held at a hanger in the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. Ihave some pictures here, but for actually good pictures go checkoutLaughing Squid’s post on the night. The tour of Ames Research Centerwas very cool it included the ArcJet, Columbia super comptuer, and Future Flight Central.

Gopal recently blogged about ways to minimize your value to the company. The last item on the list being “Contribute to an open source project”, stating:

Assume your full time job involves working on an open source project. Now answer me this, “what *competitive* advantage does your work bring to this company ?”. After all the code that you write automatically becomes available to everybody - irrespective of who paid for the development costs. Code thus released drops to near zero value and ergo, the process of creating it …

While I enjoy the humor in the post, and the fact that there is some truth to the above, I would say that I’ve seen substantial benefits to having persons within your company dedicated in part or full to working on open source projects. This makes the assumption that your company in fact uses said project of course. (not all these are great arguments to the above, just thoughts on the matter). (please also take note of Gopal’s PS update.)

• Internal Know-how: You company gains internal knowledge about the inner workings of the open source projects your company relies on. This is useful for when the shit breaks, and you need to fix it… like right now.
• Customize: While it’s not always contributed back, having someone work on a project lends itself to customizations for performance or other gains that reside within the company or are made available as patches because they are too risky or custom for inclusion within a standard project distribution. PHP is good example of this, with a number of patches that have been proposed, not accetped, but still made available for other’s use. Facebook also has a number of internal changes to PHP that aren’t proper for inclusion within PHP itself. (while this doesn’t always adress the Gopal’s point, I think you can see where there’s a grey area of an individuals ability to do this based upon their past work with a project).
• Quid pro quo: A number of open source projects that save companies a significant amount of money and development costs are often (but not always) the sumation of contributions made by a large body of individiduals and individuals within companies. For this type of cooperative work to continue, you need to make contributions back. You may not see the direct tradeoff for your work, but you’ll definitely build up some karma that you’ve probably already cashed out on or may in the future
• Many eyes are better than one: When working on changes to an open source project, or creating something new, it’s often nice to have it reviewed before you put it into use for everyone to see (and possibly laugh at). It’s even better if you get it reviewed by your co-workers, your co-developers, and get it in about a hundred other peoples production environment before you decide it’s stable enough to use. It’s also great when they fix something before you do, simply because you decided to show it to them.
• Come work for us: in silicon valley it’s important to have a name that draws in top tallent. Part of this name recognizition is working on really cool shit, and making this cool shit open source. Letting people know that you’re part of a community and not a nameless corporation is a big selling point for building to notch development team.

Item number 2 was “Write a technical blog”, I better go shave %1 off of PHP runtime to make up for this…

I’ve been neglecting some technical problems with QuailPress 0.1.1, but thanks to some help from a couple users it’s now fixed. The latest version 0.1.3 includes the following changes:

• added a share button without text (per David Stickel)
• linked author name to tekrat.com (per David Stickel)
• removed white border from share image (per David Stickel)
• corrected version display under options tab
• added html source display option
• fixed bug keeping options tab from being displayed (thank you Andrew, and David Stickel)

I’m delighted that the next version of APC has been released, it’s been a little while since a new package was made and it’s a good opportunity to get everything back into sync especially in determining which bugs are still causing problems for people. There are a number of changes and fixes from Rasmus, Gopal, Ilia, Wez, Bjori and myself. I’m interested to see how the new locking methods work out for people, specifically pthread mutex vs. spin locks (spin locks from the Postgres project). I’ll try to get some benchmarks of my own completed in the comming week.

So I’ve been going through a lot of different in ear headphones lately and I think I’ve settled on the Shure E3C’s. I initially had a pair of middle level Etymotic’s and they where satisfactory, but shorted out after a year of use. I then upgraded to the highest end Etymotics and was very disappointed, the earpieces where too large and wouldn’t stay in my ear as the long barrel shaped ear piece would get pull down too easily. Oh and the sound quality was shit. I then opted in for the Shure E3C’s and the hardware and sound quality are considerably better. The design is great, they are comfortable, and the sound quality is several degrees better then the highest end Etymotics. I’ve only had them for about a month, so we’ll see how they hold up. A close friend has had the high end Shures for well over a year now with no problems and exceptional quality.  More images can be found in my gallery.

I just read the Wired article on the Pleo, and I can’t wait. This is the latest invention from the creator of the Furby, and it sounds much more interesting! Their page states that they’ll start taking order requests on Feb. 3rd, I hope to get one as I missed out on the Furby craze and I can’t stand taking care of an animal. Seems like this is a good half way point. Besides I just like getting my hands on cool new “toys”. Doesn’t it look cute in a miniture prehistoric big lizard kinda way?

I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend on my statistics lately. Specifically search engine keyword searches that lead people to my site.

I’m not sure where “guy tied” or “american pie” came from. Really I don’t know. But it seems like I should start to focus my blog on more information about cute gay boys than anything technical, although dirvish and the facebook book seem to score pretty high as well. Perhaps it’s time for a new theme “gay boy tech”. Makes it sound like borg porn, but whatever sells.

I’ve put up a very early version of QuailPress. It’s a WordPress plugin for Facebook’s Share feature. You activate the plugin, configure some display options, then add “<?php quailpress_share(); >” wherever you want the Share button to appear (typically under each post). This is an initial shot, so it’s rough and will need some work. I’ll add some new features as I get time, please give it a try if you use WordPress. I could use some button images and suggestions/testing!

Given enough time it happens to us all. We clobber some important file we’ve been pouring ourselves over for the last 4 hours, and *poof* it’s all gone. Many companies setup regular snapshot copies of your home directory at regular intervals so when this happens you can quickly go to your snapshots and pull your lost file out of the ether. While you may only use this occasionally it’s like an insurance policy that’s really worth the regular cost.

I do a lot of work on my laptop and until now I didn’t have the luxury of regular snapshots of my work. Using a program like dirvish it’s easy to setup an automated snapshot of whatever files you want with minimal disk usage. Because dirvish uses hard links to store the incremental backups each backup copy will only consume the difference of the changed files. This way you could store multiple snapshots at a given interval without multiplying the disk usage, here’s how I did it on my Macbook, other Unix systems should be nearly identical.

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I walked down my street, past the crowds of laynard people. Past the giant projection screen showing Oracle ads. Past the street closed with the giant Oracle tent. Past the three Buildings dedicated to Oracle OpenWorld. Past the Oracle buses and Oracle bus stops. Past the posters plastered on the sidwalk. To a sliver of a cofee shop on market, where I order a medium hot earl grey tea, and I find this: