Tue 13 January 2015 | -- (permalink)

This post is about how to publish data from Postgres in more-or-less real time. Understanding why I would want to do that will require telling a story...

Once Upon a Time

Our survey system began life at a company named Polimetrix in Palo Alto in the mid aughts. Polimetrix got …

Mon 08 December 2014 | -- (permalink)

These are some notes to help myself remember the basic usage and mechanics of overlayfs, as well as explain them to others.

These steps are performed in an Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) Vagrant box, which comes with OverlayFS support out of the box.

First make 3 folders:

```

mkdir base_folder

mkdir …

Sun 16 November 2014 | -- (permalink)

This is the first post on my new Pelican-driven blog (I was on WordPress before). So far, I like it.

Fri 18 January 2013 | -- (permalink)

The internet is in an uproar over the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz and the federal prosecution that helped push him to it. My thoughts:

• I first heard about the suicide on Reddit, on a Python community thread named something like "Author of web.py framework found dead".
• There was …

Thu 08 November 2012 | -- (permalink)

Puerto Rico just approved a non-binding initiative to become a state. The next step is Congressional approval. I hope it happens.

Sun 14 October 2012 | -- (permalink)

This is my bug. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Tue 09 October 2012 | -- (permalink)

Auto Dealers Whine That Tesla Stores Are Illegal

States have varying laws around auto dealerships, ostensibly to protect consumers. Conveniently for existing dealers, these old laws also protect them from competition disruptive startups. Tesla has found a way around that. Regardless of whether Tesla's approach is illegal in some states …

Tue 31 July 2012 | -- (permalink)

A shocking story from the New York Times. Caution: contains strong imagery.

Sat 16 June 2012 | -- (permalink)

A persuasive argument from the Economist that outdated, burdensome regulations are the more serious constraint on innovation than the absence, as Tyler Cowen would say, of "low hanging fruit."

Fri 10 February 2012 | -- (permalink)

The conventional wisdom these days is that you ought to minify your CSS in order to reduce the amount of data sent over the wire and reduce the load time of your page. In practice, minification means stripping out whitespace and comments, which are useful for human readers but unnecessary …