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devopstomon In memory of Aaron Swartz: a collection of PDFs from PDFtribute

We're working with the creator of edward.io to get some kind of integration between the two sites, and also working on a search/index/analysis tool for pdftribute.net

devopstomon PDFtribute website with links scraped from Twitter

We're working on the search implementation. It will be available soon.

devopstomon A letter to my daughter, Augusta, in ruby

Hey, it's Open Source, right? LICENSE seems to confirm this.

devopstomon When I first heard the name "Safari"

I usually start projects on github, and allow the random name chooser to make that decision for me..

    "Great repository names are short and memorable. Need inspiration? How about drunken-nemesis."

devopstomon Moonbase: A plug and play engine for making web animations

Have you considered Login with Facebook/Twitter using Oauth? I hate creating user accounts on different sites, and I'm sure I'm not alone here.

devopstomon Ask HN: Who works in the VFX/CG industry?

I used to, but then the crunch hit the london VFX scene, and I was made redundant. I'd love to get back to a VFX company.

StudioSysadmins is a good place for VFX ops guys.

devopstomon Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear a School-Issued RFID Tracker

Wear it, but not before putting it in a microwave oven for a minute on high.

devopstomon The Nuclear Scientist Who Skipped College

Reminded me vaguely of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn The Radioactive Boy Scout..

devopstomon Over-specialization is the curse of our profession

I disagree too.

I've tried many a time over the years to do good front-end work (especially where web apps are concerned), and I've concluded that I suck at it. Really. The things I find appealing are entirely orthogonal to the rest of the world, especially that cool school of UX engineers. I'm generally content with synchronous http requests, and adding Ajax is always an afterthought.

As a result, I stopped making crap websites for people. I started making nice backends, and who doesn't love a nice backend(?).

Everyone (especially me) is a lot happier when I'm not breaking the look and feel of a site/app/application/product, and I'm a lot happier when I don't have to care how it looks. I'll provide an API, and some other person can make it look good. That's the way the world works.

Asking everyone to be a full-stack engineer is a nice pipe dream, but consider the same in other professions. You'd be asking neurosurgeons to know the same level of detail as dermatologists, and vice versa. You'd be asking a Professor of Particle Physics to understand tertiary protein folding (as his biological counterpart might).

There is no such thing as "overspecialisation", only oversimplification of the job at hand.

devopstomon Show HN: Musical Markov Chain Generator

I've been playing with Musical Markov Chains in the last 3 days. This is what I've made. http://musikov.twinhelix.org/

It takes a midi file (you upload it), and creates a markov chain represented as a directed graph.

Things it doesn't do very well: polyphony, chords (this will be in the next release), the processing queue representation is weird. I'll fix that one day. Maybe.

Inspired by http://xkcd.com/851/, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4671687 and Bioinformatics, in a rather roundabout way.

Not bad for 3 days work. Technologies used: Python Django Pusher Celery Supervisord

devopstomon Show HN: Lyric Graph Generator

I could if I stored them. I should really do that. If you append .dot to the name of the svg file, then you can grab the raw graphviz file.. There's no database behind it all really.. I didn't think that far ahead (and largely forgot about it until just now).

devopstomon Show HN: Lyric Graph Generator

The "R Kelly" thread reminds me of a thing I wrote after XKCD's Na comic. This also uses graphviz to generate SVGs showing the path through a song's lyrics. Lighter coloured blobs are more frequently mentioned, and there's an option to compare two songs for similarities in their lyrics.

devopstomon Show HN: GoScale Cloud Scaling in Milliseconds

Yeah, you can do that too..

devopstomon Show HN: GoScale Cloud Scaling in Milliseconds

Actually..

If you had all of the instance data stored on a fast SAN, so that it was available to all of the hosts simultaneously (possible.)

And you had an ultra-high speed interconnect (40Gbit Infiniband would do) between hosts, for sharing the memory state when you migrate..

4GB of memory, at 40Gbit/s would be transferred in 0.8s. (assuming perfect throughput, all cows are spherical, etc..)

devopstomon BRANDiD - sweet onboarding process

http://cl.ly/image/3z33443u2P0Z Where's the "Do I look like I give a toss about football?" button? Seriously. I thought we'd gotten past gender-profiling and stereotypes back in the 90s.

devopstomon Illegal Engineering

I hadn't previously seen this video, but it's a great insight into his slot machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9mkhI-KB_U