Posted by mark.
Mar
1
Posted by mark.
Having coffee at 4am after an all-nighter with my co-founder and wife a few days ago we came up with a rather obvious but interesting concept. I’ll call it The Sleep Test.
Unless your business earns revenue while you are sleeping, it won’t scale.
If you’re an I.T. consultant or lawyer selling your own time, you can’t scale.
If you’re a brick-layer who employs other brick layers and also employs a sales person, driver, accountant and all the other business components so that …
Feb
25
Posted by mark.
Just caught up with a good friend of mine who’s a tech geek and bachelor and needed some cooking advice. I’ve watched bachelor friends give themselves scurvy by getting home and ordering pizza every night. Being a tech geek makes it worse.
Your $badnessOfDiet += $levelOfAlphaGeek**3
So my wife put together the list of recipes below for him this evening. They are incredibly basic but are staples that you can make in big batches at the beginning of a week and eat …
Feb
24
Posted by mark.
Update: The Fabulis story had legs like I’ve never seen before. When I posted it to Hacker News it shot to number 1 in about 3 minutes and stayed there for 6 to 8 hours. A few hours later Robin Wauters from Techcrunch picked up on the story and since then it’s appeared everywhere from GigaOm and ValleyWag to FT.com. Citi has now issued a formal apology to Fabulis emphasizing their support of the LGBT community which you can read …
Feb
11
Posted by mark.
This morning I called in to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to answer the question “Is it fair that the Obama administration has been called anti-business”. To give you some context, I consider myself a democrat and I voted for Obama (and attended the rallies, etc)
I’ve been ruminating over the issue for most of the day. Here are a few more thoughts.
At the front of every American’s mind right now is the awful job market. America has lost more than 8 million …
Dec
30
Posted by mark.
At 09:28 on the morning of September 11, 2001, a Lebanese born engineering student named Ziad Jarrah and three “muscle” hijackers started moving the passengers of flight 93 to the rear of the plane and assaulting the cockpit of flight 93. Flights 11 and 175 had already crashed into the world trade center and flight 77 was within minutes of crashing into the Pentagon.
Two minutes after the hijacking started, passengers and crew started making phone calls to officials and family members …
Dec
1
Posted by mark.
There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails.
Here’s how you run a highly concurrent website on a shoe-string budget:
The first thing you’ll do is get a Linode server because they have the fastest CPU and disk.
Install Apache with your web application running under mod_php, mod_perl …
Nov
22
Posted by mark.
My neighbor John Winkler just emailed this to me. He took this while I was fly fishing off our dock on Lake Sammamish earlier this year.
Nov
21
Posted by mark.
About a year ago I received two old servers from Snapvine my former neighbors (now acquired by Whitepages). Snapvine got them from another startup in Seattle, I don’t recall which. I named them Rex1 and Rex2 and put them to work immediately. The graph below shows the disk activity during the last year on Rex1:
The pink stuff in the graph is the amount of time the CPU spends waiting for the disk – showing disk activity. The application on Rex1 …
Nov
20
Posted by mark.
Want to freak out your wife/husband/kids?
On a mac that you have access to:
Go to ‘System Preferences’. Under ‘Internet & Networking’ there is a ‘Sharing’ icon. Run that. In the list that appears, check the ‘Remote Login’ option.
Then ssh into your mac remotely by downloading putty if you’re on a pc or launch a terminal on another mac and run “ssh username@ip.address” without quotes to ssh to the mac while someone is working on it.
Once you’re logged in:
Crank up the volume …
Nov
11
Posted by mark.
Hold your breath for a moment.
In about 10 to 30 seconds you’ll be feeling a strong desire to take a breath. That’s not caused by lack of oxygen. It’s caused by excess carbon dioxide buildup in your blood.
[Ok you can breathe again.]
The trigger in mammals that causes us to want to take a breath is an excess buildup of CO2. In reptiles the trigger is lack of O2. Free divers don’t hyperventilate to get more O2 into their bloodstream. They …