An Associative Database

About a year and a half ago, I wanted a metadata database (or metabase), where I could collect all my notes about songs I’ve listened to and pictures I’ve taken.
The idea is that the photo and its associated notes are both data (metadata is also data). It’s important not to loose any of them. The [...]

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Twitter Updates on Google Reader

I’m one of the unlucky people living in far-away places that don’t get Twitter updates via SMS. Recently, Twitter activity has increased among some of my friends, so I wanted to get updates without having to remember to visit the site (I’m lazy that way).
Long story short, the “friends_timeline” RSS feed that twitter offers is [...]

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Wacom Bamboo and Debian

I’ve just purchased a new toy: the Wacom Bamboo tablet. Without any modifications, the tablet behaves in X like a (very slow) touchpad.
Luckily, kernel and xorg drivers are available, though support is not mature yet (I was expecting some gnome configuration tool).
Installing a Wacom Bamboo on Debian testing:
A. Install the following packages:
Packages that should be [...]

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The Sentient Teeples (or Tin Peoples)

Robert X. Cringley writes:
We’re talking about tin whiskers, single crystals that mysteriously grow from pure tin joints but not generally from tin-lead solder joints. Nobody knows how or why these whiskers grow and nobody knows how to stop them, except through the use of lead solder. Whiskers can start growing in a decade or a [...]

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Too Many Bookmarks

TMB (Too Many Bookmarks) is my homepage script. It is intended to give quick access to my most frequently used bookmarks, from any computer I may be using. I used to have a wiki page that did this, but now TMB allows me to easily add bookmarks, assign their category, and (roughly) order them.
It is [...]

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Metadata and Tagging

We used to write important information on the back of photographs. Today they are digital, but we would still like to remember, years from now, where who and what is in those photos we took.
Wrestling the information into the filename might be a good idea. It assures us that the metadata (descriptive info) is copied [...]

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Cult movie I want to see: The Room

The Room (imdb) is a movie in the “so bad it’s good” category. Not having seen it yet, just reading the reviews in imdb and seeing the clips on Mahalo Daily got me giddy with excitement. I love how the interviewer managed to keep a straight face throughout the interview, except at the very end.
Comment [...]

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Bookmooch’s Search Engine

[Illustration credit Andrice Arp, courtesy of BookMooch.com]
Regarding my previous post about Twitter’s database architecture and scaling, here’s a post about bookmooch.com’s scaling troubles (bookmooch is a book swapping site).
Bookmooch had a search engine for books, using a single table that indexed each word in a book’s title/author/etc. This system was very efficient for searching (one [...]

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Funny names

Out of boredom:

Name for a site (only Hebrew speakers will get this): vayehi.org
Name for a girl: lolcat

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Joe Rogan about DMT

Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is the alleged molecule that the brain produces during REM sleep that causes us to dream. Rogan claims in the video below that sleep is a psychedelic experience and that taking DMT allows you to experience that. One side-effect is that, just like regular dreams, you quickly forget the experience once [...]

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