Monthly Archives: February 2009

Component Diagrams, 2.0 Style

I was designing a high-level architectural slide for a client presentation and was looking for a way to best represent individual components in the system. My goal was to enumerate the components; I did not need to show the interactions … Continue reading

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What’s Missing from Amazon’s EC2 Service

Okay, if I was going to answer that, this article would be too long.  There are a two key features missing that cause a bit of pain: Static internal IP addresses – They offer elastic IP addresses for external interface, … Continue reading

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I/O Performance in Amazon’s EC2

In Amazon’s EC2 environment, users have 5 server configurations to choose from.  The Small Instance and the High-CPU Medium Instance both list the value of Moderate for the I/O Performance, whereas the the other three instance types list High.  So, … Continue reading

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The Lemmings of Twitter

I do not use auto-followers for Twitter.  I look at each one and decide if I will follow the twiticate policy of following people that follow you.  I will generally follow anyone that follows me except if they are spammers.  … Continue reading

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How I update my status

I have long said, Twitter is not a product, it’s a feature.  (Although the general population is not listening to me.)  Since several sites now support some type of status, I wanted an easy way to update them at once.  … Continue reading

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Bad Timing of a Retrospective

During the last sprint, we made a critical error in planning our meetings.  Due to time constraints and people’s schedules, we scheduled the Sprint Retrospective for the last sprint after the Sprint Planning meeting for the next sprint.  The retrospective … Continue reading

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CouchDB

CouchDB is a document-oriented database allowing you to store semi-structured data.  Written in Erlang, CouchDB provides a simple API access via RESTful web services.  The basics are analogous to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) where you can store and retrieve … Continue reading

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Dealing with negative social media

At the UGCX conference there were a handful of companies in the crowd that had little exposure to social media.  There seemed to be a fog of fear that users would make disparaging remarks about their brands.  You will have … Continue reading

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Fostering Innovation

When I was at eHarmony, they wanted to transform the company to a culture of innovation.  They did not succeed.  This is not something that can be proclaimed to declared.  There are three things that need to exist to foster … Continue reading

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The best design…

At the last Hadoop user conference, one the committers mentioned that the success of the project was largely attributed to the fact they were all able to keep the design in their head.  How complex is your design?

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