If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m using plugins!” the reply from support is to disable them immediately and see if the trouble goes away. That’s a problem.

What’s worse, if the plugins are maintained by a third party (often the case), there’s no telling whether or not they’ll exist when the next version of the base software is released, or whether they’ll be supported in future versions of the software.

Two examples that touch my daily life are Firefox, and …

UPDATE - 2008-06-23 - A member of O’Reilly’s editing team commented that this privilege has *NOT* been discontinued, and all O’Reilly authors should receive a free Safari account. Thanks a bunch, Mary, for the clarification (see comments for more).

I learned from one of the authors of the recently released second (read: first, squared) edition of High Performance MySQL that O’Reilly apparently did away with the idea of giving O’Reilly book authors free Safari accounts. Lame.

I do not know why in the world they would discontinue this offering for authors. Perhaps they’re not aware, but a great many of the O’Reilly authors are also bloggers. Tech bloggers. Some of them write on the O’Reilly blogs themselves, but …

All right! In the past, some books seem to be delayed in getting into O’Reilly’s Safari site, but on the day that Baron announces the book’s arrival, I find that I’m able to access it in Safari right now! Sweet!

If you haven't heard of Digsby yet, you have probably been living in some kind of a virtual cave or have no friends. Digsby is a multi-network instant messenger application, similar to Trillian, Pidgin (GAIM), or Miranda. I said 'similar', so what makes Digsy special? Reviews I read so far don't give the real reasons and don't dive into the features in depth. Instead, you get a standard load of marketing BS and in the end to you, the user, Digsby may end up being "yet another IM program." Some reviews describe certain features, but so far I haven't seen one that highlighted THE MAIN REASON why Digsby is different. And may I preface it with: finally somebody got a clue. I never before wanted to write about any other IM client, which already indicates that on the "this is the most awesome meter ever" meter, Digsby is floating somewhere at the top. …

I’m going to OSCON in July, and I know that just about everyone I know who is a participant in this crazy life we call IT (or web 2.0, or whatever it’s called now), is flying to a conference or something in 2008. I’m starting to notice more and more posts like this one, so if you can avoid it, don’t put anything in a checked bag that you can’t afford to lose, and avoid US Airways, and pass it on, because when you see the list of things they don’t cover in their lost baggage policy, you’ll suddenly feel like you’re lucky to still have anything you ever checked with your bags.

This rocks. It’s not complete, but Pyshards is the closest thing I’ve seen to a real attempt at making a more or less generic sharding toolkit, written in Python. This is not just great because it’s written in Python or because it helps people who need sharding capabilities in MySQL. It’s great because having a toolkit to use for this benefits the community by creating a point of reference for how to get things done, and can help unite those who are treading into this territory and help them all get a leg up on this beast that is “sharding”.

I, for one, have found ways (so far) to avoid having to do this. It’s a good bit of complexity for data that would otherwise be very simple, and an infrastructure architecture that would otherwise also be simple (by design). But one of the things that makes sharding seem complex is that there aren’t any …

Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a tech bibliophile.

I have owned more books covering more technologies than I care to admit. Some of my more technical friends have stood in awe of the number of tech books I own. I am also constantly rotating old books that almost *can’t* be useful anymore out of my collection because there’s just no room to keep them all, and it would be an almost embarrassingly large collection if not for the fact that I have no shame or guilt associated with my need for dead trees.

If you need further proof:

• I have, on more than one occasion, suggested to my wife that we take a walk around our local mall so I could browse the computer section of the book store, not to buy, but just to keep up with the new titles and stuff.
• Ok, I usually buy.
• I also go into book stores whenever I’m out of town to get a comparison of what seems to be popular in different areas of the …

I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.

You then virtually walk the city, looking around, without actually moving an inch (looking for the closest ATM, restaurant, etc, hint-hint?).

Without further ado, let's have a look at this video from Google's I/O Conference for a demonstration?

    This video …

Startups are pretty fascinating. I work for a startup, and one of my good friends works for another startup. I’ve also worked for 2 other startups, one during the first “bubble”, and another one a few years later. Oh my, how the world of web startups has changed in that time!

1999: You must have funding

The first startup I was ever involved in was a web startup. It was an online retailer. They were starting from nothing. My friend (a former coworker from an earlier job) had saved for years to get this idea off the ground. He was able to get a few servers, some PCs for the developers he hired, and he got the cheapest office space in all of NYC (but it still managed to be a really cool space, in a way that only NYC can pull off), and he hosted every single service required to run the web site in-house. If I recall correctly, he had a web and database server on one machine, and I believe the primary DNS server was on an old …