August 2011
9 posts
I hate to be so timely, but I saw a Steve Jobs quote today that I like.
When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the...
Few ideas in history have been more widely repeated, debated and dissected than the following three words:
Cogito ergo sum.
This was the philosophy of Rene Descartes. I think therefore I am.
THE GOOD NEWS IS: I am not going to attempt to debate this philosophy.
Instead, I’ve adopted Rene Descartes’ formula and developed a few rationalist philosophies of my own:
1. I write therefore I know....
Chad Valley – Up & Down →
The Vaccines – Wetsuit →
The Antlers – No Widows →
Tweet
Dear Photograph, I fell in love with a woman. I’m not ready to let go…but she is. McKenzie Dillingham
Kanye West – All Of The Lights →
I first became interested in decision making more than a decade ago, back when I was running marketing at Business Objects. My interest was prompted by the evolution of taglines among BI vendors. In the early days, taglines were descriptive like First in Enterprise Decision Support or The Enterprise Data Mart Company.
Over time, pressure mounted on marketing to pitch benefits — the message...
July 2011
2 posts
Bon Iver – Beth / Rest →
Today we’re launching a brand new product called Intercom—a tool to help web app owners build and manage relationships with their users.
It’s all about relationships
Some time in early 2010 I wandered into a little Dublin coffee shop that seemed to sprout up out of nowhere. It was run by first-time business owner Colin Harmon. Through Colin’s friendly, open approach, he turned a random punter...
June 2011
2 posts
When you are considering technology selection or strategy, there are a lot of factors that can each have bearing on the final decision — a whole lot. Below is a very partial list.
In almost any IT decision, there are a number of environmental constraints that need to be acknowledged. Organizations may have standard vendors, favored vendors, or simply vendors who give them particularly deep...
The Journey
Today, I am proud to announce the launch of Lytro and share our plans to bring an amazing new kind of camera to the consumer market.
This journey started for me eight years ago when I was in the PhD program at Stanford University. I loved photography then as I do now, but I was frustrated and puzzled by the apparent limitations of cameras. For example, I remember trying to take...
May 2011
4 posts
Lia Ices – After Is Always Before →
Lykke Li – I Follow Rivers →
This is the second post in our series about raising your profile in the web industry. Be sure to check out Ryan’s first post, about how to get a conference speaking slot.
I was super excited when Ryan mentioned that he would be writing a series about raising your profile in the web community. It’s something we’ve all dealt with at some point, right? How do I get my name and ideas in front of...
Shared by joeharris76
Apple did release a netbook (11’ MacBook Air) they just didn’t bother to give it a netbook price. :-)
Todd Bishop, on Microsoft’s quarterly results: In its quarterly filing, Microsoft indicated that the consumer PC
market was the primary culprit for the decline — pointing in
particularly to a 40 percent decline in netbook sales in the
consumer market.
40...
April 2011
6 posts
One of the goals for the Mozilla metrics team for ages has been to provide open data to the community. It never happened so far mainly due to lack of resources and different prioritization. However, that will change! During last quarter we worked on a tool to give users better insight on their contributions to the Mozilla project. David Eaves did a great blog post describing the entire...
Julian Hyde and his cohorts on the Mondrian project have been busy at work for nearly 5 years (spec 0.5 done in 2006!) working on the difficult, but worthwhile effort of standardizing client side access to OLAP in Java.
They just released version 1.0! This is a big deal; bigger players have attempted and failed at this before (ahem JOLAP). Kudos to Julian, Luc and the others involved to get such...
I have been talking about the notion that “the data must find the data and the relevance must find the user” for some time now.
Another way to think about this is “the data is the question.”
As each new piece of data arrives in the enterprise, the enterprise just learned something. And with each new observation one should ask, “How does this relate to what I already know?...
Experts go with what they know. And they’ll often insist something needs to take a long time. But when you don’t have tons of resources, you need to ask if there’s a simpler, judo way to get the impact you desire. Sometimes there’s a better way than the “best” way. I thought of this while watching “The Fighter” over the weekend. There’s a making of extra on the DVD where Mark Wahlberg, who starred...
Nice touch from LinkedIn - http://ping.fm/JD2rD
From an email to me this week. Quoted with permission.
I’ve been doing this ‘data analyst’ thing for almost a decade now and I’m not even sure I’m doing it right. Does anyone really know what a data analyst is? I’m a Microsoft Access guy that got lucky and learned SQL from a bunch of very sharp devs. Then I got lucky again when I met [name withheld] and discovered [name of tool withheld]. Now...
March 2011
1 post
When, when will someone write a novel about business intelligence? I can see it now. Amazon will try to sell me From Here to Analysis, Data in the Afternoon, and Lolita, DBA.
But titles are easy. Writing the novel might be tough, since the author would have to run on sheer imagination. There’s no apparent intrigue. The BI crowd plays it safe. Forget sex. The BI crowd works too hard. Forget...
January 2011
1 post
Problems w/ AT
November 2010
3 posts
listening to "Band of Skulls - Blood" →
Did anyone else (in the UK) notice this song in “True Blood” last night? Loving Band of Skulls right now!
Wish me luck => 1st interview tomorrow. BI Architect role with a promising local web startup. Could be good.
listening to "Arcade Fire - Sprawl (Flatland)" →
“Well where do you kids live?” “Well sir, if you only knew what the answer is worth, been searching every corner of the earth.”
October 2010
1 post
listening to "Audioslave - What You Are" →
And when you asked for light I set myself on fire
September 2010
14 posts
Kettle community is awesome. E.g. kettle-cookbook doc gen from @rolanbouman
Hilarious email from recruiter: “SQL Server ETL Consultant… Role Requirements… 2:1 degree… from a top 50 British University” » ROFLMAO
Does *anyone* have the new Twitter yet?
#lazyweb Dear Twitter: Looking for research regarding effect of animal milk on human development. Suspect ‘paleo diet’ is BS, need backup.
On a Mac? Using Chrome? Tired of PDFs opening Preview? Go here: chrome://plugins Now enable ‘Chrome PDF Viewer’. You’re welcome. :)
The #1 problem with IT vendors is that they have *no story*. When I go to their sites I have no idea why the exist beyond BS buzzword bingo
Wishlist: I want TINYINTs in my fact tables for very low values, but I need them to calculate correctly over billons of rows. I want VARINT!
This post started with a conversation I overhead while walking on a sidewalk. I didn’t want to hear it, but they were very loud. I’ll spare you the details. It did get me thinking about these two lists: first why, and then why not to start your own business.
First, a note about the outcome and the impact of the outcome. You don’t know for sure, as you start the process of building your own...
MySQL :: Using XML in MySQL 5.1 and 6.0 →
In this article, we discuss the XML functionality available in MySQL, with an emphasis on new features coming online in MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 6.0. We assume that you already have a working knowledge of…
An Introduction to XSLT →
XSLT allows you to create formatting structures which interpret and modify the existing XML elements. Learn about the syntax of XSLT elements, how the namespace attribute differs depending on the…
RT @mhoye: “Homeopathic Supervillain Puts Nothing In Town Water Supply”. (In case you missed this gem yesterday…)
Economist Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias is wondering who should exist? and the ways in which our future creations can pay to exist. He writes, [C]onsider the question, “Which creatures should be created?” in a future where factories can make a wide range of creatures. This situation might arise with whole brain emulation, or advanced genetic engineering. Imagine a supply-and-demand world where...
The results are in, and at the Eigenbase developer meetup last Wednesday, we officially selected the new logo+mascot (above) for the LucidDB project! Bears are awesome. I have a funny story about an encounter with one in Yosemite from when I was ten years old, but I can’t tell you about it here, so ask me about it next time you see me. The meetup was great—a lot of people managed to...
listening to "The Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #4 (7... →
Time keeps creepin’ through the neighborhood / Killing old folks, wakin’ up babies / Just like we knew it would.
August 2010
22 posts
No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
- Sir Frederick G. Banting
Git Reference →
ZOMG! Have you seen MySQL Workbench? I frickin’ love it. It’s early days but it could be my favourite SQL tool ever. Slick. Visual WHO-dio?!
Big Data? - I’m actually much more interested in “Little Data”; all those lost islands of information waiting for a bridge or a boat…
re Google’s hubris - Search is nowhere near optimised. SEO ‘spam’ is rampant (can you say Demand Media?). Their incentives have been twisted
re Google’s hubris - Paul Graham’s latest re Yahoo http://bit.ly/bJTjft is relevant to Google. IMHO keyword prices are 2-3x rational values.
listening to "Arcade Fire - Ready to Start" →
@joeharris76: “This is my new theme tune…”