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Monthly Archives: October 2009
Pros and cons for NoSQL
Pros:
a tornado of razorblades: SQL Databases Don’t Scale (Hacker News thread)
Cons:
Code Monkeyism: The dark side of NoSQL (Hacker News thread)
Related:
Archives of the Caml mailing list: Message from Brian Hurt
Chris Williams , Co-Curator of NoSQL East, NoSQL: A Modest Proposal
Carsonified: Should you go Beyond Relational Databases?
Relating to… Drew Barrymore?
I’m kinda surprised, but then again I don’t know enough about her personal journey. In any case, I found myself relating to her in this interview: Parade Magazine: “Drew Barrymore, America’s perkiest star, reveals The Truth Behind The Smile”:
“Were you ever secure in the fact that someone loved you?”
“No,” she says quietly. “Not yet.”
Barrymore has been married twice and has cut quite a sexual swath through Hollywood with an array of boyfriends. A serial monogamist, she always seems to come to the point at which each affair must end. Could that be because she purposely ended the most formative love of her life, the maternal one, early on?
“I’m going to call my therapist later and talk about this,” she says, trying to joke but then pausing to consider the theory. “No. I don’t have a therapist. But I think I’m going to find one now.”
“Okay. Let’s stay on the couch,” I say. “I know that long-term sobriety is the hardest thing to sustain after someone’s been in rehab. Are you completely sober?”
“No, I’m not,” she admits. “And I don’t claim to be–quite the opposite. I’ve tried to find the balance. I hope it’s balanced.”
“Would you have a child as a single parent?”
“I always thought I would, but everything feels different now,” Barrymore says.
“Are you, in fact, single these days?”
“I don’t know,” she answers. “I’m not anything. Sexual love is secondary to me right now. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life dedicating myself to love or the pursuit of love or the understanding of love. But for the last few years, my life just hasn’t been about that for me. It’s just not about the mother baggage. It’s not about the boy. It’s about something completely different, and it’s very refreshing. I’m trying to understand it and relish it.
“I’ve stopped believing in happy endings,” Barrymore continues. “I’ve started believing in good days. At the end of my movie, there’s honesty. There’s truth. There’s peace. What tomorrow will bring is still in question. There is a joy that’s earned by failure or triumph. All those things add up to teach us, if we are open to it.”
Buying a laptop for a 3 1/2 year old is harder than you think
First off, there are the requirements:
- Must be able to view videos on YouTube (cute movies, funny movies, music, and more), Hulu and Fancast (kids movies, Sesame Street clips) smoothly. Must be able to run MIT’s Scratch with a resolution that the interface actually makes sense (1280+).
- Must be able to play Flash-based games on websites such as PBS-Kids
Then there is the buying experience.
Last week with Emma to try out various machines:
- Went to Kids R’ Us to try out a Disney Netbook. No dice, none on display to try out.
- Went to Best Buy and took a look at a Asus EE, which the Disney machine is based on. Downloaded Scratch and took note that 1024 resolution won’t do (noted above). Tried YouTube and was appalled at the performance (could be network based issues here though). Tried PBS-Kids – and while the site seemed snappy, the game experience resembled that on my wife’s old G4 based iBook – which is really, really bad.
- So went to try out some true lower end laptops since netbooks resemble one another on the hardware side closely. All stop – no network. Asked for help and was told that they could only have so many machines on the network at one time and they were maxed out.
- So went to another local Best Buy and ran into the same problem.
This week, again with Emma, to try out various machines:
- MicroCenter. I was really interested in trying out a Aspire AS1410-8414 or a Dell Inspiron 1545. Both these machines *should* do the the trick. But I wanted to take a look at Hulu, Fancast, PBS-Kids to be sure. And no dice. The network is locked down to prevent troublemakers from surfing ‘bad’ web sites. Like Best Buy there is a restocking fee of 15% if you purchase something and want to take it back if you’ve made a bad decision. So reconsidering a purchase is very expense and wasteful.
- Staples. Nothing applicable here.
And the adventure continues.
“Connect with yourself, connect with others, connect with the world, connect with the Infinite”
Read – “The Freak Revolution Manifesto” (via Susie Madrak)
There’s a lot in the piece that resonates, but the parts that cheer you on to opt-out of various things, well they stand in opposition to connection, to “coming off the mountaintop” as the paper puts it. So it is a piece that is at odds with itself.
Still, its worth a good read.
Some supporting science – BioEd Online: Conformists may kill civilizations
And from Bruce Eckel comes some related thoughts after reading Po Bronson’s “What Should I Do With My Life?”:
I’m reading Po Bronson’s “What Should I Do With My Life?” which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it’s the anti-self-help book; it’s just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.
And it’s dense, by which I mean not fluffy but packed with insight. He spent years researching and developing this book, and his own struggle is woven into it. Indeed, it’s not about formulas and answers, but about the struggle itself.
One observation set me back. There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got “practical” and did something else “first.” The idea was that they’d be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.
But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the “practical” career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you’re doing.
Python links for October 3rd, 2009
John Kleint: Python Project Howto – describes how to get a Python project up and going, from unit tests to project hosting. Fantastic howto.
Dpeepul Blog: django guys let us understand django guys let us understand python *args and **kwargs – Great for a Python beginner to discern just what those features are. Here’s more in the official documentation (which you’ve read – right?).