Everything you never wanted to know about Jon Watte

I recently saw this ad:

A whole 60 dollars a year? That's cheaper than outsourcing to Congo! (the poorest nation on Earth).

Job recruiting scam pro-tip: Proofread your ads!

In my previous blog entry, I talked about cross-shard transactional integrity for key/value stores, and how SQL databases have solved this problem. I also poked fun at some of the best known key/value stores for not quite solving all of my problems for me, for free. Go read it, it's fun times!

I've been looking at NoSQL data stores for online transaction processing lately. Yes, related to work :-)

The basic model of a key/value store, where the value is a JSON object or similar, only gets you so far. The bonus with it is that it is very, very easy to horizontally partition ("shard" or "federate"). The draw-back is that you really can't do any online queries on anything other than primary key values. If you're trying to do a query on, say, "any foobar created between 2011-01-05 and 211-01-06" then you're screwed -- you have to traverse the entire data store to find that.

There are a bunch of things that are systemically broken in California, and the state would do a lot better if these could be fixed. The problem is, the far left and far right aren't much in agreement about how to fix it, or even what it is that is broken.

I've been thinking about two separate products that I'd want to purchase if they existed, but they don't. For an enterprising entrepreneur, this might be the point where you MAKE one of those products, and see if there's a market. However, I'm already enterprising within IMVU, and as they say -- ideas are a dime a dozen, it's execution that counts.

All Points Bulletin -- a great idea for a MMOFPS. Also, a nice vehicle for in-game customization of clothing and vehicles.

You can draw decals. You can sculpt avatars. You can paint cars. The game even has a built-in step/pattern sequencer!

Once in a while, I'll hear a question like "I'm tired of flipping burgers/school/my job as a sewer cleaner; how do I get into games programming?" Some people will say "don't do that -- game developers are treated like the scum of the earth, and careers are brutal and under-paid." I think that doesn't quite capture reality, though.

VMWare workstation is in many ways a great product. It allows you to do all kinds of nifty set-ups that let multiple virtual machines talk to each other and the rest of the world, within the confines of your local PC.

However, there are some problems with it. I have a couple of virtual machines that I use as a sandbox for developing networked applications at work. These are hosted inside a Dell Inspiron XPS 1330 laptop. The laptop travels between networks frequently. At work, it's usually plugged in, but sometimes gets un-plugged and goes on wireless-G. On the train, it goes on a Sprint WAN card. At home, it generally goes on another wireless-G network.

I just had to link to this.

I see this headline in the latest ACM TechNews:
Educators Seek New Ways to Steer Kids Toward Technical Fields