Last month I began hosting this website on a VPS provided by Linode.com and am happy to report being yet another happy customer of their excellent service. The entry level Linode 512 plan provides more than enough resources for a small to medium sized hobby or personal site. They have an excellent administrative system which makes provisioning a new VPS a simple painless operation. There is also an extensive collection of documentation at the Linode Library which includes guides for many of the common tasks you will encounter when setting up a new site. Their support is also outstanding. It is difficult to consider alternatives when Linode has already done everything right.

When I first read Paul Graham’s essay How to Make Wealth, I was quickly seduced, like, I am sure, many young corporate cubicle-dwellers who think themselves more clever than their employers, and found myself day-dreaming about quitting my job and forming a startup with a catchy url and the $50 Million I would get for selling it to Google. At the time, I was able to overlook the flaws and inconsistencies in the argument because the inspirational nature of the piece was so compelling. On closer examination, however, I find that underlying Graham’s motivational pep talks for the under-appreciated geek is a tenuous philosophical position that demands proper refutation. Whether this essay will succeed in righting Graham’s injustices remains to be seen. There are so many problems with Graham’s thinking that it is difficult to organize a focused response. Thus, with this essay, I intend mainly to introduce the reader to an alternate line of thought, lest they be so overwhelmed by Graham’s crusades that their mental capacities for logical reasoning are badly warped.

After 7 years as a customer of Pair Networks, I am leaving the safe comfortable confines of shared hosting for the wild jungle world of VPS. It was a difficult decision because Pair.com has an excellent setup and provides the best customer service and support in an industry where such features are hard to find.

A look at the kernel internals for handling file I/O operations.

In this series of posts, I will describe the technical foundations of a data analysis system that can support the goal of high-speed analysis of large datasets in real time. The focus will be on developing a system that can power a web application, using generic datasets. This means we cannot make any assumptions about the datasets that will be used, since we want a general purpose application that can work with a variety of data. This kind of optimization is not hard, but it can be tricky, and it will involve cost-benefit trade-offs for which real-world benchmarks are the best kind of success metric. In the end, we will have a basic blueprint for a data analysis system that can analyze data with blazing speed.

Today is a Palindrome Day for those who use the standard ISO date format of “yyyymmdd”. Enjoy it because there will not be another one for more than 8 years.

I am happy to announce the release of my IPUMS data prep tool to help users of IPUMS data load their extracts into their own database systems.

lm_sensors is a wonderful little library that provides access to hardware monitoring data provided directly by motherboard chips and processors.  This includes voltages, fan speeds, and temperatures, all very important for monitoring the health of your system.  Motherboard manufacturers usually supply their own monitoring applications included on CD, but these are almost always Windows only.  For linux users, the lm_sensors library is usually the only way to access this data.

Since most servers require a constant, fast, reliable network connection, it’s no surprise that they are typically connected via wired Ethernet. And, since most wireless users are mobile, it stands to reason that the majority of wireless configuration tools are wrapped in a graphical interface activated by a windowing system. In a standard linux installation where a wireless adapter is present, the adapter can be activated at boot time but the connection to the wireless access point is not negotiated until the user establishes a desktop session.

After installing linux and logging in for the first time, run at least these basic commands to ensure that everything looks the way you expect: ps aux, top, free, df, du. Also look at anaconda-ks.cfg and install.log in root’s home directory for a complete log of the installation process to make sure there weren’t any errors or that you find something unexpected.