Yosemite Bears

We spent the weekend in Yosemite and the dry winter is having an impact on the resident bear population -- the bears are already running low on food so they are getting more aggressive about seeking out human food.

 I've run into the occasional black bear but this year reached a new level with the rollout of boxes monitoring bears that have been outfitted with radio collars. The device pictured below detects the presence of a collared bear and immediately communicates with the Park Rangers on duty (kind of a BearWatch HQ).

 

There was also a rockslide at 4am on Friday (6/8) evening at Curry Village, luckily no injuries were reported. I was not able to find any links on the web about the slide

 

 

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Feedburner Acquired

Looks like the news is official - Feedburner has been acquired by Google. Congrats to Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt and Brad Feld.

MessageCast was part of the Mobius group of RSS-related companies (Feedburner, Newsgator and others) I met Dick and Eric on multiple occasions - great guys with a great outcome!

Great news for Brad also - his RSS investments are looking quite prescient right about now

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MessageCast - Two Years After

Two years ago today, we became employees of Microsoft via the acquisition of MessageCast.

In that time, much has transpired - lots of travel to Redmond, data center moves, Windows Live and more. It wasn't always easy, but the MessageCast team stuck together, brought on additional team members (even some old iPrint-ers) and have moved the ball forward.

Thanks guys, we did it!

 

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MySQL Conference - Two Interesting Items

Two interesting presentations from this years' MySQL Conference

 - Capacity Planning for LAMP - John Allspaw the Engineering Manager at flickr talks about how they use Ganglia (pdf).

My favorite excerpt:

 

Accept the observer effect

 * measurement is a necessity

 * it's not optional

- Wikipedia: Site Internals, Configuration and Code Examples, and Management Issues - Domas Mituzas (MySQL and Wikimedia) talks about the internals of scaling a large site like Wikipedia (pdf). There is a good section on caching with memcached, although it applies to caching in general.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Santa Cruz Half Marathon 2007

On Sunday, I ran the Santa Cruz Half Marathon (4/22/2007). Some of you know that this is one of my two favorite halfs, the other being the Big Sur Monterey Half.

 

 

It started raining Saturday night and we were all planning for a wet race. The rain quit about 4am; unfortunately, the wind started gusting to about 20 mph. When the starting gun went off at 7:20AM (we were supposed to start at 7!), the rain and wind has ceased. The 2500 runners were instead treated to a beautiful clear day. Some of the things I was lucky to encounter: a group of seals 200 yards offshore from the lighthouse; the scent of damp eucalyptus past Natural Bridges; the colorful zigzag of running jerseys on the cliffs of Wilder Ranch; the incredible views of Santa Cruz and Monterey while returning south on West Cliff Drive.

 

 

All in all, a great day with a great finish at Cowell's Beach. Can't wait for next year.

 

 

 

Overall, here's how the run rates in my book:

 

 

Organization - Twenty minute delay at the start, however, the course was clearly marked and staffed. Grade: B+ (would have been an 'A' without the delay)

Course - Doesn't get better than this. Grade: A+

Aid-stations - Well staffed, but no Gatorade, just water this year. Grade: B

Swag - Short-sleeve, cotton shirt that probably won't survive more than a few trips through the wash. Grade: B-

 

Cowell's Beach

 

Looking North on West Cliff Drive

 

Tags: marathon, running, santa cruz half

Web 2.0 Expo

After the first day of the Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone West, I read Steve Rubel's post "Irrational Exuberance 2.0". I don't know that he is correct, but it was in the back of my mind all day today.

... Web 2.0 Expo feels eerily like Internet World circa 1999

 

Food for thought (or at least something to think about while one is sitting on 101 trying to get to SF)

 

Highlights on Day 2

* Eric Schmidt with John Battelle - Battelle is a great interview, so much better than the Tim O'Reilly/Jeff Bezos infomercial from Day 1

* James Hamilton on Commodity Data Center Design. I learned a lot about something I thought I already knew a lot about (wrong!). Really impressive.

* Owen Byrne from Digg - Owen talked about the early days of Digg and how he built the prototype for Kevin Rose for $2k. Interesting to hear how a LAMP stack, memcached and 100 servers run a website that just passed the 1 million user mark.

* Dave McClure - on-stage, getting the crowd to do some viral marketing via "The Wave". Way to go Dave!

 

 

Lowlights on Day 2

* Wi-fi still sucks and still no power cords in the vast majority of rooms. I don't get it, for $1200, you think this stuff would have been worked out. I don't have these problems at Gnomedex. Maybe Chris Pirillo or Ponzi should be in charge?

* Too many people - the sheer number of people is overwhelming. It is difficult to engage the speaker for more than 1 question.

 

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Hoodoo Gurus in Solana Beach

On Tuesday night, I was lucky enough to catch the Hoodoo Gurus at the Belly Up in Solana Beach. This was the sixth of ten shows in the U.S. and it showed - the Gurus were in great form! The Belly Up was a very cool venue with good lighting and sound.

You can find the set list here.

The Gurus delved heavily into their older stuff, with a surprising number of songs from their first two discs (Lelani was a highlight). I saw them in San Francisco on their last tour, 13 years ago. Hopefully they'll be back before 2020.

 

 

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Ouch! It's My Birthday

I officially turned 40 last Saturday - I woke up feeling wiser, if not older :-)

My wife organized a get-together for some close friends at Nola's in Palo Alto. It was a great mix of friends from childhood, college, startups, etc. It is hard to believe that fully one-third of my life is over.

A few photos:

Congrats to Bill and Kelley on their recent engagement!

The party organizer

 

The original iPrint crew

Monetizing Sourceforge

Sourceforge is looking into monetizing

Dear SourceForge.net community member, As an active participant in the Open Source community, you may be excited to learn about a new feature that we will add to SourceForge.net in late spring/early summer. This feature will allow you to buy or sell services for Open Source software on SourceForge.net. Interested? Follow the link below and we'll keep you updated as we move towards the official launch of this feature: https://ostg.wufoo.com/forms/marketplace-interest-list/ Thank you for your continued support, The SourceForge.net Team

I'm sure there will be members of the Open Source community who don't like this move, but personally, I think it is the way to go. Sourceforge provides a great service to the community and figuring out ways to keep them in business and grow benefits everyone. I don't have any insight into what they are thinking, but I would guess they are planning on becoming a services marketplace ala Salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Something to watch as they roll it out.

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