geekery

Elastic Computing

With my products’ release imminent, I spent last weekend coaxing Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ECC) into action. The ECC is appealing for a few reasons: It’s someone else’s high-throughput network – product distributions, especially with demo files, are in the hundreds of megabytes. The T1 at work is 1.4Mb/s. Sharing, firewalls, and proxies reduce my […]

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Traffic patterns

While I was driving around Tucson, I was struck by how differently the traffic lights sequenced.  (Phoenix didn’t seem to have the noticeable differences.)  Consider this intersection of Some Boulevard and No Way: Some Boulevard is the moderately-trafficked arterial going left-right. In this intersection, left turns have to yield to oncoming traffic. The pedestrian crosswalk

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Like snow, but with trees

Last night’s ride home was a doozy because of the torrential downpour… easily the wettest I’ve been since RSVP 2004. The wind started kicking up around 5:30, knocking out power to the street lights. A tree had fallen across the road a mere 1/4 mile past the entrance to my subdivision. When I woke up,

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Massed particles

In my particular line of work, I get to see a lot of scientific data representing fluid flows or structural mechanics. They’re all interesting, though I have to admit seeing Yet Another Mach Yatta Whoozit lacks the pure excitement it did a year ago. Luckily, the analyses my product offers are applicable in many other

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Satellite/road map hybrids

The coolness of the satellite mapping continues. These folks built hooks into Google’s satellite maps, which now superimposes roads on top of the images, enabling one to create a basic route map. Mapping out my bike route to work took about five minutes. Here’s the result. Pretty cool stuff.

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