lukebaker.org

I just got an invite to Measure Map. It’s a hosted stats solution that’s directed specifically at blogs, developed by the people at Adaptive Path. Jeff Veen gave a demo of it at Gospelcon this year. It looks like it is an interesting use of Ajax, including Flash where appropriate. Now all I need is for people to actually read the blog and generate some stats.

Be amazed at my screenshot skills. I took screenshots of the slides used in the BigTable talk. View slides.

I seem to get easily distracted or at least quickly intrigued by new things. It seems that having a constant urge of wanting to learn and understand new ideas and objects has its drawbacks. It seems lately that my personal projects get stopped because I go off and dive into some other completely different topic.

For example, my current Google Maps project is getting side-lined by things like:

• wanting to have a solid grasp of how various hash algorithms work
• wanting to fully understand FastCGI and SCGI and their inner-workings
• watching a very interesting Google talk about BigTable
• from that talk being introduced into Bloom filters and wanting to explore those more

Maybe if I blog about the problem, it’ll leave me… Do I even want that?

This is the first post that belongs to a newly created category called ‘Ideas’. These are things that I’d work on if I had the knowledge and/or capital (and if they were even possible).

This idea came to me after dealing with cat5 cables in a rack of servers. It seems there are two fighting forces. The first is that we’d like the cat5 cables to be out of the way of anything else we might want to do. Secondly, it’d be nice to have an effecient way to isolate any given cable from the rest. So, for example, I might have one end of a cat5 cable and want to know where the other end of it is.

It’d be nice to have some sort of handheld device that when touching any part of a cable would cause the cable to glow, flicker, change color, or anything else that would clearly visually differentiate this particular cable from any other cable. My vague notion of this is that cables would have to sheathed in some extra outer layer that would respond to this handheld device. Of course if we could do away with the handheld device that’d be even better (i.e., this outer layer senses the touch of a finger like a touchpad).

Is possible without drastically increasing the size or price of cables?