Talking Walkaway on the CNet book-club podcast
CNet has started a new book-club podcast, and they honored me by picking my novel Walkaway as their second-ever title. We had a long and far-ranging discussion last week about the book and the themes it raises: disasters, economics, technological immortality, community, trolling, bohemianism, and much more (MP3). Since a big part of “Walkaway” concerns... more
My adult novels are being reissued with covers to match Walkaway!
When I first saw Will Stahle‘s cover art for my novel Walkaway, I was pleased beyond all reason (and not least because I am an unabashed Stahle fanboy, as he is behind some of the greatest covers of our era, from Yiddish Policeman’s Union to Autonomous to A Darker Shade of Magic to All the... more
Final reminder: NYCDevOps tonight: "Storing Secrets in the Cloud"
Don't miss this meeting tonight! Topic: Storing Secrets in Cloud based Key Management Services Speaker: Dan O'Boyle, Stack Overflow, Inc. Date: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 Time: 6:30-9:30 PM Location: Stack Overflow HQ, 110 William St, 28th floor, NY, NY https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/241803854/ The A/C is fixed! Don't miss this cool event! Full details and RSVP.
Live Metal is Better
Recently I went out for a live metal triple-bill, with Endon and SUMAC opening for Boris, whom Ive covered here before (with groovy pix). More pix today, with words on the history and meaning of metal, and how to photograph it. Endon, the openers, are described as catastrophic noise metal and yeah, they were pretty catastrophic. A little too abstract for me, but sincere and really trying to bring it. Didnt get any pix. Heres my problem: I wholeheartedly love this music, in particular live, and yet I have to acknowledge that its sort of, well, ridiculous. The volume is much louder than can be sanely necessary.
Vendor jerks at tech conferences
(I've intentionally delayed posting this so that it wasn't clear which conference I'm talking about.) So... I'm at a conference. I take a break from the talks to walk around the vendor show. While most of the booths are selling products I'm not interested in, I suddenly find myself in front of VENDOR-A (name changed to protect them). VENDOR-A makes a product that has both open source and commercial editions, a common business model. Since the company I work for is a happy user of their open source version, I decide to ask about the commercial version. Maybe there's some benefit to be had.
Macro Trends
In The bubble without any fizz, The Economist addresses the fact that financial-asset prices (stocks, bonds, and the like) keep drifting up and up in a world where inflation doesnt; are we in a mega-bubble? Whats really going on? Looks obvious to me, but then Im a left-winger. I think its all a straightforward consequence of economic efficiency and class warfare. Inflation? It stays low because our globalized economy is hyperefficient at making the things we want, extracting the fuels we burn, and growing the food we eat. And also flexible enough that it can scale up and down to meet demand without apparently kicking off waves of inflation or bankruptcy.
A Decade of Dynamo: Powering the next wave of high-performance, internet-scale applications
Today marks the 10 year anniversary of Amazon's Dynamo whitepaper, a milestone that made me reflect on how much innovation has occurred in the area of databases over the last decade and a good reminder on why taking a customer obsessed approach to solving hard problems can have lasting impact beyond your original expectations. It all started in 2004 when Amazon was running Oracle's enterprise edition with clustering and replication. We had an advanced team of database administrators and access to top experts within Oracle. We were pushing the limits of what was a leading commercial database at the time and were unable to sustain the availability, scalability and performance needs that our growing Amazon business demanded.
Final reminder: "DNS as Code" talk at NYCDevOps tonight!
Topic: DNSControl: "DNS as Code" from StackOverflow.com Speaker: Thomas A. Limoncelli, SRE Manager @ Stack Overflow Date: Monday, October 2, 2017 Time: 6:30-9:30 PM (SPECIAL TIME AND LOCATION) Location: Madison Suite, Hilton Midtown, 1335 6th Ave, New York, NY 10019 https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/243369226/ VelocityNYC is in town this week. They've graciously provided space for us to host an additional meeting. Space is limited! RSVP soon! Full details and RSVP. We will be going out for drinks after the talk.