Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:11:00 GMT
The last few months have been kind of quiet here for two simple reasons:
- I’ve been completely swamped with launching something new at work. That’s finally done.
- Every spare non-work minute has been spent in my back yard, working on The Project That Won’t Die. I’m re-terracing the lawn, putting in a big planter/retaining wall thing with a couple sets of steps, putting in a new paver patio, and then re-planting the whole lawn. The end is finally in sight there, too.
Basically, I’ve been alternating between not having anything interesting to say and having lots of things to say that I couldn’t really talk about.
Hopefully that’ll be changing soon. I’m changing projects at work; I was the lead for the Google download servers (need a new copy of Earth, Toolbar, Sketchup, Gears, etc?), and I’m going to be taking over a new service soon. The new job’s going to involve a lot of travel; I’m going to be in either NYC or Mountain View at least once per month for the rest of the year, and will probably be visiting at least 2 other offices for one of my side projects. Considering that I’ve only flown 4 or 5 times for Google in the 2.5 years I’ve been here, this’ll be a big change in pace. The job’s starting quickly–I first heard about this yesterday, and I’m already booked to fly to New York next Monday. I’ve never actually been there before, so it should be entertaining. I’ll be stuck in the office for most of the time, but I’ll have a couple free hours per day to wander around and see the sights. I’ll try to hit a couple of the tourist high points this time, and then branch out on future trips.
Tags google, travel, work | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 02 Feb 2008 18:37:17 GMT
Soo Valley, near Whistler, B.C.
I spent Thursday and Friday in Whistler along with a few hundred co-workers, enjoying the Seattle version of Google’s annual ski trip. I took the opportunity to go snowmobiling for the first time, and took my camera along.
I need to find another excuse to go play in the snow with my camera; that was too much fun.
Tags google, snow, travel, whistler | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 30 May 2007 23:01:00 GMT
I usually avoid promoting products that I’m paid to work with, but I just love this one: Google Gears. It’s an open-source, cross-browser (IE and Win/Mac/Linux FF for now) plugin that provides a bunch of enhancements for developers of AJAX apps. Most importantly, it lets you add offline support to your AJAX apps without requiring a rewrite or fork. You just replace your existing XMLHttpRequest calls with a wrapper and off you go. The wrapper’s designed to fail gracefully if the plugin’s not available, so one set of code will work for everyone–with or without the plugin, online or offline. Presumably someone will integrate this into Prototype and other JS frameworks shortly, making it easy for thousands of developers to build offline-enabled web apps.
That’s not all that Google Gears is good for; it also includes Javascript thread support and an in-browser SQL database. I’ll let you use your imagination on those.
I’ve been watching this develop for the past few months, and I’m really excited about it. I can’t wait to see how people integrate this into Rails and other frameworks.
Tags gears, google, javascript | 5 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:37:51 GMT
I was going to post something here saying that I’ve now been at Google for one year, but I received some mail today that kind of preempts that. I just learned that Ryan VanderWall, one of our young helpdesk guys at work, was diagnosed with advanced, metastasized liver cancer a couple weeks ago. He’s spent the last couple weeks in the hospital undergoing radiation therapy.
Go check out Ryan’s blog, and consider donating if you can.
Update: December 23, 2006.
Tags cancer, coworker, google | 4 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 11 Sep 2006 03:02:44 GMT
I’m in Mountain View this week for a few meetings, and my social calendar is pretty empty. Is anything happening this week?
Tags california, google, travel | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:49:27 GMT
I’m headed for OSCON in Portland next week, along with about half of my blogroll. I’m heading down to Portland on Sunday via Amtrak’s afternoon run; if anyone else is taking the same train, feel free to stop by and say hi. I’ll be the guy in business class editing Ruby code with TextMate on a 17” PowerBook.
Monday and Tuesday are tutorial days at OSCON; I’m going to be sitting in on Amy’s Javascript tutorial on Monday morning, followed by tutorials on Linux drivers, Haskell, and web testing.
The rest of my schedule is still in flux. Here’s the bits that are nailed down:
- I’ll be in the Google booth from 2:30 to 5:00 Wednesday and Thursday. Free to stop by and say hi.
- Google’s throwing a reception in the booth on Wednesday, from 5:00 until 7:30.
- PDX.rb is hosting FOSCON again this year, starting at 7:30 on Wednesday. Last year’s FOSCON was great, but I don’t know how they’ll compete without _why this year.
- I’d like to catch Greg’s talk at 1:45 on Thursday.
Leave a comment if there are any talks that I really shouldn’t miss.
Tags conference, foscon, google, oscon, portland | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 23 Nov 2005 04:14:27 GMT
So here’s my big news: I’m starting work as a Site Reliability Engineer for Google, starting on Monday. The job is based in Kirkland, WA, but I’ll be spending a lot of time in the very near future at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, CA.
So what does this mean for me and Typo? I have no idea. The next week is going to be completely insane, and I doubt that I’ll have time to finish the email notification code that I’ve been working on, much less fix the Flickr bug that’s been discussed at length recently. Once I get settled in at Google I’ll have a better idea how this sort of thing works.
Tags google, job, personal, work | 17 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:28:04 GMT
I was looking at my web logs last night, and noticed that (as usual) I was seeing a lot of hits coming from Google searches, but a lot of them were from country-specific Googles like google.co.uk, not just google.com. So, out of curiosity, I spent a few minutes writing a couple little scripts so see just how many different Googles have sent traffic to my site over the last year or so. The answer?
*90*.
Yep, 90 different countries worth of Google, counting .com as a country. The full list is below the break.
Read more...
Posted in Blog stuff | Tags blog, google, stats | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:28:37 GMT
I’ve never really figured out why, but Google really likes me. Or, rather, it likes this blog. I keep showing up amazingly highly-ranked in common Google searches. Today’s example is treo wifi. In order, here are the top 10 results, out of 2.2 million possible matches:
- TreoCentral: No Treo WiFi
- TreoCentral: Treo 600 and WiFi?
- .:UNEASYsilence: Treo 650 WiFi
- PDA News: Treo 650 WiFi, Verizon announces XV6600, PalmOne…
- scottstuff: another WiFi solution for the Treo 650
- Slashdot: Enthusiast Hacks WiFi Into Treo 650
- CNet: Treo 650 Update WiFi-less
- Engadget: Add WiFi to your Treo 650! SD WiFi card drivers hacked
- Engadget: some random search page
- PalmInfocenter: HOWTO: Make that palmOne Treo 650 Even Better!
So, as I see this, Google sees me as a better source of information then Slashdot, CNet, Engadget, and PalmInfocenter? It can’t just be PageRank–from what I can see, I’m just a lowly PR5 this month, while Slashdot and CNet are PR9s, and Engadget is a PR6. It can’t be the number of links in Google’s database, because no one links to my Treo WiFi page. Can anyone explain how this works?
Posted in Blog stuff | Tags blog, broken, google, search | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 17 Dec 2004 18:52:52 GMT
I am swimming in spam. Every where I go, every direction I look, every medium I deal with, I am being spammed. Spam in my email box I can handle–my spam filter manages that well enough that I can ignore the problem. It’s all of the other spam that is driving me insane.
Let’s start with blog spam. I run Movable Type, and I have a PageRank of 6 or so, so like everyone else with a good PageRank, I’m being bombarded with blog comment spam. It’s not uncommon to wake up in the morning and find that 100 ads for Viagra or online poker or something less savory have managed to make it through my filters and pollute my blog. From looking at my logs, I’ve been had over 7,000 comments posted on this blog, with only 150 or so being legitimate, and around 6,000 blocked by MT-Blacklist.
Then there’s phone spam–the Do Not Call list has actually worked pretty well for my home phone number, but I’ve been besieged by calls from (905)-482-1663 for the past couple weeks. I assume that they’re a telemarketer, but I’ve never been able to figure out what they want–even when I’ve picked the phone up on the first ring, they just hang up on me. Google suggests that that number has done work for Bank of America and the Kerry campaign and pissed off a number of other people; it’s not just me. After a week of this, I had Asterisk blacklist them, so I don’t have to listen to them hang up on me 2 or 3 times per day. Yesterday, they escalated–they called my cell phone 3 times last night. I sent a Do Not Call list complaint today, but I doubt it’ll take. I’d probably be better off using one of the other laws on the books regarding telemarketing calls to cell phones or percentages of hangups, but it’s probably not worth the hassle.
My work phone isn’t immune, either–I’ve been getting 2 or 3 calls per week from random business magazines, wanting to give me free subscriptions or renewals. Frankly, I receive so many magazines that I can’t keep track of which ones I’m already getting–95% of them go straight into the recycling bin without ever being opened. I really don’t want more–my mailbox is too full as it is. Last week, I got two calls from Information Week and had to hang up on them–they wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. The week before, it was a call, a fax, and two emails from Network World. This morning, it was eWeek.
Thinking about all of these–the blog spam, the telemarketer spam, and the magazine renewal spam–the common thread is that none of them are actually trying to sell me anything. The blog spam is trying to increase their own PageRank. The magazine spam is trying to increase their circulation size and advertising rates. The telemarketer might be trying to sell me something, but since they refuse to actually talk to me, I can’t really tell. Largely, they’re all bothering me because they can sell something that I have (eyeballs, highly ranked blog) to others, and they don’t care that they’re wasting my time and money in the process.
Posted in Blog stuff, Personal | Tags asterisk, blog, google, spam, telemarketer | 165 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:51:42 GMT
A few months back, MSN’s search engine decided that this blog was a great source of information on Paris Hilton videos, and decided to feed me tons of traffic.
Today was Google’s turn. One of my SpaceShip One entries is showing up on the first page of search results for “spaceship one” on at least a couple of Google’s servers. Surprisingly, this is only generating a couple dozen hits per hour this afternoon.
Posted in Web stuff, Blog stuff | Tags broken, google, search, spaceshipone | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 05 Apr 2004 23:18:35 GMT
topix.net has a very interesting article on Google, claiming that the single biggest thing Google has going for them right now is their ability to manage a 100,000-node distributed computing system, and then use the system to deploy new services that are nearly unthinkable using traditional mechanisms. In essence, they have the RAM and CPU power to keep the entire net cached in RAM and perform queries against it, even though individual nodes are dying and being rebuilt all the time.
Sounds like a fun job.
Posted in Computer System Administration | Tags google, sysadmin | no comments
