December 2005 Archives
I have redirected the rss & atom feeds at weblogs.cs.cornell.edu to the their new home at http://www.allthingsdistributed.com. I used a permanent redirect so I am hoping that bloglines and other aggregators will eventually figure out that they should start polling those feeds directly instead of continue to be redirected by the old site.
On a side note: for me the out-of-the-box mt 3.2 atom feed doesn't validate. I fixed one tag, but still have to see what to do with the rest of the complaints.
I have not redirected the static pages yet, as I first want to see what I can do to leave all the referrer spam behind. I wasn't aware of this crazy phenomena until I had a look at the server log files for the first time in a year. I'll look for some isapi filter to cure this.
A lot of things happened in that past months that were worthwhile writing about. New distributed systems and architectural insights, great conversations, new gadgets, good books, interesting articles and conferences, and some very cool new Amazon.com technologies (e.g. Mechanical Turk and the public access to Alexa). However I thought that it was appropriate to first move the weblog from the Cornell servers to a personal place. That took a while to materialize, but I believe I now have everything in place to execute this move.
This weblog will move to http://www.allthingsdistributed.com, where I will post the new writings. The postings from the past 3 years will move to http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/historical, and I will set up redirects in the coming days to make sure everyone gets to the new servers whether they want or not. It will be interesting to see whether the aggregators can indeed handle the feed redirects.
I am grateful to Cornell for letting me continue to use the weblogs server in the past year, and I am now looking forward to catching up with old and new friends on all things distributed.
There are two online technology essay writers who I truly enjoy reading: Scott Berkun and Paul Graham. Paul is probably the more well known of the two given his Hacker and Painters book, but I think that both have a unique insights in the software industry and the development process. Both are excellent writers who take a deeper, philosophical look at human nature and the specifically the traits of professionals, they investigate the fundamentals of human collaboration, and the ways that it impacts our daily lifes Paul's background is in Lisp programming, while Scott's is in program management and UI design. If you want to sample Paul Graham I suggest you start with "Made in the USA", for Scott Berkun I suggest his recent "Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas".
What triggered this posting is that Scott Berkun now also has a book out: "The Art of Project Management" which I think is very much worthwhile reading for anyone involved in project management. There is a lot of useful food for thought in this book as well as many pratical suggestions, and this week it will land on the desks of the people that work for and with me as "suggested reading". A sample chapter can be found at Scott's book site, if you are interested in sampling before you buy.
