http://adamstiles.com Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem. Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:26:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Michael Hyatt is the CEO of Thomas Nelson, a giant Christian publishing house. He's been tweeting about a soon-to-be released book called http://adamstiles.com/2009/04/reviewing-the-noticer-by-andy-andrews/ I'm feeling nostalgic today, my last day at MarkMonitor. My good friend Blake Hayward and I founded CollectiveTrust five years ago. MarkMonitor acquired "us" about three years ago. That chapter closes today. Looking back, it's easy to break down my career into five-year chunks. The first five years I spent in ... http://adamstiles.com/2009/04/feeling-nostalgic-and-the-next-five-years/ Last year I started tracking the total number of tweets posted to Twitter every day. I wrote a Ruby script that uses the Twitter API to post a new tweet to a private Twitter account and log the ID number of that tweet. That script runs once a day at ... http://adamstiles.com/2009/03/graphing-total-daily-tweets/ The picture on the right shows the unique id numbers of some of the shortened URLs in the ur.ly database, sorted by created date. Those unique ids are automatically generated by Google App Engine's data store. Surprised by what you see? Most databases make it easy to generate auto-incrementing id numbers ... http://adamstiles.com/2008/07/data-store-shards-in-google-app-engine/ Google App Engine let's you build web apps that run on Google's infrastructure. What's the best way to get familiar with a new framework like this? Build something -- preferably something simple and useful, and that's what I set out to do. I've played around in the URL-shortening space pioneered by ... http://adamstiles.com/2008/07/urly-dang-short-urls-powered-by-google-app-engine/ The Pasadena Marathon posted its course map today. After running the Long Beach, Big Sur and Los Angeles marathons, there is something really cool about running a course that is never more than 5 or 6 miles away from my house. http://adamstiles.com/2008/06/2008-pasadena-marathon-course-posted/ I'm a composting geek. We compost all of our non-meat table scraps, coffee grounds, and some yard waste and then dig it into our garden soil each year as a natural fertilizer. It's always fun to see what "volunteers" pop up from that compost. After Halloween we composted our jack-o-lanterns, ... http://adamstiles.com/2008/06/volunteer-pumpkin/ Just upgraded to Firefox 3.0 beta 5... do you think I have enough back/forward buttons? Revert! http://adamstiles.com/2008/04/triple-buttons-with-firefox-30-beta-5/ I've been noodling on this feature for a while -- how can I find "more links like this one" in LinkRiver. Putting on my machine learning hat, I contemplated link-to-link co-visitation schemes, semantic indexing, various clustering algorithms... but all approaches were too data-heavy, at least for now. There had to ... http://adamstiles.com/2008/04/find-similar-links-on-linkriver/ All lifestream and link-sharing aggregators use an RSS/ATOM parser to help power their service. I built LinkRiver using Ruby on Rails and would have preferred to use a parser built in Ruby. However, Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser is rock-solid and very well tested, so I use UFP for feed parsing. ... http://adamstiles.com/2008/03/what-powers-the-aggregators/