mikedanko's comments

Thomas Limoncelli's book "Time Management for System Administrators" covered how to deal with all your "customers" years ago. There's some google videos of presentations regarding the book material, and its very relavant to this subject. The mutual interruption field, how to deal with users/managers/vp's/etc, how to come off as cool as possible -- it's all in there. I don't agree with this methodologies for keeping time, but the book is still full of gold.

Good luck. This data is worth more than the actual revenue and income for most of these companies. It's how they negotiate for carriage in different avenues and grow at all. I've often seen it as the cause of make or break deals between various parties when negotiating said distribution. On the same point, most of this data has to be provided back to the content originator per contract anyway for billing purposes. Even if its free to users, someone's paying the royalty bills.

Who's your target market here? Google l4m3 and hit me up, I can answer most of your questions on this if you can give me some more data.

While awesome for a lot of tasks, I've still found that a file system and OS tweaked for a particular task can have remarkable results. On a system with a few hundred thousand RRD files, I've found that ZFS with a 16k block size reduced my load by 75%. Obviously, the average RRD workload goes is vastly improved by SSD -- the move to SSD has me forgetting about IO forever in this case.

But, it's just a hack to begin with and SSD is the patch. I don't have the time/option to find and hack out a better storage mechanism for that particular task. RRD makes little sense in this day and age, but it's what I'm stuck with due to time constraints.

Oh Jesus, can't we all stop gawking at Facebook bullshit? No one can figure out what Facebook is, but if you haven't succumbed to it, you're intimidated by it. It's worth billions of dollars and for what? The pure evil of having everyone's marketing data?

In the mindset of Rodney King, can't we all just move on? Can't we all just get past not being Zuckerberg? Can't we all get back to being hackers who do things because they make our minds happy?

We're totally not normal. That, I'll agree with.

Usage data, smoochage data. The point of bringing up ICQ was that at one time, for what seemed like a long time, it was king.

People seem to have given up and consider Facebook the winner of this era of the Internet. My point is that stuff comes along too often, and changes so much, that it won't matter eventually.

Besides all that are we really talking about two competitive products? People still haven't even decided what Facebook really is, nor have they really defined it either. Why? Because no one can figure it out.

I'm a Fedora contributor and closet Ubuntu user. While I can get extremely upset at how difficult things can be in Fedora, like python and ruby, I generally try and take care of these things myself anyway. And who's not using RVM so why does it matter in the first place?

Truth is, I spend way too much time hacking at my Fedora system to make things work. It gets frustrating. I fall back to the Ubuntu systems and somehow, it's just easier. I'd comment on the details here, but it is madness.

So why even bother with Fedora at all? People. I can't stand Ubuntu people. From uneducated bloggers to Ubuntu fanbois, it drives me insane. You know there's a popular blog called OMG Ubuntu!? As far as uneducated views, there's a lot of talk about how awesome NetworkManager is in Ubuntu... you know where all that awesomeness came from? Fedora!

The Fedora community? Just amazing talented people all over the place. I can't stand to give them up. Some of the most awesome, unique, thoughtful and mindful people I've ever met all have Fedora in common.

In the end, I can't see how much feature X has to do with anything over it not existing in another distro. I can sort of see how something as shiny and new as a new Ubuntu release can be appealing, but not enough to move me. It all comes down to people, and Fedora has what really matters here.

But I don't use Facebook. I work in a department of seven, and they all are extremely reluctant to even check their Facebook accounts. Google? We use it all day. Google is like Linux, you can't even count how much you use it until you actually talk to an engineer.

Facebook just reminds me of ICQ. It was all hot shit, everyone thought it was going to take over the world, but it was just left to little old ladys who LOL'd at everything you had to say. Which, according to schedule and my wife's age, is probably going to be about another 10 years. Facebook gets another 10 years before it's ICQ.

And WOW, this just hit me after posting. Your question to HN is by far and large more blog worthy than most of the things on your blog.

I always tend to think that in the blogging world there are those that are journalists and those that are diary writers. The diary writers only ever succeed if they're writing about things you'd read in Penthouse Forum circa 1978.

Try not to involve yourself or your feelings too much. Offer less opinion and more substance and things based on the concrete. Use the words "I" and "You" less and consider it more of a group activity -- even though people may have not shown up yet.

Instead of lines like "Do not allow anyone to read your code out of context.", you need to put the parts together and make the reader actually understand how you got to the thought process without being demanding. Instead consider something like "From practical experience I find that often, reading code out of context can obscure the meaning, context, blah." Zed is the only person who is allowed to be this opinionated, and only because he is charming at the same time.

If you want people to read, they have to feel engaged and part of the conversation. This is key.

Find your 10 favorite blogs, or ones of people you closely identify yourself as being close to professionally speaking, and do your best to gauge the voice of the ones that are extremely readable. Find your likes and dislikes, about a particular blogger or series of posts and gauge other media sources by the same methods.

I find my best writing comes after a lot of reading, pause to think, a mental break then coming back to the subject. Give it a try.