z2amiller's comments

This morning, my normally SFW "Tech News" folder in Google Reader was full of full-on explicit pornography - apparently at some point the feed URL was redirected to their Fleshbot site. Are we being encouraged to "sample" some of the other Gawker properties?

This already exists in California to some degree. The state offered a limited number of stickers to hybrid cars that allows them access to the carpool lanes with a single driver. The stickers were quickly exhausted and now cars that have the sticker sell at a significant premium. (see http://www.greencarreports.com/blog/1021405_california-hov-l...)

The value of these stickers has probably declined significantly since that article was written, as the stickers are only valid until July 1, 2011.

A few years ago, my boss (CEO) at my last company bought a Prius at a premium for this reason so he could use the carpool lanes during rush hour. The populist/progressive in me thinks that it isn't "fair" that the rich can pay for faster commutes, but the truth is that he probably created many times more wealth than the several thousand dollar sticker premium by having an extra 30-60 minutes of productive work every day.

FWIW, most of the "Major Players" support the Crawl-Delay directive in robots.txt, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Crawl...

I know at minimum GoogleBot and Yahoo! Slurp respect this value. I believe Google AdsBot (Landing page URL verification for AdWords) also supports this value, but GoogleBot and AdsBot each will crawl at the rate you specify (so if you specify a Crawl-Delay of 1, each bot will crawl at ~1qps). I don't know if it is in the spec, but fractional crawl delays appeared to be respected (Crawl-Delay: 0.25 would result in ~4qps, for example).

I too have fought with this problem - at times more than 90% of the capacity of the site I was running was devoted to serving up content for bots. I sympathize with small (and large) companies who don't want to add capacity so that new/random bot can add another <x> QPS to the daily baseline load.

I wonder if there will be a next generation of hackers that learn this way. I had a similar story, learning "programming" by poking around inside giant dungeon crawl type games written in basic. However, any game that is interesting enough for "kids these days" won't be a text interface written in a couple thousand lines of basic. Are there languages and tools simple enough to create a game that would be interesting enough for a potentially budding hacker to bother digging in to?

Checking the schema and upgrade scripts into source control is extremely important, and this is how I have managed it in the past. (names like table.alter.12.sql). I regret not setting this type of versioning table up from the beginning, though - when you have multiple environments (dev, QA, staging, etc) it can get very confusing in a hurry as to which schema changes have been applied to which databases. With a versioning table and maybe even some deployment time scripts to sanity check versions between the release and the DB, mismatches become immediately apparent.

One thing I've done in the past to help prevent 'configuration rot' of nagios configs is to hook it into the same files that drove our deployments - when the deployment changes, the nagios config changes with it. Nagios supports template-based configs so once the tests are developed it isn't too hard to write some automation that spits out a config file. This worked pretty well for a site with ~350 servers and devices (switches, APC rack PDU's) with ~3000 tests.

Good advice all around. If you wear a backpack or messenger bag, you'll end up with an awfully sweaty back. Getting rear panniers will help a lot, especially since you'll probably want to carry a change of close with a 15 mile commute.

Bigger tires are better - I ride on Rivendell Jack Brown tires which are ~33c. The larger tires are a smoother ride and can handle debris better. Also make sure your tires are kevlar belted. City streets, even in bike friendly cities, collect a lot of broken glass and other sharp debris along the bike lanes.

Make sure you have a good lighting system, come wintertime it will likely be pitch dark on at least one of the legs of your commute. I just got a NiteRider MiNewt 250 which is nice because it is a self contained unit and has mini-USB as its charging input (So no need to carry a specialized charger, can easily charge while at work or even in a cafe). A friend recommended the Novae Cyclone 900, less convenient but brighter than the MiNewt and cheaper. http://light-reviews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=897

+1 for fastmail.fm, I've been a customer for some time and like their features. You can point your own domain's mail there, set up fairly comprehensive rules for filtering mail into folders, etc. They have a web interface and it fully supports IMAP so you can point your phone, mail client, etc at it.

Working at a "real" company will give you some insight about "how the sausage is made", both from the business side as well as the software development side. You can gain a lot of information about what does and does not work by observing and participating in the process for a while. Stay at home or live cheap and put some of that decent salary into savings for if/when you commit to your own project full time.

Nothing wrong with developing your own product on the side or "after hours", although be aware that at many startups most positions have some kind of operational component and/or tight deadlines, which might interfere with after hours projects. (Not all startups/small companies are like this of course).

Make sure that if you are developing something on your own time that it does not compete with the company's product line, you will often have to sign a contract to that effect. Along the same lines, be sure to have a clear line between things you develop for the company and things you develop for yourself - keep a separate machine for your own code, don't use your employer's equipment or even a personal machine with your employer's code checked out on it. The same advice goes for freelance projects.