One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers Festival, I was inspired to look around at what other conferences I might attend in 2009. Turns out, this is a huge pain in the ass, because I can’t find a single, central place that lists all of the conferences I’m likely to be interested in.

So… I created a public Google Calendar. It’s called “US Technical Conferences”. It needs more conferences, but I’ve listed the interesting ones I found. In order to keep the calendar from getting overwhelmingly crowded, I’ve decided that conferences on the list should:

• Deal with open source technology in some way. This is purposely broad.
• Be at least 3 days in …

I have, in the past, worked for startups of varying forms. I worked for a spinoff that ultimately failed but had the most awesome product I’ve ever seen (neural networks were involved, need I say more?), I helped a buddy very early on with his startup, which did great until angel investors crept in, destroyed his vision, and failed completely to understand the Long Tail vision my buddy was trying to achieve, and I worked for a web 2.0 startup which was pretty successful, and was subsequently purchased… by another startup!

Working in academia for 6 years also exposed me to people who are firing up businesses, or projects that accidentally become businesses, and some of those go nowhere, while others seem to be on the verge of NYSE listing now, while a year ago they were housed in the smallest office I’ve ever seen, using lawn furniture for their workstations.

Of course, I’ve also consulted for, and been interviewed by, a …

Hi all,

Are you aware of the fact that you can use NetBeans IDE for programming with Python? It's still early in the game, but it's true. We've already set up a quick tutorial for Python at http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetBeansPythonTutorial.

As mentioned, it's still early, but efforts are already underway to provide tutorials that feature the following:

• Python and Django
• Database Interaction (SQLAlchemy, mysqldb)
• GUI programming (wxPython, pyGTK)
• PyQT4

I'll let you know more as the story develops.

Cheers!

--James

I’ve been using Google Reader since it was created. I really love the *idea* of Google Reader. I like that scrolling through the posts marks them as read. I like that you can toggle between list and expanded views of the posts. I like that you can search within a feed or across all feeds (though selecting multiple specific feeds would be great).

All of that said, I’d like to explore other avenues, because I don’t like that there’s, like, zero flexibility in how the Google Reader interface is configured. My problem starts with large fonts…

I use relatively large fonts. If you increase the font twice up from the default size in firefox on a mac (using the cmd-+ keystroke, twice), and you have more than just a couple of feeds, you wind up with this really horrible side pane with the bottom half of it requiring a scroll bar, and the text wraps, and it just looks terrible. What makes this really REALLY REALLY …

Taming MySQL is… challenging. Especially in very large, fast-growth, ‘always-on’ environments. It’s one of those things where you seemingly can never know all there is to know about it. That’s why I really like coming across posts like this one from FreshBooks that describes a very real problem that was affecting their users, how they dealt with it, why *that* failed, and what the final fix was. Post a link to your favorite MySQL Problem and Solution post in the comments (oh yeah, and “subscribe to comments” should be working now!)

I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or that were suggested to them, this blog ranks #20 in a listing of 25.

I’m really flattered, but wonder if it’s an indicator that this is a quality blog, or that they should aim higher in their blog reading ;-P  Either way, listing 25 bloggers in a flattering way is a fantastic marketing technique, because most of us are probably egomaniacal enough to say “Hey! Look!” and link back to the list on *your* blog, resulting in lots of traffic. Kudos, and thanks Mobile Maven!

Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site.

Excel is not a database

Here’s the thing: Excel isn’t a database. Most people who don’t work in IT don’t seem to understand this, and they’re deathly afraid to actually communicate with anyone in IT, so they take matters into their own hands, and create problems so big that IT is forced to get involved, because at some point this spreadsheet becomes “critical” to some business function. Then IT gets even more bitter toward the non-IT folk, validating some of the reasons the non-IT folk went that route in the first place, and virtually guaranteeing that they won’t come to the IT …

I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before, but it just looked so huge and convoluted to me, given the simplicity of what I wanted at the time, that I moved on. This time was different.

This time I needed a lot of the capabilities of ReportLab. I needed to generate PDFs (this is not a web-based project), I needed to generate charts, and I wanted the reports I was generating to contain various types of text objects in addition to the charts and such.

I took the cliff-dive into the depths of the ReportLab documentation. I discovered three things:

1. There is quite a lot of documentation
2. ReportLab is quite a capable library
3. The documentation actually defies the simplicity of the library.

It’s a decent bit easier than it …

So, I recently ran into one of those situations where a customer complains that his MySQL database is slow, and “it worked great until about two weeks ago”. The first thing I look at in these situations is not the queries or any code, but the indexes. Once I determined that the indexes were almost nonsensical, I had a look at the queries themselves, which proved that the indexes were, in fact, nonsensical. Running the queries as written in the code, from a mysql shell, with EXPLAIN, I was able to further confirm that the indexes (most of them, anyway) were never used.

Easy right? Just reindex the table!

NOTE: I’m going to skip the talk about all of the database design issues on this gig and just go straight to solving the immediate problem at hand. Just know that I had nothing to do with the design.

But, supposing this table has 15 million rows and is running on a machine with 2GB of RAM and only …

First, AddThis.com (where I was the director of IT) and Clearspring have merged! A side effect of that is that I’m now (happily, on purpose, by choice) a full-time consultant! I’ll have a web site up soonish. Until then, check back here for updates. If you’re a tech firm who needs help, and don’t mind remote workers, send mail to bkjones at Google’s mail service (.com).

Some folks thought I’d passed away due to the uncharacteristic lull in posting frequency on this blog. I’m very much alive — but working for a startup and maintaining a consulting business simultaneously is hard, especially when two large projects fall into your lap at the same time. So what have I been up to?

Well, as part of the now-public merger between the company I worked for and the new company, …