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My latest project at work is Cassandra, a distributed, eventually consistent, column oriented data store. It’s somewhere between Dynamo (Cassandra’s original author worked on Dynamo), and Google’s BigTable. It was developed as an internal application at Facebook, later open sourced, and is now an Apache incubator project. The external interface to Cassandra is thrift-based. Thrift is a framework for creating network services, services that communicate using a compact binary data format....

I don’t have it. Do you?

A co-worker of mine uses one of the stranger keyboards I’ve seen, a Kinesis Advantage. He picked it up his after a bout with tendinitis and was sold on it. He was kind enough to let me borrow his spare for about a week so I could try it out. It’s been an interesting week. :) The Advantage differs from conventional keyboards in a number of ways, the ones I think most relevant are:...

Lenny released yesterday. This is great news, and congratulations all around to everyone that worked their asses off making it happen. By my calculations this comes 677 days after the initial release of Etch, (or 22 months and change). I’ve said before, Debian releases When Ready and that (to the best of my observations), consensus seems to be that somewhere between 18 and 24 months is the sweet spot. Not only does this make for the second “on-time” release in a row, but there was an Etch-And-A-Half sporting new kernels and video drivers in the mean time....

I received a surprising number of questions related to the cat-a-log series. I’ve attempted to collect them all, and answer them here. Q: Does your wife think all cats are sweet? What about dogs? A: Any member of felis catus is by definition unconditionally sweet. She also views many dogs as sweet, though they tend to be held to a much higher standard, (for example, “humping” is unacceptable and any dog known to have committed such an act is Not Sweet)....

Apparently there is in fact a 15th cat (or a 14th for you purists out there). If cataloged, it would have been Unknown #3, an as-of-yet unnamed cat that comes to my porch to eat the food my wife puts out. I wasn’t able to get a picture, and I’m not sure I recall ever seeing it (they all look the same to me anyway). A shame really, rumor has it that it’s missing a paw, I could have had some fun with that....

Last but not least, Pepe. Alright, granted this one might be borderline, but to be fair, many people refer to these guys as Polecats. It comes onto my porch to eat from a dish of food, and my wife and daughter have named it, I think that counts for something. Other interesting facts: Smells awful.

Unknown #2… or is it Zorro? Yet another cat that I suspect has applied for citizenship under the terms of If it eats, we must greets. I refer to it here as Unknown #2, but someone let slip the name “Zorro” when the subject came up. Other interesting facts: None.

This one has been cropping up more and more. When I first brought up Unknown #1, my wife explained that it was not her cat, she didn’t know why it was hanging around, and that more than likely it belonged to someone and was just wandering a bit. This would be comforting if I hadn’t heard it before (see day 6 and day 11 for current examples). And yes, it eats the food that is placed outside....

Moving on… This is Garfield, another cat who obtained amnesty through If it eats, we must greets. The look on his face in the picture above it pretty typical for him. I think he’s bummed because he showed up 10 cats too late and has to sleep outside. Other interesting facts: My wife thinks he’s sweet.