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mark_l_watson
21,400karma·8,624submissions·August 19, 2009
about
I am an author of 20 books and a practitioner specializing in artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing, and the semantic web. I have 55 US patents. I code in Common Lisp, Clojure, Swift, Python, Haskell, Java, and Scheme. My web site is https://markwatson.com
My recent books can be read for free online on my web site or optionally you can pay for them at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson
Twitter: mark_l_watson and Mastodon: @mark_watson@mastodon.social
recent activity (8,624 total)
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As a long time Microsoft detractor, I must admit that Bing has a few things that I like: 1. instant view popups 2. free search and spelling APIs for developers. I wrote a web blog showing how to use t…
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I agree. I do use Chef and Capistrano to automate creating AMIs, but then I like to just save the AMIs and boot from them. Also, creating a new AMI from an old one is quick and easy.
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I wish they had released this new feature a year ago - it would have saved me a lot of effort setting up both customers and my EC2 backed applications. I'll use this in the future, and I will convert …
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My wife and I sort of did this. We owned a great house near the beach in California and had "regular" jobs. We moved to the mountains in central Arizona (Sedona), she stopped working and I write and d…
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I like his response. re: Wave itself: I am more enthusiastic about Wave as a platform (custom robots for back end processing, gadgets) for software development.
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I'm writing an article for DevX as we speak for Heroku deployments. I think that Heroku is a good alternative for some applications where saving money by managing your own EC2s is offset by decreased …
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TextMate and RubyMine (Ruby and Rails), Eclipse (AppEngine, Wave robot dev), IntelliJ (Java), AquaEmacs and SBCL/Franz/Gambit-C (Common Lisp and Scheme). For documentation/writing: OmniGraffle and Lat…
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I think he nailed it: more of a competition for developer support.
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It would be difficult, I think, to WFH if you lived alone. Except for doing charity work, my wife is usually at home, but does not interrupt me while I am working. Having friendly neighbors and friend…
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I have used RimuHosting for years to host both my and customers JSP ('J2EE lite') web apps. Great service. I still use Rimuhosting for low volume and testing, but for more capacity it is hard to beat …
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I think I'll wait until a VirtualBox pre-built image is available. I did recently go to the trouble of building the open source edition of the IntelliJ IDEA IDE, but since I have no interest in hackin…
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A great article! It made me realize that I need to be much more careful in setting up restrictions for PostgreSQL users (i.e., client applications).
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I have mostly worked from home for the last 12 years. There is a real trick to it: identify projects that are mostly self contained with well defined deliverables; avoid projects that require tight co…
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Interesting. Sort of like Heroku with "instant install", no admin. I don't touch .Net with a 10 foot pole (yeah, letting my M$crosoft biases show), but this does look cool.
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Although I do all of my deployments on Linux, so MacRuby is not so useful to me, I still think that this is an exciting project: LVM compiler technology, potential for good runtime performance compare…
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OK, apparently this is not such a problem; from the book: "At the time of writing, CouchDB doesn’t remember continuous replications over a server restart. For the time being, you are required to trigg…
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Great writeup. I use CouchDB behind nginx anyway for simple authentication so I'll have to try this. The only problem is "continuous replication currently does not survive server restart" - that is no…
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I offer a 12.5% discount for customers who use 'express service' which basically means that they agree to pay within 7 days of invoice and agree to use my simple NDA/contract and not use up my time do…
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I don't know Don Dodge, but he seems to be a very cool guy, and the tone of his microsoft-fu (get the joke :-) seemed just right.
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Hello Drusneko, re: "Sure, your content may disappear if the startup goes offline" good point. I mirror my Google Docs (in case Google goes belly up :-) and online pictures. For "personal servers", S3…
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I think that most developers have a "personal server" (or two!) I keep MongoDB, CouchDB, Sesame, PostgreSQL+PostGIS, etc. "always on" for my personal and research projects - keeping my stuff separate …
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I can't answer your question from personal experience because I always just use plain old EBS volumes with my EC2s. That said, here is a good writeup on RAID use with EBS by someone at Heroku: http:/…
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Nice writeup. My current favorite is MongoDB (I blogged a few days ago on an easy way to index and search text in MongoDB docs), but I still also use CouchDB (and covered CouchDB in my last APress boo…
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Just an opinion, but my wife and I both like Heifer Project, and I also like afsc.org/
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You make a very good point: definitely cross out and initial parts of a customer's agreement that you are uncomfortable with. Once I had the president of a company (new client) tell me how much he app…
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I have been an independent consultant for 12 years. I have a master services agreement/NDA that has slowly evolved over time, often adding something to get a gig. Feel free to use mine ( http://markwa…
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I use Hadoop with custom map/reduce apps, but I am just experimenting a little with Pig, and playing with Hive is on my to-do list. I may change my mind on this, but I find the map/reduce model to be …
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Sorry if this is off topic because it is a command line solution: zip -9 -r -e foo.zip foo/ The -e argument will cause zip to ask for a password. That said, I usually create a normal ZIP file, then us…
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My antivirus is that I usually boot my MacBook to Ubuntu. For both Ubuntu and OS X I stay up to date with security updates. And hope for the best.