Jozef Nagy.com

An economic downturn is a great time to start that business you've been thinkg of. Jason Calacanis, who made his fortunes with Weblogs Inc., started his company after the Dot Com bubble burst. One of the reasons to start a business now is that a lot of the competition dries up. The VCs pull back and funding gets tighter. Even tech marketing genius Seth Godin agrees.

What do you do when your company is too bureaucratic to give it's developers access to any kind of version control whatsoever?

The star ship Voyager has 257 rooms according to the Emergency Medical Hologram. You'd think the writers could've accomodated us Computer Scientists and made it 255. Of course, then Captain Janeway's quarters would have to be room 0. Can't have a non-zero based room assignment now can we? Otherwise we'd end up with made up IPs like CSI uses.

As you know from seeing my projects page, I've been working on building a ZoneMinder server. ZoneMinder is the software that manages the recording of multiple security cameras, streams live video over the internet, and provides all sort of analysis and other goodies. It's a robust, mature application.

Camera Setup

• 1 usb webcam, 10 FPS, 320x240
• 2 analog B&W cameras, 15 FPS, 640x480
• 1 analog B&W camera, 30 FPS, 640x480

System Specs

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 3.16 GHz LGA 775 Wolfdale 1333MHz FSB
• Motherboard: Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX
• Video Card: Cheapest name brand (Asus) PCIx x16 video card you can buy. Hey, it's a server.
• RAM: 2x 2GB DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
• Power Supply: Thermaltake 750W ATX12V / EPS12V. This is a monster of a power supply.
• UPS: APC 1500 VA 750 Watt battery backup
• Video Encoder: Hauppauge ImpactVCB Video Capture Card 558 PCI
• Video Encoder: BlueCherry PV-149 - 4 port video capture card (120FPS)
• A single 80 GB 7200 RPM hard drive for the operating system and a few fans
• Mid-size ATX case

Total Cost = $1110

Some of Google's former employees recently left to start their own search engine, Cuil.com. It not only purports to have indexed tens of millions more web pages, but has a more interesting way of presenting search results. The layout is supposed to be more of a magazine style layout, with text blocks directly answering users' queries. This is different from Google's approach of putting their search effort into the quality of their index.

End users tend to think of database design as a direct one-to-one mapping of their spreadsheet designs. So when you need to design a database for someone, they submit their existing Excel solution. You, the clever DBA that you are, begin mentally dividing out tables, normalizing, finding keys, etc.

Meanwhile, the user keeps talking about your database as if it were this one table, congruent with his Excel spreadsheet.

Sooooo... last night I decided to submit to Digg again. I also went on some random blogs, etc. and spammed some comment sections with links to a new site I'm starting. I think the graph speaks for itself.

Normalizing a database isn't always the right way to go. Basically, normalization guarantees certain kinds of data integrity. But all the JOINS you'll end up using are performance suicide. For read-heavy applications you de-normalize. That's something to keep in mind for sets of tables we use that are very large and mostly used for reporting (read only). For most of our financial data we need the data integrity so we normalize and deal with the penalty hit of using JOINS. One financial app I maintain is a good example.

The last week of June, 2008, was aqua-hell. On a daily basis the evening commute was fraught with flooded streets. Getting home was an adventure and a gamble. "Should I plow through this deep puddle and risk a stalled engine? Or do I go through the detour and hope it's not just as terrifying."

The fact that I lowered my front springs by 2" doesn't help in these situations. Here's a shot of the Mustang before the conversion. No pictures from after. Use your imagination. The suburbanites with Explorers and Grand Cherokees must've been proud. All that wasted gas money so that a few times a year that unnecessarily large gas guzzling behemoth can prove useful.