Just Call Me Humpty

Last weekend I crashed my motorcycle and broke my shoulderblade (scapula for those with a medical bent) and a couple of ribs. Fortunately I was with Jordy and Noah at the time, who were kind enough to direct the paramedics to get me and my bike to convenient places. Otherwise both me and the bike could have ended up in Monterey instead of San Jose. Thanks guys!

So of course things have been kinda slow going for the last week. Fortunately I found out that I can use both hands to type and that the sling they gave me is just to keep my arm from swinging around when it shouldn’t. As long as I can sit at the computer and get stuff done, I’m a happy camper. One of the things I did find ultraconvenient however was the Nokia N800. Using the thumboard on that instead of the stylus it makes for a great way to be able to lounge out and be comfortable while still keeping on top of IM, web stuff, and email. I just wish the terminal for it worked a bit better with the thumboard. You have to enter commands and pop out of thumboard mode to hit return. Still, quite convenient, I’ve ended up using it more in the last week than I have any other week with the 770 or 800.

Stuff has been rolling along at AdMob too. Not only have they continued the demolition and expansion of the AdMob office to include more wall removals, but additional hackery has been ongoing. Yesterday Wayne put up an updated version of the live ad request info now called the AdMonitor. We were all pretty sad to see the live request ticker disappear from the main page when we did the website refresh, and Wayne took it upon himself to replace it with something ever slicker. Fantastic!

I’m still hacking away at some Hadoop stuff. The recent distros have come with a tool you can use to call out to external programs to run the map or reduce phases. Cool, cause I would personally write stuff in Ruby than in Java. I was having a hard time finding an example of scripts to call from the streaming tool, but then I happened upon some C examples for the two phases and was able to get some Ruby scripts executing across my homemade cluster. Best of both worlds. Hopefully it’s a project that I’ll get to spend enough time hacking around with that I can contribute something back.