Fubaredness Is Contagious

I recently gave a talk titled Introduction to AMQP Messaging with RabbitMQ at a big web technology company in Chicago. You can now see the slides here on Slideshare, or download PDF.

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As “cloud computing” is gaining on its rivals in the race for the hottest IT buzzword du jour, I started noticing that many products that only yesterday were marketed as “hosting,” “grid” or “cluster” became “clouds” virtually overnight.
I realized something the other day.  For something to call itself a computing cloud it is necessary, but [...]

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If I select “field as alt_field_name”, the value will always come out as String, not what the field actually is.

 
>> User.find(:first, :select => :created_at).created_at
=> Wed Jan 24 00:04:59 UTC 2007
>> User.find(:first, :select => "created_at").created_at
=> Wed Jan 24 00:04:59 UTC 2007
>> User.find(:first, :select => "created_at as created__at").created__at
=> "2007-01-24 00:04:59"

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Most of us often get donation solicitations in mail. When it’s for children, these solicitations often feature a story of one child who needs help. However, if one donates, the money always goes to the organization, not to this particular child. So you never know if that child got the needed treatment and you don’t [...]

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Today I would like to continue my never ending quest of finding parallels between IT and economics and social sciences. I will start with a preamble, but if you are already familiar with a concept of “operations alert” in context of IT, you can skip it.
Preamble
I have spent a big part of my career in [...]

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