http://wanderr.com/jay Rantings of a Grooveshark Developer Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:04:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Here's a fun issue I ran into a little while ago, while doing DB maintenance at Grooveshark. MySQL has a handy atomic rename function, where you can do something like this: RENAME TABLE CurrentTable TO OldTable, NewTable TO CurrentTable Both renames are done as a single atomic action, so that the table CurrentTable ... http://wanderr.com/jay/mysql-atomic-rename-fk-constraints-oops/2008/11/17/ Sorry about the new ads on Grooveshark Lite, folks. They certainly don't make me very happy either, but in these tough economic times, we gotta pay the bills somehow! The good news is that these ads should free up some resources so we can spend more time making Grooveshark Lite even ... http://wanderr.com/jay/sorry-about-the-ads/2008/11/13/ One of my long-standing favorite bands is Soltero, and this song is a great representation of why. http://wanderr.com/jay/soltero/2008/10/28/ It's finally here: the Grooveshark widget! To show it off, here's a collection of songs by The Bird and the Bee; one of my new favorite bands. http://wanderr.com/jay/grooveshark-releases-our-first-widget/2008/10/17/ It's almost as if Tuesday never happened... http://wanderr.com/jay/stocks/2008/10/15/ As with nearly every issue in Software Engineering worth thinking about, Joel Spolsky has written an article about leaky abstractions that is very relevant to some problems I ran into tonight. Abstractions do not really simplify our lives as much as they were meant to. [...] all abstractions leak, and the ... http://wanderr.com/jay/leaky-abstractions/2008/09/12/ Google released their Chrome Browser today. I'll refrain from giving it a full review as many others have already manged to do so. I want to comment on the ease of adding search engines and some minor tweaks you can do to make the search functionality more powerful, specifically in regards ... http://wanderr.com/jay/quick-searching-in-google-chrome/2008/09/02/ One of today's headlines is Human error causes most Predator crashes. Without reading the article, it should be obvious that this statement is simply not true. If there is a common recurring problem attributed to human error, it is most likely actually a design error. A caption in that article reads Research ... http://wanderr.com/jay/when-human-error-isnt/2008/08/25/ This is the second time that an error in a monitoring/testing tool that we use has caused me to waste a good deal of time trying to solve a non-problem. The first was when we were using a tool to test the scaling performance of a new feature. According to this ... http://wanderr.com/jay/who-will-monitor-the-monitors/2008/08/21/ When I was in college (oh so long ago...) I was a DJ for our radio station, and then I was a music director. I loved being a DJ: having lots of new, interesting and unreleased music on tap, from Smashing Pumpkins to Underwater Boxer; having a channel to share ... http://wanderr.com/jay/on-being-a-dj/2008/08/18/