Story

I’ve been wanting to share this experience for a while, but it took me a while to come up with a story and example I could use in a blog post. I help out during the weekends in a small family run magic shop. I’m the third generation working in the shop. My great-grandfather always hoped that his only son would follow in his footsteps as a carpenter. But at only eighteen years old, my grandfather said goodbye to the chisels and sawdust, and set out for the big city to chase his dream of becoming a world class magician. The first few years were tough, he was no Houdini. He would (hardly) get by performing at kid birthday parties, weddings and store openings. That’s how he met my late grandmother. She worked as a shop girl in one of the first malls that were built in the city, and happened to show up each time my grandfather performed in one of the stores. After getting married, having a baby (my dad) and saving every dime they earned, my grandfather was able to rent a hole in the wall and open up his own tiny magic shop - in that same mall. Once my dad finished school, he worked as a middle school teacher for a few years, giving up on that job to join his father in the family business. He loves to tell you how he can now still teach children, without the chore of grading their homework. I’ve been running around and helping out in the store since I could barely walk. I guess you can say that magic runs in our blood. ...

San Francisco, 1852. With the California Gold Rush at its peak, successful gold-seekers wanted to protect all their precious gold nuggets by storing them in a strong safe. At the time, it wasn’t that easy to have access to a safe though. At the very beginning, it were just a few local merchants that owned one. Not much later, bankers swamped the area hoping to get their piece of the pie - bringing the strongest safes money can buy. ...

Having worked with several storage paradigms over these last few months - from flatfiles, to NoSQL, to the big enterprisey relational databases -, I have spent plenty of time trying to make sense of all the options out there. It wasn’t until I watched one of the last episodes of The Wire season 3 that I had an epiphany regarding modeling data in document stores. Yes, I know, I tend to take those things home with me. ...

Last week, several news channels reported on the strongest solar storm since 2005. This news item reminded me of a peculiar support ticket we received one gray Monday morning a few years ago, when I was still writing software for fire departments. # Ticket 7238 Subject: **AVL broken** Status: New Description 06:22 Vehicles stay mostly stationary on the map, even when we are positive they are en route. Fire departments that have to cover a large area - and are wealthy enough - often use AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location) to track their vehicles and visualize them on a map. This is extremely valuable, because you always want to dispatch the vehicles with the smallest response time to a high priority intervention. Also being able to advise drivers of possible blockages and toxic gas clouds can save lives. To be able to track a vehicle, an AVL module is installed into each vehicle’s cockpit. This module uses GPS to determine the location and sends the location data over GPRS to a central server. ...