Matt's Blog

We use supervisord on our systems, which has a handy browser based 'tail -f' feature. The problem is that the end of the log file appears off the bottom of the screen, and the browser won't scroll to the bottom automatically. This bookmarklet will keep the end of the page in view. javascript:scroll=function(){setTimeout(function(){window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);scroll();},100);};scroll();

"We take comfort from Charles Darwin's observation that it's not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. We just need to be adaptable." - Gary Pruitt, then the CEO of McClatchy Newspapers and now CEO of the Associated Press ( http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/11/12/google_ad_revenue_tops_entire_us_print_media_industry_chart.html ). I recently spent some time looking into the stats for web content we were responsible for and noticed two things. The first was that the majority of visitors were viewing chunked versions of our books, where each individual web page aligned roughly with an entry in the table of contents. The second was that most visitors were spending only a couple of minutes reading the content in any given session. This observation aligned very closely with my own information gathering process. Once or twice a year I'll make time to sit down and read a technical book ...

In the next 5 - 10 years our good friend and faithful digital companion, the search bar, is going to ride off into the sunset. Googling has forever changed how we find answers to almost anything we could ever want to know, because the answer is most likely there buried in the first 10 links brought up in response to anything you type into the search bar. When you think about it though, having to trawl through those 10 links is actually not a great way to answer a question. If you were to ask your mechanic what was making that noise in your engine, you want the answer, not rambling descriptions and discussions on engine design and maintenance. But that is exactly what you get if you were to ask Google the same question: pages of forum posts when you only want the last one that actually has the answer; a blog post where that engine noise is coincidentally mentioned in the comments; or a 10 minute YouTube video where the information you want is 9 minutes in. That is all about to c...