Brian Pane

I use a lot of Apple products, and I like them. I’ve come to depend on the versatility of Mac OS X: rather than having to choose between Windows for good productivity tools and Linux for good engineering tools, I can have all those tools together in one OS X system. The iPhone [...]

I wanted to try out Ruby on Rails with MySQL on OS X 10.6. I ran into a few common problems along the way, so I am documenting the process here in case it might be helpful to others.

Step 1: Install MySQL

I grabbed the .tar.gz distribution of the latest MySQL 5.1 release and installed [...]

This post on TechCrunch contains quite a nice analysis of Twitter’s user behavior:

Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective

As the author notes, it was possible to deduce so many key metrics because “Twitter uses auto-incrementing ID numbers (1,2,3,4…) for both users and tweets.”

Auto-incremented ID numbers are a common web development practice. When you run an [...]