Nick Ashley: A web geek from Omaha

A friend of mine is coming to Omaha on Saturday, May 29th to put on a slackline workshop, as well as a acrobatics workshop. Each workshop is 1.5 - 2hrs long, and has a suggested donation of $20.

This should be alot of fun, and no prior experience is necessary. If interested, contact me at nick@nickashley.org

Here is some information about the event:

Workshop Descriptions: 

 Fundamentals of Slacklining  

Offer a unique practice that redefines your sense of balance and mental focus. Great for yogis, climbers, and athletes of all forms, slackline yoga teaches complete body awareness and is an excellent cross training tool. Slackline workshops include the basics of the “slackasana series”, including sitting, kneeling, arm balancing,  standing and walking on the line. This workshop will surely push you to your limits, where you can find even more possibilities.

Dynamic Duo Acrobatics

The dynamics of working with another person acrobatically can be like learning to walk again. Instead this time you’ll be Flying! Sam and D are bringing to you a way to sync up harmoniously and connect through counter balances, partner yoga, and breath. Like the yin yang symbol, acrobatic partner movements can leave you unclear on where one thing begins and the other ends. After looking at the world upside down you may not even know up from down. But then again, it’s all relative ;) Sam and Dan will teach techniques in ways to find balance in positions you may have never thought you’d find yourself in. No partner or experience necessary, though yoga practice helpful.  

Dan’s Bio, 

 Born and raised in MN it took a move to ND for Dan to start climbing and practicing yoga.  Since then he has grabbed a hold of the lifestyle and hasn’t looked back.  His goal: to help people discover what they are passionate about and help them find ways to challenge their minds and bodies.  Be it in a park, a yoga studio, a climbing wall, or a classroom Dan is always ready to teach and learn from you.  

Sam’s Bio,

“Push your limits, consciously. Focus on the step in front of you, learn how to break through your internal barriers” Sam Salwei is a teacher, one who will help you teach yourself.  He works with his inspirations, passions and limits to create a conscious lifestyle to share with others.  His goal: to help others break through emotional and personal barriers.  Irrational fear is what holds us back and lack of trust limits us.  Sam strives to help others realize that what appears too difficult is attainable. The Actual step you will take yourself.

see www.yogaslackers.com for more info

So I’ve seen a few articles talking about how twitter released a new open source ‘Sharding Framework’ called Gizzard. It sounds interesting, but I really have no idea what a sharding framework is, and how that works.

Gizzard is not a storage engine, it is middleware that you use on top of whatever storage engine you want. I dont really understand how that can work, or make sharding any easier at this point.

Read more about what Gizzard is, and grab the source code from the gizzard project on github. Let me know if you can make any sense of it!

Just finished reading a good blog post by Jonathan Ellis where he discusses some common myths that are floating around about Cassandra. The most interesting to me is his last point, where he explains that even though most of Cassandra’s data remains in memory, it writes to a commit log sot hat your data won’t be lost in the event of a catastrophic failure. Apparently the write-log technique gains the reliability of having the data on disk, but alleviates all the random seek times that a hard drive normally requires if you are simply fsyncing every piece of data you store.

Read Jonthans full list on his blog post Cassandra: Fact vs fiction

So I was hosting my blog with a company called storytelr. Basically I never wrote any content there, it was just another site to view my feed from sharing google reader items, as well as my twitter posts and pictures uploaded to picasa.

Well they stopped hosting peoples content, and I didn’t really feel like setting up an account on our server and installing it locally, as it really wasn’t worth it. So I setup a tumblr account, we will see how this goes. I probably wont post much, but my goal is to post info about new things I am learning, at this point possibly related alot to the nosql movement, and more specifically Cassandra.