Author Archive

Enthusiasts talk shop casually

I spent some time with a few colleagues yesterday and came to the conclusion that true enthusiasts gravitate toward talking shop with one another. This is true even of casual situations. I’ve had plenty of “getting to know you” and “let’s just hang” social situations with other geeks where we might start out talking about [ READ MORE ]

Neato article about NoSQL on Ars Technica

I am very excited by some of the NoSQL stuff out there and enjoyed a recent Ars Technica article. The first page is some neat background and the second page has a good overview of some NoSQL options out there. http://arstechnica.com/business/data-centers/2010/02/-since-the-rise-of.ars/ [ READ MORE ]

The zen of backup theory

When stuck inside due to all the snow, there is no better time to consider the topic of backup. Seriously, backup is important and the issue is fascinating.  The area of backup brings together so many topics in computing. Think about it! To do backup successfully, you must deal with data transfer, data integrity validation, [ READ MORE ]

Cool Free/Open Source Software from Google

As has been spoken about endlessly (OStatic, OSnews), there is a great blog post from 0×1fff with many (started at 35, is now many more) open source projects from Google. In fact and indeed, there is some cool stuff on there. I knew about Caja and Protocol Buffers (wish there was a JS port of [ READ MORE ]

ES5 is finally here, JavaScript geeks rejoice!

So, earlier this week, it was announced that ECMAScript 5 has finally been released. This is a good thing and I caught the highlights on InfoQ. The full draft is a 252 page PDF  beast of a document which covers basically about everything there is to cover. The things which strike me as interesting are [ READ MORE ]

Messing with OpenStreetMap

Some people might not see the reason for a project like OpenStreetMap when there are plenty of good mapping products and services laying around. I am not one of them. Whenever I use a GPS, I think quite a bit about it’s inner workings. How does it figure out which route is best? How does [ READ MORE ]

It’s never too early for elevator calculus

So, this past Friday night we had some friends over for a lovely Shabbos dinner. It really was a delightful time. Good food, good company and good conversation. What could be more relaxing and appropriate for Shabbos after a long week? Anyway, after dinner, they all left and Sarah and I cleaned up and promptly [ READ MORE ]

Data visualization on a web page

Quickie: Two of my favorite ways to get data visualized on a web page are the Google Chart API and flot, the amazing canvas-based plotting library built on top of jQuery. The Google Chart API provides a rediculously clever way to get high-quality information graphics which are generated on the back of the clearly-amazing Google infrastructure. [ READ MORE ]

Good talk about DSL construction in JS

Neat talk, should remind everyone about the joys of doing cool stuff in the browser. Plus, it made me think about DSLs in general which is good because of all the Scala goodness I’ve been messing around with recently. The talk is on InfoQ. [ READ MORE ]

Thoughts on different types of data

At work, my title is the Data Warehouse Manager. Mostly, I work with numbers. Lots of test scores, checklist data, compositve variables and the like. Numbers are cool and they can often yield plenty of insight. However, numbers are not the only story that can be told! So much of business intelligence right now focuses [ READ MORE ]

About

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Jonathan E. Magen is currently the data warehouse manager for a school district in Connecticut. He is a passionate developer who loves curry and writing clean code. Star Trek is cool, too. Also, books. Many things are actually really great and Jonathan likes them as well.

Me on GitHub