Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
This marks my fourth attempt at being a technology pundit after previous attempts in 2010, 2011, and 2012. I honestly have no idea what happened to my 2013 predictions or if I ever made them. As usual, these predictions are intended to be concrete and…
The days are once again getting depressingly short here on the East Coast. It’s barely light out when I enter my office in the morning and it’s completely dark by the time I leave. This means only one thing - the Christmas shopping season is…
JazzHub is a new project from IBM that provides the power of Rational Team Concert (RTC) in a cloud environment. If you’re working on a public project it’s entirely free. In fact, it’s also free until at least the end of 2013 for private projects…
Last night I, along with a lot of other amazing folks, gave a lightning talk at the Data Science DC meetup. In addition to talks about being a “growth hacker”, random forests, consensus clustering, and “If you give a nerd a number”, there was my…
For the last year and a half I’ve been working with Anita Sarma, a professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and her graduate student, Corey Jergensen, to try and understand some of the social dynamics around GitHub. As we began to dig at the…
On May 1st, 2012 I embarked on an experiment at work — I started signing work emails to my team and friends inside and outside the office with the words “KTHXBYE” or “KTHXBAI”. The goal was to see how long it would take until someone…
Once again I’m looking for an amazingly bright Ph.D. student to work with me over the course of the summer. The position is open to Ph.D. students from any university and at any point of their studies, and I can nearly guarantee it’s going to…
Tech jobs are hot in New York right now. Last year while sitting in LaGuardia Airport waiting for a flight I was hacking on some code for work in Eclipse and guy who was shoulder surfing me tried to persuade me to interview for positions…
A couple of years ago I got the bright idea that I’d get my wife open water SCUBA certification as her Christmas present. She likes aquariums and fish and I thought it would be a fun way to do something different when we travel. Fast…
Recently I’ve seen a number of friends and acquantences post some variation of the following message to their Facebook walls: In response to the new Facebook guidelines I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional…