Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
Development of any moderately complex software package is a social process. Even if a project is developed entirely by a single person, there is still a social component that consists of all of the people who use the software, file bugs, and provide recommendations for…
This is my first new post written in markdown for the static version of patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog. The only reason I was running both PHP and MySQL on my server was to host wordpress which became a pain in the ass with all of the upgrades. This…
In the past couple of days I have twice received an opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal which suggests that the models used for estimating climate change are grossly pessimistic and that we really need not be concerned with anthropogenic climate change. It was…
IBM TJ Watson Research Center — Photo by Simon Greig Are you one of the best software engineering students in the world? Do you dig mining software repositories? Are you a wizard at social network analysis? Interested in a great summer job looking at what…
In January 2011 I made my 2011 Personal Development Goals public. In the spirit of complete transparency, here’s my scorecard of how I did on my quest to accomplish these goals. I’m not being quite as hard on these goals as I was on my…
As I did for 2010 and 2011, I’ve created a set of predictions for the coming year around Open Source. However, this year I’ve expanded it to the general field of technology. These are all fairly specific things that I should be able to verify…
A new year means that it is time to revisit the predictions about Open Source and technology in 2011 I made at the end of 2010. As before, I’ve tried to be entirely honest with my assessment. If I’ve got something wrong please leave a…
Lately I’ve had trouble doing anything more than idly browsing the Internet during my non-work hours. Yes, they’re non-work hours, but I still like that time to be productive. I feel much better after work if I took those few hours and wrote some code…
I attended the joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the Foundations of Software Engineering Conference earlier this month in Szeged, Hungary. I was fortunate enough to have a paper in the 4th Workshop on Social Software Engineering and also in the main…
Graph databases such as Neo4j, OrientDB, and InifiniteGraph are useful tools for social science researchers because localized queries are a function of only the number of links relative to the nodes in question. In contrast, relational databases, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, suffer performance degradation…