- Optimizing MongoDB Compound Indexes
How to find the best multicolumn index for a complex query.
- Eating Your Own Hamster Food
If you aren't using your own libraries as you build them, you're skipping an essential test: not mainly for correctness or performance but for usability. (Using your software as you develop it is normally called "eating your own [ ... ]
- Motor Progress Report: GridFS, Logo
Two big updates to Motor, my non-blocking driver for MongoDB and Tornado. First, my friend Musho Rodney Alan Greenblat made a logo. Motor may or may not be ready for prime time, but it looks ready. Second, I implemented GridFS. GridFS is a [ ... ]
- Regarding Warhol
I saw "Regarding Warhol: Sixy Artists, Fifty Years" at the Met today. I've always enjoyed Warhol: his every work makes a clear, prescient statement, and there are days I just want to go to a museum, understand what the art is saying to me, and [ ... ]
- Review of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" by James Agee and Walker Evans
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" by James Agee and Walker Evans, 1941. I give up. I can't finish this nor ever will. Walker Evans begins the book with a few dozen photos, most of which are mediocre at best, a handful of which are among the best [ ... ]
- Dhyana
- Review of "Opening the Hand of Thought" by Kosho Uchiyama
Highly recommended, but don't feel bad for skimming the second half. The book's early chapters offer the most specific and practical guide to zazen that I have read—the method, its goals, and what the meditator can reasonably [ ... ]
- Ordination Ceremony at the Village Zendo
This April I photographed a tokudo, an ordination ceremony at the Village Zendo for my friends Kaku (pictured above), Tokuyu, and Oshin. It began in the early morning with elder priests shaving the novices' heads. Then we held a ceremony [ ... ]
- Review of "The Social Organization of Zen Practice" by David L. Preston
I read this while I was practicing at Zen Mountain Center in 2003; it describes the effect of peer pressure on new Zen students.
- Adorable!
I had to post this adorable photo of Oshin and Seizan, two students at the Village Zendo.