Cumulus is a new novel from Eliot Peper, set in an near-future Bay Area remade by severe economic inequality, ubiquitous surveillance and consolidation of corporate power. While it works better as a commentary than as a novel, the dystopia it presents is a plausible evolution of current economic and social trends and worth a read by fans of the genre, or anyone interested in where another decade or so might take us. more

Docker With the end of my free tier eligibility looming on AWS, I took advantage of the Rackspace developer discount and set up a new account and personal server this weekend. One of the technologies I’ve been most interested in recently is Docker, a container engine for Linux which aims to be the intermodal shipping container for applications and their dependencies. A brand-new box seemed like the perfect time to dig in to it. more

Earlier this year, I finally set up a blog on my domain, having owned but left it unused for over a year. My needs were simple: it was to be a completely static site, hostable on GitHub Pages or Dropbox, and the focus of the project was in no way to be the technology or process of creating and maintaining it. Despite the part of me that automatically geeked out at the opportunity to build my own completely custom blog generator from scratch, the point of doing it was to provide myself with a straightforward platform for writing, not to go on a technical adventure in creating one. Although I’ve only written two posts on it so far, the effort was successful: in short order, I’d set up Octopress and had it deploying to Pages. more