User:DerrickPallas

Derrick Pallas

About me

I am a Software Engineer for [Alexa Internet], a subsidiary of [Amazon]. (Anything I say on this website is on my own behalf and is not the opinion or property of my company, nor should it be construed to represent such.)

I have an MS in CS from [UCD] where I [worked] in the [Center for Software Systems Reasearch]. These days I just do cool tricks with Ruby and C++, advocating cool things like [FastCGI] and [microformats]. You probably saw me at [BarCamp] last year or the birthday party for microformats. You can often catch me at [SF Beta].

Additionally, I used to write for [The Daily WTF]. You can find out more about me at [my own website].

re: microformats

What I'm working on:

• working on examples for a software dependency / generic directed acyclic graph microformat
• telling everyone I know about how to embed an hCard in the web page they've already got
• I got a couple of fields added to the Alexa search engine, including "ClassTag" and "RelTag", which search for documents in which a class or rel appear. This is useful for queries against Alexa's "Million Search Results" service.
• Every month, I count the number of pages with microformats that show up in Alexa's archive.
  • I don't show this number to Ben West any more, lest it end up in IRC attached to his name. (That really makes me furious.)

proposal: dependancy

• looking for examples of directed graphs on the web
• applications in
  • software engineering
    • automatically build library dependency trees
    • distribute security alerts to people that link to your code
  • any directed, acyclic graph
    • getting dressed in the morning
    • cooking
• orthogonal to xfn
  • people don't have versions
    • libfoo requires libbar-2.0 or later
  • people don't have optional relationships
    • ex: at build time, compile in SSL support if present
  • people don't have exclusive-or relationships
    • ex: in Gentoo, syslog, syslog-ng, and metalog satisfy virtual/syslog
    • ex: the Ruby library RMagick requires ImageMagick xor GraphicsMagick