Oliver Roup’s Blog

• How Facebook uses Erlang for real-time chat – Off the Grid!!

February 8, 2010 – This is a somewhat old blog post from a Facebook engineer describing how they engineered the chat system in Erlang. It’s notable because it contains a description of a scale testing technique I’ve never heard of before – they did a “dark launch” where real users pages were simulating status update connections and even fake message sending without ever drawing a single element on screen. This seems like a very novel way to get realistic load testing (realistic because it’s real people with real data) but without exposing your users to a system with bugs. Clever!

• On College Campuses, a Shortage of Men – NYTimes.com

February 6, 2010 – Hmm, not what I remember…

• Backing out of a term sheet cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog

February 5, 2010 – Chris Dixon flexes some muscle. Hardcore.

• The disrupted of Davos « BuzzMachine

February 5, 2010 – Very interesting view of the WEF

• 12+1 Signs That You Have Founderitis – GigaOM

February 3, 2010 – Om Malik on Founderitis

• Dear MBAs who want to work at startups | from This is going to be BIG! – Comments on New York Tech Community, Startups, Venture Capital and Career Education

January 30, 2010 – Charlie O’Donnell, EIR at First Round Capital (one of our backers) writes just excellent advice for MBAs trying to work at startups. It’s a little harsh at first but also spot on. I think this advice goes in both directions (Entrepreneurs shouldn’t think they know what all “MBAs” are like just because they met some asshole who couldn’t shut up about Harvard) but I did see a number of my classmates committing some of these errors.

An awesome and pretty self-explanatory graph from an awesome blog I just got sent. It’s three years old so I guess I’m just behind the times. (MySpace? What’s that?)

• Conan Blowing NBC's Money, Spends $1.5 Million For One Minute Segment (VIDEO)

January 21, 2010 – Conan sticks it to NBC by doing a comedy bit with a Bugatti Veyron ($1.0m car) and by playing a clip from the Rolling Stones. Awesome. (Although I doubt he really bought that car…)

• Chinese Fingerprints Said to Be Found in Google Attacks – NYTimes.com

January 20, 2010 – This is pretty exotic stuff. Is the Chinese government really hiring the types of hackers that read Chinese math journals to pursue their electronic espionage? This stuff all seems pretty aggressive.

• The Welcome screen may be displayed for 30 seconds during the logon process after you set a solid color as the desktop background in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2

January 19, 2010 – Hillarious Windows 7 bug – solid background color desktop -> 30 second delay while booting.