Kevin Railsback

Ex Post Yahoo

kevin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:38:00 +0000

That is all. Sad day for me, and for lots of awesome Yahoo! folks. The time was too short!

Restarting the blog

kevin — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:32:45 +0000

Time to dust things off and get my blog back into shape. Right now it only has posts up through April 2007, working to find my backup of posts since then to import into Wordpress.

A new adventure

kevin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:46:35 +0000

After nine and a half great years at InfoWorld/IDG, I’ll be leaving on April 4th to try something new. I’ll be starting at Yahoo! as the Web Operations Engineering Lead for the Brickhouse and Advanced Products groups. Both departments are led by former InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson.

Lots of brilliant folks there, and many large-scale challenges to work on bringing Fire Eagle to market and helping advanced Yahoo! Live and other cool projects. I can’t wait!

I can’t say enough about how great IDG has been as a place to really grow and hone my IT and operations chops, and to build management skills. I wish I could stick around to make my 10 year anniversary and dinner with Uncle Pat (Pat McGovern, IDG’s Founder). This is an opportunity I can’t pass up.

The Industry Standard is back, baby!

kevin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:05:45 +0000

After many months of hard work, and an exciting launch night, The Industry Standard is back!

Want to know more about what the new Standard is all about, and how you can participate? Read more at InfoWorld and from many other sites.

And of course come check it out in person. Link up with me here: http://www.thestandard.com/people/kevin-railsback

Check it out! http://www.thestandard.com

Testing JS-Kit commenting at InfoWorld

kevin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:32:09 +0000

I’m in the planning process to roll out a new commenting system site-wide for all InfoWorld blogs, from a company called JS-Kit. This is the same commenting system used on Guy Kawasaki’s blog and a number of other sites. Pretty solid so far in our testing. Anyone have experience with it on a large-scale project?

Here comes another bubble…

kevin — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:01:17 +0000

Funny video about the current Bubble 2.0

Massive SF power outage

kevin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:03:33 +0000

SimCity: “your city is experiencing brownouts, build another power plant”

The entire South of Market (SOMA) area of San Francisco is currently experiencing repeated power outages which began shortly before 2pm. This is the tech hub of SF, and a number of high-traffic websites are completely off the grid currently, including 365Main (a major colo), Craigslist, Netflix, Technorati, Yelp, and SixApart (Movable Type, Typepad, LiveJournal, Vox, etc).

InfoWorld’s building near South Park is currently down as well, but our website, hosted at Hosting.com, formerly Verio, on 3rd is still up and running as of 3pm.

Details on SFGate

Apparently 20,000+ in SF are currently without power. Glad I worked from home (San Mateo) today. =) Just hope the power comes back on before we have to start shutting down servers for heat reasons. And if you see InfoWorld drop off the ‘net you’ll know why….

iPhone SSH access enabled

kevin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:00:08 +0000

The resourcefulness of folks working on accessing the Unixy goodness of the iPhone is impressive. Working off of previous accomplishments, someone going by the name NerveGas has figured out a way of getting the SSH daemon working on the iPhone. This, combined with custom-compiled utilities, is really opening up the possibilities for customizing the iPhone going forward.

I’m a bit beyond my days of spending hours figuring out workarounds for restrictions, and I’ll most likely continue to use my iPhone as-is. But it’s heartening to see that the platform is being opened up for customization.

NerveGas’ Howto is located here.

More details at TUAW: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/23/ssh-on-iphone

iPhone Chat part 2

kevin — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 23:17:23 +0000

Is Apple’s iPhone worth the price? Eric Hill and I discuss how the iPhone fares as a multimedia device, a corporate e-mail client, a PDA, geek bling, and, oh yes, a phone.

What geeks….

iPhone Chat part 1

kevin — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:40:57 +0000

Is Apple’s iPhone worth the price? Eric Hill and I discuss how the iPhone fares as a multimedia device, a corporate e-mail client, a PDA, geek bling, and, oh yes, a phone.

What geeks….