Dary and I experienced our first quake today. LA old-timers Henry and Jorge experienced another one.

We're on the 31st floor in Burbank and the whole building basically bounced then started swaying. Surprisngly, the ordeal wasn't freigtening at all. We gazed out the window and watched people below scurry into the street.

The swaying lasted about 20 seconds and was pretty amazing. That said, I don't really want to experience anything more powerful than this 5.8 quake.

Scanning Google Reader this morning, I noticed "Corporate Blog" in one of my headlines, and I prepared myself for another usual bashing.

Fortunately, Don Reisinger's Mashable post accurately summarized my feelings on such blogs.

I wrote about some of the nuiances of operating a corporate in our first post, and since then, I've sometimes been frustrated with some of the limitations we assume when writting a corporate blog. And yes, I still cringe when I read corporate blogs that would be better off labeled "Press Release".

Still for those with even the slightest ability to take the good with the not so good, corporate blogs provide valuable insights into what the company's up to.

How else could I tell you that we are scrambling toward a big relaunch of Fan Profiles?

Also, as Reisinger points out, these blogs can give companies a face instead of being brick and mordar. We make a concerted effort to be honest and interactive. We've enjoyed going to conferences, working with developers in Google Groups and eleswhere.

I just hope we can get more involved and encourage more of the company to do so, too.

Amazon's S3 service was down for about 6 hours on Sunday, which drastically affected Fan Profiles. All of the image-based services provided by that product were basically not working, which needless to say was disappointing...

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (or S3) is a service that lets you create, delete, or access data objects (like images) securely using REST or SOAP protocols. It works hand-in-hand with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2) to create a simple and rapidly scalable hosting solution. The benefits of not having to worry about maintaining stores of physical servers and not wasting rack space and engineer's time planning for those one or two days where traffic is wildly higher than average far outweighs the drawbacks of having to deal with this newish technology that is clearly still working out all of the kinks. As SmugMug pointed out in their post on the issue, these outages are few and far between and are generally resolved (reasonably) quickly.

Clearly it's disappointing that Amazon's already experienced two fairly extended outages this year (couple hours each). It's a little unnerving that the complexity of the infrastructure is such that the entire service can go down - Sunday it was all all of the EU and the US! But given that these outages are the exception and not the norm and that cloud computing seems to be the wave of the future and S3 works so nicely with Amazon's EC2 service, it's still a viable solution.

Alex Iskold's really cool list of the Top 10 Concepts That Every Software Engineer Should Know has completely whetted my appetite. Add Flex and Open Social development to this list and that's like the next year of my life. Hell yea.

I'm sure I'll never seeing anything like the night Juan Marichal and Warren Spahn both pitched complete games in a 1-0, 16-inning affair. Can you imagine that? 31 1/3 combined innings?! Add to that the game-winning - and only - run scored was on a walk-off homer from Willie Mays in the bottom of the 16th! What an epic game. What an epic time for baseball: Hank Aaron, Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, and Willie Mays on one field for 16 innings (and let's not forget the up-and-coming 22 year-old named Joe Torre behind the plate for the Braves).

Let's just say I'm a little jealous of the fans who were there that chilly night at old Candlestick Park.

Hello my name is Henry Jackson, and I have just started working here at ESPN as a Web Developer, The first week I spent the time in Bristol , which was really nice, I got a chance to see the great facility in Bristol which is the home of the ESPN  studios. I took the tour of the studios which was surreal. While I was in Bristol I was taught the ESPN way.

I'm learning a lot of great technology such as programming on the Mac, RSpec, Feed_normalizer.

I work with a bunch of really neat guys and I went to the ESPN award shows, which was great !!!

Just came across this awesome post that describes how to fix an annoying bug with autotest that causes it not to show up like half the time. I hated having to go back to the terminal whenever growl didn't popup; every time it was another half second of my life wasted. I must've wasted upwards of 3 minutes because of this bug. I could've killed like 3 level 11 Goretusks in that time (just started playing WoW - level 15 Human Lock, username merckens, keep an eye out for me - I'll be the guy dominating everyone). If you've noticed this problem with your autotest-growl interaction, read the post. Worked for me.

Rails has come a long way quickly, but one of the biggest problems with our favorite MVC framework is support for multiple databases.

Sure you can use self.table_name and/or establish_connection to force a model to point to a table in a different db, but try running a freaking test with fixtures for the offshoot models, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Even more depressing is SQLite3's lack of cross-database query join support, making this statement impossible:

has_and_belongs_to_many :blocked_users,
:class_name => 'User', :join_table => :blocked_users,
:foreign_key => "user_id", :association_foreign_key => "blocked_user_id"

Here's the kicker: All of our apps are multi-database apps, so that means no more SQLite allowed for us, and I really loved it until now.

If I'm wrong, let me know. I'd love to go back to using SQLite for local development. Same for an easy way to load fixtures.

We launched Fight For The Top about two and a half months ago (one third of the time, I've been on top), and it's turned into a fun little Facebook Application. Like all our products thus far, it grew to where it is organically. No ads, marketing or publicity.

Today that changes. We asked ESPN's ad group to create a banner ad for it, and the ad went into rotation today on ESPN.com.

Let's hope it brings in some new challengers.

I love this: Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed!

Reddit's algorithm is probably my favorite, using logarithms to weight earlier votes more heavily. Although I do enjoy the StumbleUpon "safety variable" (which keeps it from being totally gamed). And the del.icio.us algorithm is kind of remarkable in its simplicity. As Danny says though, the "10,000 Pound Gorilla in the Room" is of course Digg's algorithm, which is stored in a single machine buried 5 miles below the surface of the Earth.