Monday, August 11, 2008

Hadoop: When grownups do open source | The Register

Hadoop: When grownups do open source | The Register

Hopefully the suits can get beyond the childish language to get the main message in the article.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Erlang Ring Exercise

I didn't bother with the benchmark part, simply the implementation. This starts out like mine but the message handling seems a bit more involved. I have to say this exercise is a good one to wrap ones head around functional programming.


-module(ring).
-export([ring/3]).

ring(Proc_count, Msg_count, Msg) ->
First=spawn(fun() -> loop() end), %% first process
links(Proc_count, First, First), %% others
First ! {Proc_count * Msg_count, Msg}. %% send msg to first

links(1, First, Left) ->
First ! {left, Left}; %% tell First who his Left is (last link)

links(Proc, First, Left) ->
P=spawn(fun() -> loop(Left) end),
links(Proc-1, First, P).

loop() -> %% this loop is for First
receive
{left, Left} ->
loop(Left)
end.

loop(Left) ->
receive
{1, Msg} -> %% done
io:format("[~p]: ~p says ~p~n",[1, self(), Msg]);
{Count,Msg} -> %% send message to process on my left
io:format("[~p]: ~p says ~p~n",[Count, self(), Msg]),
Left ! {Count-1, Msg },
loop(Left)
end.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

InfoQ: The multicore crises: Scala vs. Erlang

InfoQ: The multicore crises: Scala vs. Erlang

This language debate is really interesting and eye opening. I think Erlang will end up winning in the long term.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Ah, the perfect child companion!


armstrong on software: The Road we didn't go down

armstrong on software: The Road we didn't go down

Interesting views on RPC. This is going to make me think twice when I comment on something that just seems to be another RPC implementation (most are). I've been re-reading the Erlang book. Maybe someday I'll be payed to program with it. :)

Friday, May 30, 2008

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Sorry Facebook, Jeff Pulver DOES NOT Have Too Many Friends

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Sorry Facebook, Jeff Pulver DOES NOT Have Too Many Friends: "So instead of waiting for Facebook to raise the limit on the number of friends I can have..."

Good grief. There must be something that I'm missing. I just don't get it.

Slashdot | Internet-Based Realtors Win Monster Settlement

Slashdot | Internet-Based Realtors Win Monster Settlement: "Internet-Based Realtors Win Monster Settlement"

WOW! All I can say is this is a win for the consumer. Perhaps the downturn in the real estate market helped?

Monday, May 19, 2008

Zuckerberg: We're Not Selling Facebook, Probably (MSFT) - Silicon Alley Insider

Zuckerberg: We're Not Selling Facebook, Probably (MSFT) - Silicon Alley Insider: "Also, Facebook in Japan? Interesting. Far as we know that's the third non-U.S. version the startup has launched (four, including a Spanish-language version)."

I'd say smart.

Entropy Overload: The point of VMs

Entropy Overload: The point of VMs: "Abstract machine: Developments in programming language fashions have made object orientation come to the fore (perhaps even too much to the fore). However, our physical machines map much closer to procedural code and a separation between code and data than the trends in language and architecture design."

The bolding is mine. It is not the main point of the post which is a nice attempt (not that I'm any expert in the area of VMs) to explain what makes a VM a VM. Thanks Barry for giving me a pointer to it in the comments from my previous posting.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Interoperability Happens - Clearly Thinking... whether in Language, or otherwise

Interoperability Happens - Clearly Thinking... whether in Language, or otherwise: "it's not a VM, it's an interpreter"

This comment is about Erlang. Yet, lately my thinking has been an interpreter is a VM.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Samurai Jack

Samurai Jack - Season 1

The twins just started watching this. I have four seasons on DVD. Haven't watch 2 of them yet. Now I find out Cartoon Network is replaying them again. While I can embed other cartoons, for some reason I can only link to this one.

Episode 1

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Coding Horror: Should All Developers Have Manycore CPUs?

Coding Horror: Should All Developers Have Manycore CPUs?: "Here's the second part of the answer I promised you earlier. The one you might not like. Most developers aren't writing desktop applications today. They're writing web applications. Many of them may be writing in scripting languages that aren't compiled, but interpreted, like Ruby or Python or PHP. Heck, they're probably not even threaded. And yet this code somehow achieves massive levels of concurrency, scales to huge workloads, and drives some of the largest websites on the internet. All that, without thinking one iota about concurrency, threading, or reentrancy. It's sort of magical, if you think about it."

Read the entire article. It is a fairly accurate view in my opinion. However, and some of the comments point this out, while one application may not use all the cores, the other cores can be used for other applications.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Techdirt: Your Electric Vehicle Is Too Quiet; Congress May Force It To Be Louder

I am easily amused tonight. Read the blog post to see what the comment below is related too. :)

Techdirt: Your Electric Vehicle Is Too Quiet; Congress May Force It To Be Louder: "#
Only if I get to choose the sound.. by Ajax 4Hire on Apr 14th, 2008 @ 2:25pm

The new ringtone;
download a new cartone for your EV (Electric Vehicle).

Transformer transforming sound would also be cool ringtone.
If I have to submit a sound for my EV then I should at least be able to pick the sound; blowing rasberries, WrapSong...
I like the Jetson sound also.

Next is a Shania Twain skin for your EV.

I love technology."

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Macbook Pro makes 3 and other Apple tibits

I liked Melissa's Macbook so much I got the Pro for myself. A co-worker and I were debating which one to get. Let's just say we got the standard 15 inch with more video RAM. I was going to pick up a copy of World Of Warcraft, but the Apple store charges $5 more than it can be gotten for at other places.

I've made very little progress with the mini. I did pick up a VGA cable. I finally get the full resolution on the Sharp HDTV. Beautiful. Warcraft looks nice too. :)

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Charlie Rose sacrifices face for MacBook Air - Engadget

Charlie Rose sacrifices face for MacBook Air - Engadget: "Wow, in an instant he took a measurable shot to his dignity and redefined the term, 'air head.' Not bad."

This is really funny. :)

Slashdot | Pleasing Google's Tech-Savvy Staff

Slashdot | Pleasing Google's Tech-Savvy Staff: "Unlike many IT departments that try to control the technology their workers use, Mr. Merrill's group lets Google employees download software on their own, choose between several types of computers and operating systems, and use internal software built by the company's engineers"

Awesome, an IT department that lets people work with tools that make them productive!

Phenomena in the days of Philip » Blog Archive » Nonetheless, there’s something I don’t like about the architecture of Evolution Data Server.

Phenomena in the days of Philip » Blog Archive » Nonetheless, there’s something I don’t like about the architecture of Evolution Data Server.: "What I don’t like about it, is that it more or less requires each client of the service to keep a local copy of the calendar or contact data in its own memory. At least all the data that matched the search query. This data is not really small per item. In fact, it’s quite large. It never really surprised me a lot that both the calendar component of Evolution’s shell AND the Evolution Data Server consume quite a lot of memory."

Philip's post touches on some similar thoughts I have about email clients. My beef with Evolution is it can't handle a machine crashing very well. It goes through this validation phase that takes forever. I'd take advantage of a system that handles crashes. Some thing that SQLite provides out of the box. Put the indexes inside the database. Let the database handle crashes.

Now, I just need to find a MIME widget and I can work on Yet Another Email Client.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Apple invasion

Sometime in mid January, I bought a MacBook for Melissa. A couple of weeks ago I bought a Mac Mini to become a MythTV frontend. So far I haven't been that successful with that, but Miro has worked like a charm. So far I like Mac OS X. I'm confused about why uname -a shows a i386 architecture when the mini is 64-bit capable. Once I figure out the Myth issues, I'll blog about what I'm up to.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Herd mentality with email authentication

Chad White writes:

RetailEmail.Blogspot: Alert: DKIM adoption among online retailers is way past tipping point: "Craig Spiezle, chairman of AOTA and director of internet security and privacy at Microsoft, says, “AOTA is calling on all brand owners to implement domain-level authentication within the next six months.”

and Mr. White adds:

"I would echo that call to action. There are still far too many retailers that have not stepped up to protect themselves and their customers from cybercriminals by adopting both DKIM and Sender ID—including Ann Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, Brookstone, Blue Nile, Circuit City, Costco, Crutchfield, Dell, EB Games, Home Depot, HSN, J. Crew, Office Depot, PetSmart, Sam’s Club, Sephora, Sony, Victoria’s Secret, Walgreens and Wal-Mart, among others."

Some of the retailer's listed are clients of where I work. I haven't pushed for DKIM adoption for a couple reasons:

1. for the most part, DKIM has 2 possible identifiers that reputation could be attached to
2. one of these identifies would cause much more work for domain owners with lots of brands
3. some ISPs have said they'd take an identifier and apply a function to it in which the end results would be multiple identifiers

In short, the DKIM spec doesn't state what the output is. That's OK if there is some supplemental spec that says what identifier should be used for reputation purposes. Currently, there isn't. Instead of following the herd and being part of some grand experiment in which method A is abandoned for method B but at the expense of hurting method A adopters, I'd rather wait for a 'Best Practices' document.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

United States Patent: 7325045

United States Patent: 7325045

Good Grief! Patenting customized 404 pages? Amazon should know better.