Archive for the ‘Notes to self’ Category

• So you want to be enlightened?

  Date: 2008.08.16 | Category: Distributed Computing, Notes to self, Stuff just breaks | Response: 0

  Availability Enlightenment

  • “And nobody expressed any concern that this might not be right?“
  • “Bill, you are building a system, not a collection of parts.“

• London CloudCamp

  Date: 2008.06.15 | Category: Notes to self | Response: 0

  Alexis and the team at CohesiveFT are in the process of setting up a London Cloud Camp meeting. It is (tentatively) scheduled for July 16. It is still in the early day’s of preparation so we don’t have a page on Upcoming yet but you can see that the San Francisco camp is going great guns. Sign up on the registration page if you are interested.

• Transylvania JUG

  Date: 2008.05.16 | Category: Notes to self | Response: 0

  Gabi and the Java developers at our development centre in Cluj Napoca have just set up the Transylvania Java User Group. The project site is here and a Google Group is available here.

  They are holding their first meeting next Wednesday (21 May). The topic is : “Introduction to SpringSource Application Platform” and the event is registered here. We are hosting it at our offices:

  Betfair
  Str Somesului 2-12
  Cluj Napoca.

  Sign up and come along!

  Csaba has even created a logo.

  

  How cool does Duke look there! I bet this has got to be one of the best JUG logos around!

• Reliability

  Date: 2008.05.02 | Category: Distributed Computing, Notes to self, Stuff just breaks | Response: 0

  Steve Vinoski talking about reliability (in particular my favourite: Erlang)

  To achieve reliability, you have to accept the fact that failure will occur, Once you accept that, then other things fall into place: you need to be able to restart things quickly, and to do that, processes need to be cheap. If something fails, you don’t want it taking everything else with it, so you need to at least minimize, if not eliminate, sharing, which leads you to message passing. You also need monitoring capabilities that can detect failed processes and restart them

  Amen to that!

  Technorati Tags: reliability, Erlang

• Yahoo! just cloning Google

  Date: 2008.03.10 | Category: Notes to self | Response: 1

  Interesting to see another Google-like piece of infrastructure cloning coming out of Yahoo!. Zookeeper appears to be almost identical to Chubby, Googles distributed lock service.

  • Hadoop = MapReduce
  • Zookeeper = Chubby
  • Any more?

  Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo!, Hadoop, MapReduce, Zookeeper, Chubby

• 15 February 2008

  Date: 2008.02.15 | Category: Notes to self | Response: 0

  • Large scale failure of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. Ouch.

  Technorati Tags: Amazon, EC2, S3

• 31 January 2008

  Date: 2008.01.31 | Category: Notes to self | Response: 0

  • MapReduce at Rackspace – OK it is not MapReduce (as beloved by Stonebraker et al) but its open source breathen Hadoop. Original link (and more info) at How Rackspace Now Uses MapReduce and Hadoop to Query Terabytes of Data.
  • MapReduce II – more installments.

  Technorati Tags: MapReduce, Hadoop

• 23 January 2008

  Date: 2008.01.23 | Category: Distributed Computing, Notes to self | Response: 0

  • Towards Robust Distributed Systems – Eric Brewer’s slidedeck that kicked off the whole CAP Theorem debate at PODC in 2000.

  Technorati Tags: Towards Robust Distributed Systems, CAP Theorem, PODC

• 18 Jan 2008

  Date: 2008.01.18 | Category: Distributed Computing, Notes to self | Response: 0

  • London Erlang Meeting – “How do you test large systems written in Erlang?” on Monday (I presume) Jan 21.
  • Map Reduce a major step back. Michael Stonebraker and David J. DeWitt let forth on why they dislike Google’s MapReduce infrastructure and how it is poor relation to standard relational database technology.
  • Relational Database Experts Jump The MapReduce Shark – a reply to Stonebraker and DeWitt that I pretty broadly agree with.
  • MapReducing 20 petabytes per day – Greg Linden commenting on the recent paper “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters” by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.

  Technorati Tags: Erlang, Stonebraker, DeWitt, MapReduce, relational, database, Relational Database, petabytes

• 8 January 2008

  Date: 2008.01.08 | Category: Notes to self | Response: 0

  • Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea
    
  • Clarkson stung after bank prank – lol

  From the Edge Question: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

  • Maybe MBAs Should Design Computers After All
  • Being a Heretic is Hard Work
  • Trusting Experts
  • Truth does not reside with smart university experts
  • The Calculus of Small but Consistent Effects

  Technorati Tags: New Product, Clarkson, Edge