Category Archives: Notes to self

A holding place for stuff…..

July 18 2007

TED talks
(Via Bill de hÃ“ra)
Supersymmetry, Extra Dimensions and the Origin of Mass: Exploring the Nature of the Universe Using PetaScale Data Analysis (PDF: here)
If you think you have a problem handling a really big real time system then it is likely you haven’t even BEGUN to scratch the surface! Event Driven Architecture writ large! (Via Three-Toed Sloth)
High-efficiency power supplies for home computers and servers
Worried about the environment (or more realistically the cost of running your data centre) but need to power a massive cluster of machines? Why not improve the efficiency of your power supplies (google style)?

HBase
A BigTable clone from the Lucence Hadoop team. (Via Greg)
Lucence Web Service API
Startup Marketing: Big Bang vs. Darwinian Evolution
OK, devs (sort of) get the iterative/agile approach but does the rest of the business? If they don’t get it, or unable to act on it (know many agile lawyers?) things are going to get in a pickle.
Screeching Animatronic Monkeys
System automation – simian style.

Live Code Update in Erlang
“The point I want to make is that code-upgrade is a part of the application which needs to be designed (like anything else) – it should to be designed together with the fail-over and scalability issues.” At last, I have found someone else who understands that building in the capability to change a system in real time is both powerful and actually easier in a large distributed system.
binary protocol notes from the facebook hackathon
The memcache guys had a hackathon at the Facebook offices a couple of weeks ago and are starting to make some progress on implementing a binary protocol.
Google Scalability Conference talks available
Greg Linden has links to almost all the Google Scalability videos.

life-at-google-the-microsoftie-perspective
Interesting that the comments on the blog from what appears to be the Microsoft contingent are trying to skin the guy alive for posting what appears to be a reasonable comparison on the two companies. Makes you wonder how much of a flash in the pan the Scoble openess was…
Mingle
Just got my beta invite for Mingle from Thoughtworks – gonna have a play and see what it is like.

Reading references
Some references from Werner Vogels. VERY interested to see that Werner Vogels was suggesting Steve Grand‘s book “Creation: Life and How to Make it“. I truly believe that biological approaches to system development are what we are going to need to take us beyond the next level of systems development and I am heartened that someone like Werner is pushing this book. Go and buy it!
Seattle Scalability Conference: Amazon on Data Storage
Dan’s feedback on the some of the Google Scalability conference. Gotta love the biology!
Seattle Conference on Scalability videos
Some more links to the conference, via StorageMojo.
The iPhone’s headphone jack and world domination
Take a commodity product – headphones – make sure your product doesn’t quite work with it and then get everyone to change the commodity product to fit your requirements, increasing your branding and marketing power in the process. Normally I would say this was a crazy idea but I can see it working with all the hype at the moment – who knows..

Betfair taps Romania for offshore software skills
Eachan talked to Silicon.com earlier this week about the Betfair development centre that we are currently setting up in Cluj. As he says, it is going really well: the people are bright, keen and talented, we are working on some brand new products and I think it is fair to say that the work we have been doing in Cluj for the past few months has already made an impact on the way that Betfair development takes place back in London. If you are in Romania and want to see what we are up to don’t hesitate to get in touch!
More on Google Scalability Conference
Greg has a link to Dares reports on the Google scalability conference…
Seattle Scalability Conference, Pt II
… and some more from StorageMojo. Anyone else going to put something up?
Scrum from the trenches just went payware
Continuous Integration Server Feature Matrix

Seattle Conference on Scalability, Pt. I
StorageMojo’s first take on last weeks scalability conference at Google. Can’t wait to for the vids to come out.
Joe Miller of Linden Lab speaks at the Catalyst Conference
Jeff Barr has got some Second Life stats.

Amazon EC2 and S3 disaster planning
More on the Amazon SLA discussion. Artur reckons someone should compete with Amazon – I agree – competion is good. A (VERY) tongue in cheek suggestion: as this competition will be a start up, why not bootstrap it using S3 and EC2? If it takes off then you can afford to do your own thing, if it doesn’t then who cares – you don’t own the hardware.
CFengine
Must be going senile – never heard of CFEngine before and it seems to have been around for a while.
Ubuntu bug number one
lol

Technical Debt
Make sure you know what the interest rate is.
Improve continuously
The insurance point of view
Fancy insuring the results of your development process? What would happen if we applied completion guarentees (as used in movies) to software development?
Four hours upfront and then reevaluate
The 37signals guys are trying out 4 hour dev cycles. Less is more I suppose.
Second life bugs
Ouch!