October 2009
56 posts
“One of the most important things for having a successful project is
having...”
– P. Norvig
Lone Star Rising — The American, A Magazine of... →
Houston
“This may explain why most of the smaller cities of the Midwest and South have...”
– The White City | Newgeography.com
example.py at master from superfeedr's... →
I would not recommend using this.
It’s dependant on Sleekxmpp. Sleekxmpp doesn’t seem to be python2.6-compatible at first: ‘import queue’ fails (it should be ‘import Queue’). The project page is useless (a phantom and outdated google code page), the documentation is non-existent. I have patches. Where do I send them? Who knows? Do they even care?
When using...
Mihalcea (2007) Using Wikipedia for Automatic Word... →
“Source Safe is not source control software. At best, it’s a fat random byte...”
– Git and Microsoft Development: A Success Story
Think Progress » Daily Show Heckled, Attacked For... →
igather:
clingtomymouth:
Following their joint appearance, Baltzer revealed in an open letter that “the show was overwhelmed with angry emails and phone calls prior to the appearance, and up until the last minute it seemed like they might cancel. … The entire staff were very nervous and may come to regret the monumental decision (and not make it again) as they will surely be inundated now that...
Performance monitoring with collectd →
Parsely: Inside a modern RIA built with Solr →
Andrew’s presentation of Parsely and how we’re using Solr+ExtJS+Posgresql to power it. This is great timing because most of the work we put it this month has been about using Solr more broadly. We also have been betting on 2 features that I like:
The ability to load and unload Solr “cores”. Solr cores make it easy and efficient to load up another Solr index (with...
“The National Security Archive has requested information held by the U.S....”
– Musicians Seek Secret U.S. Documents on Music-Related Human Rights Abuses at Guantanamo (via thedaytheytriedtokillme)
aka the Guantanamo Jukebox.
(via ledgergermane)
(via igather)
Java implemented in Java →
Project Guest VM is an implementation of the Java platform in Java and hosted directly on the Xen hypervisor, that is, without the traditional operating system layer. It is based on the Maxine Virtual Machine which is itself written in Java. The result is a Java platform software stack that is all Java except for a very thin microkernel layer that interfaces to Xen
“The department highlighted the confusion that surrounds open-source licenses and...”
– US DoD snuffs open-source ‘misconceptions’ • The Register
“soon all major browsers had two modes: “quirks mode” and “standards mode.” Of...”
– What Does It All Mean? - Mark Pilgrim (via llimllib)
Yep, that’s how browsers are created.
“When designing distributed web services, there are three properties that are...”
– Brewer’s conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services
“Eric Brewer, systems professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and at...”
– Eventually Consistent - Revisited - All Things Distributed
It Is 2009. Why Is "Groupware" Still So Hard?
continuations:
Now one reason this is still hard is that groups come in all forms and as a result have very different requirements. But the response of the service providers has compounded this problem. Instead of opening their services up via APIs and making it “point and click” easy to use one from within the other, they all seem to want to own the group and lock it in. There are some...
“I think black people are afraid of their own queer desires. It’s so
interesting...”
– (via Tyler Perry x Morehouse x Real Black Men) (via igather)
“The second wasteful government action was in how Medicare was designed. Before...”
– I used to be the CEO of an HMO, AMAA
Note that the poster has been verified, and should not be considered an idiot despite being anonymous.
(via llimllib)
“Successful new protocols are rare. There are only a handful of commonly used...”
– Y-Combinator’s Request For Startups: Things Built On Twitter.
gbattle sez:
I have a lot of issues with people playing loose and fast with the the term protocol when what they really mean is API. Twitter is not a protocol, it is an API. Protocols have rule sets around generic communication, are...
Amazon Web Services Blog: Introducing Amazon RDS -... →
Now in beta, RDS makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without worrying about infrastructure provisioning, software maintenance, or common database management tasks. Using the RDS APIs or the command-line tools, you can access the full capabilities of a complete, self-contained MySQL 5.1 database instance in a...
[Python-Dev] Reworking the GIL →
The new GIL shows roughly similar but slightly better throughput results than the old one. And it is much better in the latency tests, especially in workload B (going down from almost a second of average latency with the old GIL, to a couple of milliseconds with the new GIL). This is the combined result of using a time-based scheme (rather than opcode-based) and of forced thread switching...
Scaling Lucene and Solr | Enterprise Search... →
“It’s the rank-and-file employees who usually get the short end of the...”
– Hacker News | I’ve written about this here before, and though it’s not a popular position on H…
night tale » Python messaging: ActiveMQ and... →
Both brokers have lots of Python type clients. AFAIK, none of them are optimised for raw speed. So I am not sure how much we learn from comparing these clients. Moreover I am less sure how useful the numbers are if you use different brokers to compare them. But if you are certain that it’s the right thing to do, then you may want to compare clients like for like:
If the ActiveMQ-CPP client is a...
Why I like Redis →
It’s also incredibly easy to set up, ridiculously fast (30,000 read or writes a second on my laptop with the default configuration) and has an interesting approach to persistence. Redis runs in memory, but syncs to disk every Y seconds or after every X operations. Sounds risky, but it supports replication out of the box so if you’re worried about losing data should a server fail you can always...
Indexing Data in Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search... →
celery - Distributed Task Queue — Celery v0.8.0... →
Really excited about using this to schedule/process async. jobs across machines. Tooks me 15 minutes to get something tangible running.
“When does a strong interest become an obsession, and why do we have a different...”
– Good Vibrations Magazine » Blog » Spread the Word: Kinky is NOT a Diagnosis (via dixiecupua)
“‘There’s a Rep. for that’”
– Want your wife to be submissive? ‘There’s a Rep. for that’ | Raw Story (via dixiecupua)
“judge the freedom of your codebase not only on its license, but also on the...”
– “Open Core” Is the New Shareware - Bradley M. Kuhn ( Brad ) ( bkuhn )
“semi-proprietary business models are thriving on the fundamental principle of a...”
– “Open Core” Is the New Shareware - Bradley M. Kuhn ( Brad ) ( bkuhn )
“The first move we have to make is simply give up the idea that the best...”
– “Open Core” Is the New Shareware - Bradley M. Kuhn ( Brad ) ( bkuhn )
WatchSage Development Visualisation by Alex Ghitza
Relative Size of US Military Spending, 1940--2003... →
The Importance of APIs
continuations:
This afternoon I am participating on a panel for Yahoo! OpenHack NYC titled “Building on Others’ APIs: A Strong Foundation or Recipe for Disaster.” That will make a good complement to yesterday’s discussion at the USV portfolio summit where we spoke about the importance of having an API. In preparation for the summit, I asked Oren Michels from Mashery whether he had a good...
“the TDD teams produced code that was 60 to 90 percent better in terms of defect...”
– Exploding Software-Engineering Myths - Janie Chang (via llimllib)
Cheap, reliable, fast. Pick two.
“Does distributed development affect software quality? An empirical case study of...”
– Exploding Software-Engineering Myths - Janie Chang (via llimllib)
“But we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one...”
– Critical thinking? You need knowledge - The Boston Globe
“The list goes on: students built, measured, and figured things out while solving...”
– Critical thinking? You need knowledge - The Boston Globe
Codeplex: Stay Away →
I was following IronPython for awhile and at the beginning, Ms employees could not accept patches made by outsiders. I don’t if that has changed now. Doing open source on .NET is hard anyway because there is no culture of writing open-source code using .NET (obviously, there are open-source projects, but they are rare).
Here's the full survey in Oklahoma from yesterday...
Oklahoma applies The Scarlet Letter to the internet:
igather:
catbus:
Individual Abortion Form (TO BE COMPLETED FOR EACH ABORTION PERFORMED) 1. Date of abortion _________________ 2. County in which abortion performed ________________ 3. Age of mother _________________ 4. Marital status of mother ________________ (married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married) 5. Race of mother...
“Democracies prefer markets but market do not prefer democracies”
– B. Barber - Jihad vs McWorld
That is why I’m always skeptical of so-called “market-based” solutions, especially when it comes to social problems. Markets are interested in profits, and it’s not always clear that this translates automatically to better services, better...
Excited about Flash and HTML5
continuations:
Adobe made a couple of big announcements about the future of Flash on mobile platforms. First, they announced that RIM has committed to making full Flash available on BlackBerries. Second, they showed an early version of compiling Flash into native iPhone apps as a way of getting them into the app store. Now some of the discussion has focused on all the problems with flash. ...
