Monthly Archives: July 2012

How not to do APIs; and …My New Job

July 25, 2012 by dpc 1 Comment
Having access to a quick way to get dictionary lookups of English words while using the computer has always been useful to me. I don’t like to pay the “garish dancing images” ad tax that comes with using commercial dictionary sites like merriam-webster.com; or worse, the page-load-takes-10-seconds tax. I … Continue reading »
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AWS “High I/O” EC2 instances

July 19, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
A while back I commented on Amazon’s DynamoDB and disagreed with the viewpoint from HighScalability.com that using SSD for storage was a “radical step.” In my comments, I predicted that We will see SSD replace mag disk as a mainstream storage technology, sooner than most of us think. … Continue reading »
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HBR Blogger says Projects built on Short, Iterative cycles might just work

July 18, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
Harvard Business Review publishes an aggregated blog.  I like the content there, because there are varied perspectives from different writers, and the posts span a number of different topic areas. Recommended. Better than Waterfall? Recently, Jeff GotHelf posted an item comparing the old-school waterfall software development project management approach … Continue reading »
Quickies ,

NoSQL is apparently NOT going to deliver World Peace

July 17, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
Peter Wayner at InfoWorld has articulated “Seven Hard Truths” about NoSQL technologies. Among them: It’s nice to have JOINs; NoSQL has none. It’s nice to have transactions After 30 years of development, it seems that SQL Databases have some solid features, like the query analyzer. NoSQL is like … Continue reading »
Reaction

PHP Makes People Sad

July 11, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
Just read an enjoyable rant entitled PHP: a fractal of bad design by a nerd who calls himself Eevee. A good effort! I also found a link to PHP Sadness there, and a bunch of other links to sites that complain about PHP. This kind of criticism is correct, … Continue reading »
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Google’s Compute Engine: do you believe it?

July 3, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
Google has become the latest company to offer VM hosting, joining Microsoft (Azure) and Amazon (AWS), along with all the other “traditional” hosters. Bloomberg is expressing skepticism that Google will stick with this plan.  Who can blame them? If I were a startup, or another company considering a … Continue reading »
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Sauce Labs explains its move from NoSQL CouchDB to old-skool MySQL

July 3, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
Sauce Labs has rendered a valuable service to the community by documenting the factors that went into a decision to change infrastructure – to replace CouchDB with MySQL. Originally the company had committed  to CouchDB, which is a novel NoSQL store originating from a team out of MIT. … Continue reading »
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WaPo article on last week’s Cloud failures

July 2, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
When the Washington Post publishes an article on the failure of cloud computing infrastructure, it’s not going to be good. Enterprise CIOs all over the world are re-thinking their plans to commit to hosted services. See also, How to Discourage Adoption of Public Cloud by Enterprises
Quickies ,

Redmonk’s Analysis of Microsoft Surface is Naive

July 2, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk, an analysis firm, looked at Microsoft Suface and concluded that the business model around software is in long-term decline. …another indication that software on a stand alone basis is a problematic revenue foundation. Mr O’Grady’s analysis is naive. His analysis casts software as a … Continue reading »
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Impressive factoids on Facebook and Hadoop

July 2, 2012 by dpc Leave a comment
It’s common knowledge that Facebook runs Hadoop. The largest Hadoop cluster on the planet. Here are some stats, courtesy of HighScalability, which scraped them from twitter during the Velocity conference: 6 billion mobile messages every 30 minutes 3.8 trillion cache operations in 30 minutes 160m newsfeeds, 5bln realtime … Continue reading »
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