Hot Holiday Scalability Links for 2009

• Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing in the Ambient Cloud. The only independent platform most of us will have access to capable of hosting planet-scale applications is the Ambient Cloud. It forms a sort of digital potluck where everyone contributes memory, network, and other compute resources from whatever they happen to have available. 
• Top 10 Internet Startup Scalability Killers. Strategies taken from The Art of Scalability. 1. Thinking Scalability Is Just About Technology; 2. Overuse of Synchronous Calls; 3. Failure to Weed or Seed Soon Enough; 4. Inappropriate Use of Databases; 5. Cesspools Instead of Swim Lanes; 6. Reliance on Vertical Scale; 7. Failure to Learn from History; 8. Changing Development Methodologies to Fix Problems; 9. Too Little Caching, Too Late; 10. Overreliance on Third Parties to Scale.
• The New Google: Internet Giant Opens Up About Real-Time and Local Search, Cloud Computing, and Data Liberation. In four separate interviews, Google delved into some of the most important topics of the day, from its advances in real-time and local search to cloud computing and a “data.. liberation” effort to help consumers export their files and digital information from Google products 
• Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? Quite a nice variety, no clear winner. Some honorable mentions: Django, Redis, Clojure, XMPP, Node.js, AMQP, Rails, jQuery, Solr, Hadoop.
• Why I think Mongo is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks. We have been amazed at how much code we cut out of Harmony with the switch from MySQL to Mongo. 
• A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing. Dr. Gray called the shift a “fourth paradigm.” The first three paradigms were experimental, theoretical and, more recently, computational science. He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists.
• MySpace Replaces Storage with Solid-State Drive Technology in 150 Standard Load Servers. Using SSD reduced the headcount of their heavy load servers from 80 to 30.
• Amazon's CloudFront Now Offers Flash Streaming, This Will Disrupt The Market. Amazon does have the potential to take many of the mid-sized customers who spend between $3-5k a month on video. 
• How would you design an AppEngine datastore for a social site like Twitter? Using Jaiku's reimplementation on Google App Engine is a good reference.
• Query Processing for NOSQL DB. It seems to me that the responsibility of building an indexing and query mechanism lands on the NoSQL user.
• Persistent Trees in git, Clojure and CouchDB. There are some really neat software projects emerging at the moment, and as a developer I always find it interesting to take a look at the implementation details, because there is often a lot to be learned. 
• Transcendent Memory. Transcendent memory is a new memory-management technique which, it is hoped, will improve the system's use of scarce RAM, regardless of whether virtualization is being used.
• Trading Shares in Milliseconds. By the end of the day, his computers will have bought and sold about 60 million to 80 million shares.