Friday, July 30, 2010 at 9:13AM For some Friday Fun nerd style, I thought this demonstration from Basho on the difference between single master, sharding, and consistent smashing was really clever. I love the use of safety glasses! And it's harder to crash a server with a hammer than you might think...
Recommended reading:
Friday, July 30, 2010 at 7:36AM 
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 8:17PM The NoSQL movement faults the SQL query language as the source of many of the scalability issues that we face today with traditional database approach.
I think that the main reason so many people have come to see SQL as the source of all evil is the fact that, traditionally, the query language was burned into the database implementation. So by saying NoSQL you basically say "No" to the traditional non-scalable RDBMS implementations.
This view has brought on a flood of alternative query languages, each aiming to solve a different aspect that is missing in the traditional SQL query approach, such as a document model, or that provides a simpler approach, such as Key/Value query.
Most of the people I speak with seem fairly confused on this subject, and tend to use query semantics and architecture interchangeably. In Part I of this post i tried to provide quick overview of what each query term stands for in the context of the NoSQL world . Part II illustrates those ideas using code examples from GigaSpaces and Datanucleus
/Hbase.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 8:22AM 
Should you pay more in the cloud or pay less for bare metal in the datacenter? This is a crucial decision point facing startups today. Which way should you go? In this Webpulp.tv interview, Joe Stump, always a go-to guy when you need a metric ass-ton (a favorite expression of Joe’s) of good advice on cutting edge practices for the modern startup, laughs at conventional wisdom by saying the cloud is really not more expensive than bare metal.
The argument for a cheaper cloud has a three main points:
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 7:55AM Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 9:08AM 
It's trendy today to say "I don't read blogs anymore, I just let the random chance of my social network guide me to new and interesting content." #fail. While someone says this I imagine them flicking their hair back in a "I can't be bothered with true understanding" disdain. And where does random chance get its content? From people like these. So: support your local blog!
If you would like to be a part of random chance, here are a few new podcasts/blogs/vidcasts that you may not know about and that I've found interesting:
Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 7:22AM 
Over the years I've read a lot of research papers looking for better ways of doing things. Sometimes I find ideas I can use, but more often than not I come up empty. The problem is there are very few good papers. And by good I mean: can a reasonably intelligent person read a paper and turn it into something useful?
Now, clearly I'm not an academic and clearly I'm no genius, I'm just an everyday programmer searching for leverage, and as a common specimen of the species I've often thought how much better our industry would be if we could simply move research from academia into production with some sort of self-conscious professionalism. Currently the process is horribly hit or miss. And this problem extends equally to companies with research divisions that often do very little to help front-line developers succeed.
How many ideas break out of academia into industry in computer science? We have many brilliant examples: encryption, microprocessors, compression, transactions, distributed file systems, vector clocks, gossip protocols, MapReduce, search, algorithms, networking, communication, and on ad infinitum. For every Google that breaks out there must be thousands of other potential ideas that go nowhere, even in this hyper-VC aware age.
We need to do is a better job of using the research. There's a lot out there in the literature that we could be making use of right now, but it's closed off from the people, i.e., developers, who can turn this research into gold. And it's largely closed off because researchers don't consider developers as an audience and they don't write their papers with the intention of being applied. Change the publication process and we can save the cheerleader and save the world.
I'm bringing this up now because:
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 7:16AM 
At Monday's Cloud Computing Meetup, Paco Nathan gave an excellent Getting Started on Hadoop talk (slides). I found one of Paco's strategies particularly interesting: consider when a service starts charging in cost calculations. Depending on your use case it may be cheaper to go with a more expensive service that charges only for work accomplished rather than charging for both work + startup time.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 6:25AM Saturday, July 17, 2010 at 7:30AM
And by hot I also mean temperature. Summer has arrived. It's sizzling here in Silicon Valley. Thank you air conditioning!
