-
On Grids, the Ambitions of Amazon and Joyent
There’s a lot of talk lately about “grids”. And Amazon. The word “grid” has reappeared in marketing materials and we’ve seen it brought up during the the emergence of companies offering utility computing and storage products (or at least they want you to think that’s what they’re really offering). There’s also definitely been a PR…
-
9.5 hours until Java is open-sourced
Sun is releasing the source to Java SE, Java ME, and Glassfish in nine and a half hours, and then releasing the rest of the stuff around the spring of 2007. Most interestingly they’re releasing it under the GPLv2 license. Floyd Marinescu has a great explanation as to ‘Why GPL?’. Once it hit midnight eastern…
-
Are Lines of Code really a measure of either success, productivity or popularity?
Via this and that, I found myself reading PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast The title PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast and subtitle Despite the buzz around sexy new frameworks like Rails and Django, PHP is more dominant than ever initially commits the same fallacy that others have and that is to compare frameworks (Rails and…
-
Jason Hoffman’s European Rails Conf Presentation
The Rails Conference in London was great fun. The only downside is that I spent my last day there ill, and it’s only now (about 9 days later) that I’m starting to feel OK. Mind you, I still completely barfed (correction: projectile vomited) up lunch today and have a nagging cough, a cough that while…
-
Erlang processes are human too
Via Ludo I came to read why processes scale better than threads (a topic that comes around every now and then). But the case is really made in Joe Armstrong’s recent Concurrency is Easy where he does a great job connecting the philosophy behind erlang to common human experiences. Each human is a process you…
-
Evaluating proxy engines and load balancers for mongrel-driven ruby on rails applications: an introduction and an open call
Zed Shaw’s mongrel “is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI.” And saying that it’s “fast” is true. The performance you get from a single mongrel process listening on a port is quite good. You…
-
Thin Provisioning in ZFS
Ah, Ben understands and did a great demonstration of thin provisioning (also read Dave’s Blog) with ZFS using sparse volumes (zvols). HUGE. The ability to thin provision storage is a very “enterprise” feature that one can know get from free when using ZFS+Opensolaris. When combined with ethernet-based storage networks (iSCSI), it’s unstoppable. Ben’s also a…
-
Thanks for the Techcrunchy party
The Techcrunch party was a good time and it’s always nice to see friends and even some hosting customers. Thank you Arrington et al. I had a beer for those of you who couldn’t make it. Picture by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid
-
We’ll be in London in September for RailsConf Europe 2006
The talks schedule is out for the first Rails Conference in Europe and both Koz and I are giving talks. I’ll be talking about Ruby On Rails Applications: A Systems View and Koz is called Playing Nice with Others . My talk is related to the Scale with rails work and God knows what Koz’s…
-
The Scale with Rails Workshops
On a daily basis we receive emails containing things like “I am looking for a host for a commercial ‘Ruby on rails’ website development that is due to go live in 3 weeks time. It is an update to a relatively busy PHP-based site, which is also on old hardware. The site features media streaming,…