Basho: An Introduction to Riak. I should take a closer look at this, it has a quite clean and simple architecture and all nodes in the system are equal (this is similar to Cassandra). The whole thing is written in Erlang here, but interesting is the MapReduce interface: functions can be delivered as JavaScript code and the communication goes over a simple JSON interface.
Linkblog - 27.2.2011 - 29.3.2011
HBase vs Cassandra: why we moved « Dominic Williams. Not entirely uninteresting blog post that dares to compare Hadoop/HBase with Cassandra and tries to highlight the different focuses. His conclusion: HBase is more for warehousing, Cassandra more for transaction processing. Alone, this would make something like Brix even more interesting if it could really combine these two aspects.
Brisk – Apache Hadoop™ powered by Cassandra | DataStax. I should also keep an eye on this, as someone is marrying Hadoop with Cassandra as a backend. This makes higher-level layers from the Hadoop project also usable with the high performance of Cassandra and, above all, with the freer update of data in Cassandra and its eventually-consistent model.
HIVE: Data Warehousing & Analytics on Hadoop. A point that particularly interests me at the moment: evaluations, especially BI, of large amounts of data. Hadoop provides Hive as a solution for this. Access to HIVE can not only be made via Thrift, but also via JDBC and ODBC.
Apache Thrift. Also worth taking a closer look, in principle something similar to Google Protocol Buffers, but more prevalent in the Apache environment. Therefore, in areas like Hadoop, it is often chosen as the path of choice for accessing services from various languages. A small comparison of the two protocols. I like that Thrift not only allows binary representation but also a JSON-based representation - this makes the integration of Thrift APIs into web solutions easier, as JSON is native to JavaScript.
The Secrets of Building Realtime Big Data Systems. This is how I came across Cascalog and ElephantDB: a talk by the programmer of both projects about Big Data. He is also currently writing a book "Big Data". Could be very interesting.
nathanmarz/elephantdb. Same author as for Cascalog, here he built a distributed Key/Value-Store on Hadoop with Clojure. Also not uncool.
nathanmarz/cascalog - take a closer look, a marriage of Clojure and Hadoop for easier evaluation of large data sets. The interesting thing about Cascalog: it draws ideas from Datalog and forms a query language for Hadoop data sets in Clojure.
JavaScript Quotations - interesting link about a metaprogramming feature for JavaScript. In this case for a very interesting JavaScript implementation: written in F# and for the CLR world, runnable under .NET and Mono.
Microsoft Shuts off HTTPS in Hotmail for Over a Dozen Countries | Electronic Frontier Foundation - a villain who thinks evil about it. Surely pure coincidence that the list of affected countries reads like the "elite" of democratic states. The hypocrisy of large corporations is actually only surpassed by FDP economic ministers.
Enterprise Java Development Tools | SpringSource. I should take a closer look, as it was recently about J2EE and EJB alternatives, and this is one of the more well-known alternatives.
Trinity - Microsoft Research. I should take a closer look at this, it sounds somewhat like distributed Redis (in-memory structures that are persisted) combined with a query semantics that is more based on graph relationships (comparable to RDF Triple Stores).
Programming, Motherfucker. Do you. speak it?
Why Cloud9 Deserves your Attention - browser-based IDE in Javascript on server and client. And source of the current version available on github.
Django-nonrel - NoSQL support for Django. Provides a first approach to integrating various NoSQL databases into Django at the level of the Django ORM. Backends for MongoDB (no thanks), AppEngine and Cassandra are in the works. Cassandra is particularly interesting to me at the moment.
WordPress › Really Static « WordPress Plugins. Well blogged, because it allows you to generate static pages directly from WordPress (this could also be done with WP Super Cache and its directly cached pages, but these are not automatically updated) and perhaps this could be an interesting way in the long run. Okay, I would probably have to forego some elements to make the whole thing work without "artefacts" - but many of them are actually dispensable. For example, a tag cloud would be frozen at the state of the last rendering if it is part of the page. Similarly, information such as "latest comments" or "latest posts". The same goes for calendars, which have more marked days on newer pages than on older ones. This is also the main reason why I have repeatedly abandoned baked sites - on the other hand, are these problem cases really important for a blog?
Vundle 0.7 is out. I usually use Pathogen, but Vundle has some features that make it quite interesting - maybe I should play around with it. On the other hand, I haven't made any updates and changes to my Vim installation for a long time. But since all vim.org scripts are now on GitHub, Vundle's GitHub integration is certainly very interesting.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 * Exporting using Publish Services. Well, Adobe has Photoshop.com - and just expanded it. And promotes it as a better alternative to Flickr. How serious Adobe is about this can be seen in the Publish Services in Lightroom 3. Facebook, Flickr, and SmugMug are offered out of the box. Even on the Lightroom Exchange, I found nothing about connecting to Photoshop.com. Well done, Adobe. Very convincing.
Privacy advocates: Piwik instead of Google Analytics - that's a good start, concrete suggestions for what site operators should do if they want statistics. We should probably take a closer look at work to recommend it to customers who ask for statistics.
By adding extra code to a digital music file, they were able to turn a song burned to CD into a Trojan horse. When played on the car's stereo, this song could alter the firmware of the car's stereo system, giving attackers an entry point to change other components on the car.
via With hacking, music can take control of your car | ITworld.
Satellite Photos - Japan Before and After Tsunami - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com. Slide the slider left and right.
Programming Languages - Progopedia - Encyclopedia of Programming Languages. That was the programming language wiki I was looking for recently when the deletion frenzy struck Wikipedia again. I think I already mentioned it in the old blog.
Instagram now has official APIs. It completely passed me by. Maybe I can eventually get around Tumblr to get my Instagram pictures into the sidebar. On the other hand, Tumblr has been doing quite well lately, and why change something that works (the curse of any further development - good enough).
pdict.py at master from segfaulthunter/sandbox - GitHub. A PersistentHashMap for Python - so a functional data structure that does not allow changes, but provides a new structure with minimal change compared to an existing structure with substructure sharing to the original structure. A rather interesting implementation. There are also further explanations of the ideas behind it. And an alternative implementation of the same idea.
ShutterSnitch. Interesting little app with which you can receive images via WiFi on the iPad and automatically tag them with metadata and geocoding - could be a rather interesting combination with an EyeFi card in my Sony or my Panasonics (the M8 unfortunately cannot be used with EyeFi - the SD slot on the M8 is too narrow for the EyeFi and the metal body blocks too much of the weak signal). Simply connect the camera, put the iPad in the backpack and walk around and take snapshots and occasionally use the iPad as an extra-large lightbox.
Rob Galbraith DPI: Alex Majoli points and shoots. Just as a reminder that it's the photographer who makes the pictures and not the camera. So the design of the image. And yes, "flat depth of field" is not always the answer to "what makes a good picture".
HowTo: Using Radio2. Well, ok, I understand his motivation. But well - I click on the "Press This" bookmarklet from WordPress and write a sentence - I've customized the bookmarklet form with JavaScript and Custom Post Types (in this case Aside) does the rest. And up top I already have a link blog - and it also has its own feed. And it's also quick, enclosures are also easy to make and tagging works right away. Sorry, Dave, but somehow I already have all of that! Update: I just set up a Twitter account and now I'm pushing new posts there. Let's see what comes of it.
The risks of technology cannot be abolished. But the way we deal with it can be changed. Facilities like nuclear power plants, which can cause unimaginable damage, should not be operated by any state. And people who make money with such facilities, like our esteemed nuclear industry, should clearly be branded as irresponsible lobbyists. They have the situation under control in their speeches, while the reactor hall is already falling apart behind them.
via Dieses Vertuschen und Verzögern ist ein unfassbarer Skandal: Die Methoden der Atomlobby - taz.de.
Re: Factor: Google Charts - I really should use Factor more often. Every time I see how practical a visual REPL is (in Factor, graphical representations of objects can be embedded in the normal output, similar to old Lisp machines), it tempts me.
consistency and ecosystem opportunities - Twitter API Announcements is an email where Twitter pretty much leaves all reality behind. Just to remind you: Twitter is this cute service where you can send 140-character messages - and I'm not saying that to make fun of it, it's often quite practical to search there when something is currently happening. But when I then read this bloated nonsense about "prevent diffusion of user experience" and other bullshit bingo in the email, I can only wonder what they're smoking. The real thing behind it is probably rather an attempt to close the platform to control and exploit it more - for example, the uproar about this absurd fat bar in Twitter has probably caused some panic at Twitter. Because if all users leave the official client, no one will look at the bought trends anymore ...
Python Tools for Visual Studio. If you are on Windows and a number cruncher - SciPy and NumPy are now directly available on the .NET platform with these tools. And I wonder why Apple doesn't include something like this with Xcode, as it would certainly be popular in the university environment (just think of Sage).
ABCL - Release notes v0.25. New version out and ABCL is increasingly developing into a really usable Common Lisp implementation. Since it runs on the JVM, you also have easy access to many libraries (if you want to) and since 0.24, Quicklisp also runs smoothly with ABCL, giving you easy access to many Common Lisp libraries. However, there are some issues with the CL libraries, as many programmers do not consider ABCL (and there are still deficiencies in the CLOS area).
BBC News - Voyager: Still dancing 17 billion km from Earth. It is often forgotten and because it is still one of the most fascinating missions - the Voyager probes are still active in service. And they are still making important contributions to research. More of that!
J Source is now available under GPL3. The craziest programming language in active use is now even more accessible. But beware of the Source: it's C, but C from someone who thinks in J and writes in J and only abuses the C compiler for it.
blueMarine is a project I was previously unaware of, taking inspiration from Lightroom and Aperture. However, it currently has no RAW editing functions (while Darktable has non-destructive editing), but focuses solely on image management. This might actually work in my favor for Linux, as I usually just want to view images there, with editing mostly happening on the Mac.
darktable seems to have completely passed me by unnoticed - an open-source alternative to Adobe Lightroom for Linux. I should really take a look at it. I really like Lightroom, but it's always good to know an alternative, as there's no guarantee that I'll always like Adobe in later versions ... (and for Linux I will always need an alternative as long as Adobe doesn't support Linux)
fantasm - Project Hosting on Google Code. Definitely worth checking out, a workflow engine in Python. Something like this could be quite interesting for projects at work.
harukizaemon/hamster. Immutable Threadsafe Datastructures - for Ruby. You can't change them, but you get new, modified versions back. Ideal for using them across thread boundaries. Clojure has this built-in, Scala since 2.8 as well. I would like something like this for Python ...
Pyjamas - Python Javascript Compiler, Desktop Widget Set and RIA Web Framework. I already mentioned this in the old blog, but a) a lot has happened and b) it came up again today as a topic, so I'm blogging about it again.
Check it out: pqc - PostgreSQL Query Cache. A PostgreSQL proxy that caches queries via a Memcache database to improve performance for recurring queries. Since it works as a proxy, it can also speed up applications that don't already implement caching on their own.
Whoever the asshole at Apple is responsible for the appallingly bad app sorting in iTunes (seriously, how can someone be so completely braindead to replicate the already quite clunky sorting interface for the home screen in iTunes with the mouse in nearly the same stupid way?), that "designer" deserves to be slapped, kicked, and fired. If I spend 20 minutes sorting my apps, I expect that when I click "Apply," it will actually be applied. I certainly do not expect all the icons to revert to their original positions before my 20 minutes of work. And no, this is not the first time I have cursed this pathetic app sorting interface. Bah.
The Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old today. Happy Birthday, old plastic box. I loved that thing and started some crazy projects on it. It started with 1 Kilobyte of memory, later with the great expansion to 16 Kilobytes - you couldn't hit the table too hard, otherwise the connections would wobble and the computer would reset. And the box even got me my first (and only) article in c't! After the ZX 81 came the ZX Spectrum with gigantic 48 Kilobytes of memory (from the money of the article). Then it got boring with PCs. It wasn't until the 90s that Macs came into my life.
jsFiddle is a very nicely made online editor for JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Various JavaScript frameworks are supported, and there is the possibility to save snippets and discuss them with others. Progressing.js is also available, as well as a number of tools to unleash on the code. Quite cool for experiments.
Toolbox, H5 and twentytenfive are Wordpress templates that are based on HTML5. I should take a look at them and see if I can't build my own theme on one of them, instead of deriving it from the standard theme. Since I am currently a subtheme of the standard Twentyten, Twentytenfive might be the easiest - but Toolbox could also be interesting because it is a really minimal theme that I could use as a real base.
balupton/history.js provides an API for accessing HTML5 History manipulation, but it also supports older browsers and uses that ugly # notation - but only when HTML5 is not available. Could be quite interesting for a project of mine.
Today I learned that there are two-legged skinks (which are actually legless reptiles) that use their front feet as shovels like a mole: HandwĂĽhlen. Just when you think nature is already weird enough, you learn a new curiosity.
Plagiarism scandal: Doctoral supervisor distances himself from zu Guttenberg. Just as a question posed to the room (honestly, I don't know!): doesn't a doctoral supervisor read the doctoral thesis of their doctoral candidate?
WordPress JSON API. I don't know if I really need this, but it might come in handy someday - the XMLRPC or Atom APIs are quite cumbersome if you just want to quickly access data from the blog via JavaScript.
Feeding the Bit Bucket» Blog Archive » Common Lisp, Clojure and Evolution. No, Clojure is not described as an evolution of Common Lisp - it's simply the example program "Evolution" from the book "Land of Lisp" translated into Clojure by someone who is learning Clojure by implementing all the examples in Clojure using the Common Lisp code as a basis. And therefore a good comparison opportunity between Clojure and Common Lisp. Maybe interesting for 2 or 3 readers of my blog. Otherwise, for me as a bookmark to look back at later.
Naked Password - jQuery Plugin to Encourage Stronger Passwords. Yes, that's what it says. The internet is very, very strange.