Disqus - Latest Comments for lhl

Re: The Droid fails AS A PRODUCT when compared to Palm Pre and iPhone

lhl — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:36:00 -0000

You might want to give Swift a try - I found that I like it much better than Twidroid.

My biggest annoyance w/ Android (which remains in Eclair, I believe) is that even though they're non-modal, notifications steal focus when they come in.

Oh, and the multitasking really needs UI work. Requiring 3rd party task-killers is just plain bad.

Re: random($foo): Getting Started w/ Python

benjaminclemens — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:21:37 -0000

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Re: random($foo): Getting Started w/ Python

benjaminclemens — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:59:07 -0000

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Re: Palm Pre: Two Months In

lhl — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:53:57 -0000

Yeah, on a better day I would have just deleted the comment, but layovers make me cranky. I have comments enabled for interesting conversation, not for anonymous manchildren to come and crap in my internet living room you know? (there's cerainly enough space to do that, although I suspect that if more people enforced community standards, that these sort of pointless posts wouldn't be quite as common.)

As far as inferior product or not, my point is that there are many dimensions. There are aspects of the product itself beyond the UI that contribute to UX, like the service, as well as other things like developer friendliness, openness, etc. Lastly, and perhaps even less quantifiable are the strands of... Justness (this probably gets lumped in by product people as part of brand strategy/identity). "Appleseed" may scoff at that, but it's what kept Apple alive through the 90s, and although the irony may be lost on him, what get's people like him to post on random blogs about how awesome Apple is.

Re: Palm Pre: Two Months In

hariseldon24 — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:10:04 -0000

Your response seems a bit harsh, the article stated "The experience is absolutely not as good as the iPhone", so the term "inferior product" is apt.

Re: Palm Pre: Two Months In

lhl — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:13:47 -0000

Hey semi-anonymous Internet Jackass. Normally I don't get baited by mouth-breathers without the self-esteem to post with their true name, but your lack of reading comprehension, simplistic worldview, and my hour-long layover makes this your lucky day.

In case you missed the very first bullet point, the fact that the Pre on Sprint actually has connectivity and doesn't drop calls really sort of blows away your "inferior product" construct right out of the water.

Now, how about you tell me how many clicks it takes to check new mail messages in 7 inboxes in iPhone Mail? Or how your experience is when you're typing a text or email and receive notifications? How's the Facebook sync? Or running background apps?

That's OK, those are rhetorical questions. That means I already know the answer to those questions because I've had an iPhone since literally day 1. And I still carry around my iPhone 3G with me in my bag and I use it both for development testing and for running some sweet apps.

Did your fanboy head just explode that something could be better on different axes, or that multiple things could be good and bad at different things?

Go troll elsewhere (and really, grow the fuck up).

Re: Palm Pre: Two Months In

lhl — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:38:43 -0000

Yeah, I suspect all phones will have built in social addressbook syncing soon. It *is* magical, and actually bumps up the FB usefulness even more. Honestly, I'd rather have a "FBPhone" than a GPhone...

Re: Palm Pre: Two Months In

lhl — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:29:32 -0000

In theory, Palm and Apple are both gatekeepers, although having multiple gatekeepers is probably preferable to having a single one. In practice, however, my Palm experience has been a lot better - developer mode is easily accessible, which gives full system access, and homebrew apps are available (and tacitly approved) without jailbreaking (and without disappearing w/ system updates).

(While Palm has made some noises about being more developer friendly, they haven't committed as publicly as Google has to openness, so we'll have to wait and see I guess.)

Re: Palm Pre: Two Months In

canucker — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:04:25 -0000

I know there's a bunch of Android powered phones coming, but they are an eclectic bunch that will fragment support for the OS. Will games be playable on all devices? Some have physical keyboards, others just the screen, etc. At best it will be a lowest common denominator approach where each app can only be sure it can address the basic functions. Perhaps Google has figured it out somehow (virtual environment) but games, especially, push specs to the limit. Apple and Palm have a lesser problem. Single form factor but different components. Android is certainly a work in progress but Apple and Palm are not standing still.

Re: Palm Pre: Two Months In

lhl — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:49:42 -0000

Yeah, I like WebOS a lot, and hope that it can get the refinements it needs to remain a contender. That being said, despite my less-than-stellar Android end-user experience, I suspect it'll "win" as the iPhone alternative - w/ a couple dozen devices coming out, it shouldn't have any problem getting to critical mass (at least 5-10M devices?). And, w/ HTC's Sense, Motorola's Blur, and Sony's Rachel, it also has a number of 3rd party UI's that should be, at the very least, interesting. I wonder if there's going to be anyone that tries to compete w/ Apple on fit-and-finish. It seems like right now no one is even *trying* to make a product that has a responsive, non-laggy UI...

Re: random($foo): Getting Started w/ Python

benjaminclemens — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 01:49:05 -0000

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Re: random($foo): Keyconfig for Firefox 3

lhl — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:05:21 -0000

You're best bet on FF 3.5 compatibility is to check the forums. I think that the official build should work...
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=6...

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:54:22 -0000

kvstores are particularly good for anything where you want to pull stuff quickly and randomly by id - canonical storage for documents perhaps, or pointers to media files. also, just about anything you would use something like memcache for, but that requires persistence.

Re: Thoughts on the Palm Pre, G2, and iPhone 3G

lhl — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:43:04 -0000

Yeah, it's really disappointing, the bad UI seems to be baked in at every level. HTC's Sense UI looks interesting, if only for the better widgets (looks like the mother of all weather widgets there), but I'm not getting my hopes up in terms of responsiveness or overall usability (I'm sure that someone will hack a ROM soon to flash on the G2, so it'll be worth poking around with).

Re: Thoughts on the Palm Pre, G2, and iPhone 3G

lhl — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:42:41 -0000

Re: Couple of New Toys: Google Ion (G2) and Palm Pre

lhl — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:40:15 -0000

Usually I carry one phone around. I have a Chrome bag I carry around (almost 5 years old now) almost everywhere that I use to lug my laptop and any extra stuff I need to carry around.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:10:05 -0000

Fair enough on making sure the data is accurate. Still, the hyperbole ("has no idea what he's talking about" or "spewing misinformation") does a disservice if free information flow is your goal. And from your tone and borderline ad hominem attacks, it sounds you have an axe to grind (unless your last comment is simply confusion- ie, I wasn't referring to his writing simplejson, but rather writing voldemort_client).

Personally, not knowing Bob at all, I found his presentation to be useful as a good overview for people that haven't been playing around with the various packages (and it jibed well enough with my own experiences) - I think he was pretty up front about where he was approaching it from (as someone who needed a solution that worked and his experiences - not as any domain expert, whatever that means). Most of the data is going to be out of date anyway since projects have been moving pretty quickly. And the plain fact of the matter is that his presentation has gotten attention precisely because there's so little published out there. In that respect, I think that it's a pretty big contribution to the community and I wish there was *more* of that out there, not less.

Anyway, if want to correct the errata in the presentation, why not just drop a line and it'd get fixed? If it just offends your sensibilities that "anyone" can go around, test some stuff and talk about it... well, that's err, usually how that works. At least he's put his real name to it (that's what I'm a firm believer in).

Anyway, since we've all said our pieces, I'd like to consider this conversation closed unless Bob jumps in. Life's too short.

cheers,

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

coder — Sun, 03 May 2009 14:06:03 -0000

Hi; I am a firm believer in "knowing what you don't know". Getting up there and talking in front of people and spewing bunch of misinformation is not cool. I don't think Bob did the research, to his credit, I don't think any one man could do it given the wide range of products he was looking at; he was looking at bunch of stuff, and he confused things, and wrote some wrong stuff. I understand this. But I also want to set the record straight. Writing some JSON library does not make you an automatic authority on all things IT.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:58:03 -0000

coder, that's a useful link, however saying that Bob has no idea what he's talking about is going a bit too far I think, seeing as he did explore Voldemort enough to write (the only) python binding for it... (your post btw also nears the line where I start with comment smackdowns - if you're gonna blast people, you need to man up and put your Real Name and Reputation on it; I find that helps to keep conversation constructive and civilized),

Both the partition-rebalance2 and protobuf branches look promising, so we'll just have to see.

Re: Random Thoughts on Twitter

lhl — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:51:08 -0000

Good point, Twitter by virtue of brevity I think does actually tend toward IRC even though it's has some more publishy aspects and is async and not realtime, but that idea of off the cuff conversation vs more well thought out compositions I think is pretty valid.

So, these days my blog tends toward the expository, but mostly because the rest of it has been offloaded into various tools (flickr, delicious, twitter, facebook, etc). I'm not sure there's a mapping since they're quite different, but I use to spend a lot more time gathering and curating links - which I don't think that was necessarily less worthwhile, but I'm not sure there's a conversion factor.

So, I don't think I'd print my tweets into a hardback, but I could see myself reading some and it being really interesting. I do think there are lots of great tweets. (I'm a big fan of favoriting stuff in general) You can see some of my favorite tweets...

Oh, neither here nor there, but Ulysses tweeted, and If Homer's Odyssey Was Written On Twitter. :)

Also, I can laugh (well, snigger) at the wall joke too, but imagine if you were at a cafe w/ your friends and there was a TOS agreement that claimed ownership over your conversation in there. The objections you'd have wouldn't have anything to do w/ the artistic value of the conversations themselves...

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

Frazer — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:00:36 -0000

Hi,
Yes, MySQL Cluster is the name we give a system of MySQL servers connected to an Ndb Cluster.
I think there's some confusion with the definition of disk-persistence and durability.
MySQL Cluster has always had disk-persistence. All changes are redo-logged to disk and checkpoints to disk are used to allow the Redo log to be trimmed. Checkpointing has a few percent impact on achievable throughput - the disk write bandwidth used can be traded off against checkpoint duration and hence redo log size. The redo log is not fsynced at every transaction commit, but periodically - usually every 2s, and down to every 100millis. This tradeoff allows high throughput on Cluster's internal 2PC.
This window means that committed transactions are not immediately disk-durable, but when running with 2 or more replicas, all data is synchronously replicated at commit time, so committed transactions are machine-failure durable, and become disk durable (on all replicas) within ~2s. This is a three-way trade off between tolerance to total cluster failure (requiring disk durability), tolerance to machine failure (requiring machine-failure durability) and throughput (requiring control of fsyncs/s).

Prior to MySQL 5.1, all data was held (and had to fit) in memory.
From MySQL 5.1, non indexed data (i.e. the values in a kvp) can be stored on disk. This means that when they are read/written they are fetched from disk into an in-memory LRU cache in the same way as most databases. This allows data sets larger than the memory size to be handled by a single cluster node, at the cost of some performance. Persistence/Durability is the same, with Redo log flushed periodically etc.

Over time we will add support for disk-storage of indexed data (keys in a kvp), disk-durable transactions etc.

I take your point about complexity. Getting a system that has 'just enough' complexity to meet your needs is always hard. I think MySQL Cluster could suit some folks but it's not the simplest system out there.
Frazer

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:07:26 -0000

Frazer, I've played around w/ NDBCLUSTER a bit, which is what MySQL Cluster is running on, right? Does it have durability now? My understanding at the time I played w/ it was that it was neat but didn't have storage - for the disk-persistence you mention, how does check-pointing affect performance? It sounds interesting, although one of the appelas of running a "simple" system is not needing a dedicated DBA or data-wrangler...

Hopefully someone gives MySQL Cluster a spin, would love to see how it compares.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:17:26 -0000

Here's your chance EllisGL, do some tests and post some numbers.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

Parand — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:31:41 -0000

I haven't personally used HBase, but a friend is using it in production in a fairly large site and tells me query speed is definitely not fast enough to be user facing (they have a huge memcached farm in front of it).

Also, my understanding is that HBase mostly uses HDFS (the distributed file system) as opposed to Hadoop.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

scoop — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:21:40 -0000

Hey Leo, thanks for the great write up. There is a lot of hype around these k-v dbs. By the time you write a serious domain application around most of them, you begin to understand why "traditional" persistent stores are not as fast. If you want to use these as the primary persistent back end for a domain app, you'll soon realize that most of these "databases" push the messy details to the programmer.

"Partionable", and "distributed" are also tall claims for most of them. I looked at redis too and can't understand where the distributed part comes in.

"Based on the maturity of projects out there, you could write your own in less than a day. It’ll perform as well and at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it. Alternatively, you could go on the conference circuit and talk about how awesome your half-baked distributed keystore is"

Completely agree. At the end of the day, its not rocket science to write your own memory hash-map and have a thread write backups to a disk file or just embed BDB and be done with it. And you can tune it to do exactly what you need for your own domain, including managing relationships if necessary.