Disqus - Friends of yahooza

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

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

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): 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: 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

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

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

lhl — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:45:29 -0000

Ilya, do you have numbers on your HBase setup? How's the latency for queries? My understanding (and this applied to Hypertable too if I would've been able to get it up and running) that as BigTable clones, they're oriented about fast sequential requests, but not as good on the random. Would be interesting to get actual #s from your testing (ms latency, qps, on #/kind of nodes, w what kind of data set).

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:34:26 -0000

On the one hand, sure "technically" you're right. On the other hand, do I really need the Big-O Notation police commenting here? Is this really the kind of conversation I want in this thread?

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:21:36 -0000

No worries, will continue to keep an eye out. I think part of the problem is the cool stuff CouchDB is tackling (non-relational, document-based, built w/ erlang, map-reduce processing) is catnip for devs and tends to make them forget about the "alpha software" bit unless it's big and blinking. The inevitable backlash/eye-rolling when it gets brought up everywhere isn't necessarily your fault, but something to be aware of.

Cheers!

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:40:05 -0000

Yeah, I'll be happy if this helps some people getting started, but even happier if this encourages more people out there to publish their findings/results, even if it's like mine where I could only get a few of them running (that in itself maybe a useful datapoint).

It'd be nice to get the s/n ratio up a bit for people that actually need to run something into production (I mean sure it's the Interweb, but the amount of fanboy/hater hot air has been pretty insufferable in this area).

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:27:18 -0000

FYI, I sent Jay some details on my setup and dataset. Hopefully that's enough to help replicate, otherwise may be a bit slow going since I'm juggling a few other balls atm.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:24:40 -0000

Nope, I'd actually looked at Neo4j in the past but didn't actually even think about it for this. Hopefully someone takes a look at it and posts some results.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:23:07 -0000

Sample single-node and multi-node AMIs would be *huge*. I think that that, and some sample schemas would be great. If you created an empty table on the wiki for people to post up their testing results, I'd have to believe that it'd also fill up pretty quickly. I think there are a lot of people that are reviewing these things, but probably getting hung up getting started/wrapping their heads around deploying.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:19:54 -0000

Oh BURN! (not) I'm perfectly happy to reveal the depth of my ignorance if the ensuing discussion can help shed light on it (although my patience for other people's asshattery on *my blog* is finite). You're right that CouchDB isn't a kv store, but since every conversation about any of these subjects ineveitably brings up the "What about x?" where x invariably includes Couch, it'd be worth pre-empting. Personally, I think the critique I give in the posting (one line != rant) is pretty valid. The detailed response to Jan was because he asked. I'm sure he and the rest of the Couch team are good peoples, but my sentiments aren't unique - some have suggested that I should have made the CouchDB line it's own bullet-point.

As for trash talk, I have to say that you've been engaging in a fair amount of it. I'm posting my experiences (and I don't claim it to be anything more than that). It's not rocket science, but it's real data w/ real world usage in an area where there's significantly more smoke than fire (or published results). So, what's your skin in the game, and what's your contribution?

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:16:12 -0000

I know that's slightly tongue and cheek, and there's some truth to that, but I think it's worth pointing out the difference between the solid data storage and retrieval part and the distributed part. In a comparison between redis and tc/tt for the former, I don't think there's any question (certainly not in my mind) which one is more battle-tested. So it's not like I went out and built my own keystore. For the distributed part, it was a matter of putting together the simplest thing that could work after it turned out that I there wasn't a black box solution to be had.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:10:16 -0000

Yeah, I'm using Bob Ippolito's (he's everywhere :) pytyrant, a pure python implementation that's *very* active. There is also a wrapper for the C API: python-tokyotyrant.

Re: Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

lhl — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:06:11 -0000

Actually, I was wrong, but not for that reason - in the real world there is a big difference between O(1) and O(bazillion) - however, my assumption was that the chaining for collisions was a fixed value but it's chained w/ a binary search tree, so O(log n).