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Dienstag, 13. Mai 2008

Yuan Yu et al.: Some sample programs written in DryadLINQ

High-level analytic programming plus automatic parallelization. Ladies and gentlemen, what you're staring in the eye here is The Future.

2008-05-13-drinq

2 comments • BY gavin, chris

Samstag, 10. Mai 2008

Woah! John Resig ported (a lot of) Processing to JavaScript/Canvas; and not only the API, but also a fairly complete translator from Processing's Quasi-Java to JavaScript, which means that many (simple) Processing applications will run unmodified.

By the way, it's also quite easy to use the Processing API (from the original implementation) with Helma/Helma NG. Wiki note upcoming.

2008-05-10-mobro

Speaking of Helma NG: The Helma user meeting on Tuesday was a lot of fun; I greatly enjoyed both meeting people again (several after years) and seeing so many new Helma developers.

The key topic definitely was Helma NG, brand new and rapidly moving as it is. See Hannes' slides for some information on how (and why) it came about; from my perspective it boils down to a. in the core, focus on the essentials, b. less Java, more JavaScript and, closely related, c. provide a sensible module mechanism (something that's lacking from JavaScript-as-language).

In its current form, the most important piece missing in Helma NG when compared to Helma 1 is an object-relational mapping layer; consequently, the question of data persistence resulted in a great deal of (rather fruitful) discussion. In any case, JSAdapter support and Hannes' Minibase sketch should provide ample playground for experiments.

It's important to note that Helma NG is extremely flexible in terms of application structure; flexible enough to support e.g. a Rails-ish framework on top (amazingly enough, this has already been prototyped [slides] by Matthias Platzer). The one downside is that such flexibility makes it hard(er) for newcomers too see how to best structure NG applications (and currently, everyone is a newcomer); my guess is that soon enough patterns worth emulating will show up.

Minutes from the Helma Spring 2008 Meeting

2008-05-10-angie

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Montag, 5. Mai 2008

Morgen (und das schon ab 10 am frühen Morgen): das Helma Spring Meeting 2008. Everybody come!

2008-05-05-hehe

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Donnerstag, 1. Mai 2008

Easy watchening zum 1. Mai: Peter Norvig & Co. bei der Startup School 2008. VisualRank, data-driven word segmentation (on a laptop), Google Sets.

Und: Omnisio hat das bislang schier Unmögliche geschafft - einen brauchbaren Slides 'n' Speaker-Simultan-Player zu bauen.

2008-05-01-watchEn

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Dienstag, 29. April 2008

Eric Tiedemann, 1966-2008. Rest (or rave) in peace (as you may prefer).

e7 is wonderful. May it live on.

2008-04-29-rest

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Freitag, 25. April 2008

"Im Grunde ist damit Google Maps zu einem rekursiven sich selbst fütternden Mash-Up geworden."

Walter Rafelsberger durchschaut.

Semi-related und jedenfalls drüberschauenswert: Enkin.

2008-04-25-reMash

"Believe it or not, predictions have to be made before an event occurs, not after the fact."

2008-04-25-pred

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Donnerstag, 24. April 2008

6. Mai ist Helmatag!

2008-04-24-hWerkzeug

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Freitag, 18. April 2008

Two interesting disk-y posts:

James Hamilton: "How to ensure that data written to disk, is REALLY on disk? Yeah, I know, this shouldn't be hard but the I/O stack is deep, everyone is looking for performance, everyone is caching along the way, so it's more interesting than you might like."

Steve Dekorte: ACID Databases: Fact and Fiction

"I learned this by writing my own small database (SkipDB) and doing it wrong the first time."

WAL

Addendum: Paul McJones kindly let me know about the amazing technique of "group commits", in which mutually independent transactions (think ATM networks) are grouped into single disk write windows; that way, it's indeed possible to support thousands of (disjoint!) transactions per second while adding only negligible latency to each individual transaction. Paul also recommended Jim Gray's and Andreas Reuter's Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques: '[...] a good reference for just about all the "tricks of the trade"'. — Thanks!

2008-04-18-disky

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Mittwoch, 16. April 2008

Helma 2 imports Pythonic imports.

2008-04-16-hepy

Steve Dekorte asked: "Is anyone working on file systems or databases optimized for flash disks?"

The answer, apparently, is: yes.

2008-04-16-flashy

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Dienstag, 15. April 2008

Havoc Pennington: 'It would be wonderful discipline for any software dev team serious about Linux "on the desktop" [...] to ban their own use of terminals. Of course, none of us have ever done this, and that explains a lot about the resulting products.' [ Ø HTP • ]

2008-04-15-dropTerm

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Samstag, 12. April 2008

Philip Wadler: "Ellie works in quantum computation, and told me (rather to my surprise) that monads have an application there. She had once read one of my papers on monads, but found it too difficult. This cheered me up, since I feel the same when I try to read about quantum computation."

2008-04-12-monadMechanic

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Freitag, 11. April 2008

James Hamilton on China's Great Firewall:^* "[...] [T]he main goal of the Golden Shield project is to add friction. If it's painful enough to get to the content they are trying to prevent from being accessed, few will bother to access it."

^* Which, as he writes, isn't a firewall at all.

2008-04-11-frictional

Nachdem das liebgewonnene katchup in Rekordzeit reimplementiert wurde, möchte nun auch ich die Gelegenheit ergreifen, auf das überaus freudige Ereignis der Quasi-Wiedergeburt des famosen shnitzls hinzuweisen: Schneller, featurevoller, geographischer (man beachte die Box unter der Karte)!