mindstorms

iPhone Apps for Geeks Series

2009-08-21T15:28:00.002+03:00

On my Tumblr blog: thinking differently big, I've started a new series of articles about iPhone Apps for Geeks where I’m exploring the different apps for geeky daily tasks. If there are any categories of apps you'd like to see please drop me a line over there.

About Alternative Data Storage Status

2009-08-20T15:24:00.003+03:00

From Alternative Data Storage Status Quo:

Here is my short TODO list on how to make things better:

accessible and immediate availability: make sure that there is a very easy way to get people to try out the solution. That might mean creating (already optmized) Amazon EC2, VMWare or whatever else images. As in the old internet say: "one-click away"

document scenarios: even if atypical, others will be able to figure out common points

publish any available benchmarks: even if not perfect they will give others an idea about what they are looking for

common API and protocols

MyEclipse Customer Support Sucks

2009-07-01T15:04:00.002+03:00

I cannot say it any clearer than this: MyEclipse Customer Support Sucks

iPhone 3GS or Nokia N97?

2009-07-01T08:24:00.000+03:00

What is your pick: iPhone 3GS or Nokia N97? If you feel strong about one option please drop me a note on my Think Differently Big Tumblr: iPhone 3GS or Nokia N97.

Why is Apple already releasing the iPhone OS 3.1?

2009-07-01T03:22:00.000+03:00

Tumblr vs Blogger: Make Sure You Consider Any Blogger Alternatives

2009-06-29T08:53:00.000+03:00

Last month I have decided to create my completely custom Blogger template. I've had a few of different reasons for trying this out, but the main goals were to make it simpler for posting different format posts and also to offer an easier way to consume the content.

Indeed there were many other reasons behind my decision to invest time into creating a custom template: starting with the fact that I wasn't satisfied with the templates and their 'semantic' HTML and probably ending with my curiosity on seeing how complex would it be.

While I'll not walk you through my experience, I'll just tell you that the it was absolutely horrible, main causes being: 1) the documentation is most of the time wrong, 2) the user group is full of completely useless monkeys, 3) most of the time your best bet will be JavaScript (nb while I do like JavaScript I don't think that using it for customizing a template is a decent option).

Anyways, more or less I have finally got what I was looking for. But at that moment I have realized that I was trying to hack a system to make it behave and look like already existing solutions: Tumblr, Posterous and maybe others that I haven't heard of. After observing my own posting habits, but also how my visitors have consumed the blog, I have decided to experiment more seriously with Tumblr.

In just a couple of hours, I've been able to completely setup my new Tumblr: Think differently big. And in case you are wondering why it took me so long, I'll tell you that I've spent a lot of time just deciding which one of the absolutely gorgeous Tumblr themes to use, revamp the chosen theme HTML (nb while I completely suck at almost everything related to design and CSS, I am a maniac in what regards displaying information and HTML), integrating Tumblr bookmarklet with Google Reader and testing MarsEdit support for Tumblr.

At least for the next month, all my posting activity will happen over there, so now I'm inviting you to my Tumblr experiment: Think differently big. Thanks!

Notable bits

2009-06-17T21:48:00.000+03:00

Sub DiggerPlus: A Cool Look Into What Your Friends are Digging ★

A couple of weeks back, I've just explained Vlad Stan why I think that using the social graph as it is today for recommendations or filtering engines still presents tons of limitations and traps. (in the quote below just ignore any reference to specific products and focus on social graphs and filtering aspects).

Digg’s Recommendation Engine was one of the biggest announcements in the history of the company, and yet it just never did it for me. Yes, I sometimes like to check out what my friends are digging, but in most cases it just adds to the noise, as I’d simply like to know what’s new without any additional filters, except perhaps the category.

[...] If you haven’t been just randomly adding friends to your friend list, Sub DiggerPlus will provide a nice insight into what they’ve been digging lately, and the fact that it all opens in the same browser window makes it simple enough to be enjoyable.

(via Sub DiggerPlus: A Cool Look Into What Your Friends are Digging)

Lie Telling Medium Of Choice ★

In a study of college students, Hancock found that 37% of lies were told via phone, 27% face-to-face, 21% using Web-based messaging and 14% through email.

Why so few lies via email? Because it leaves a trail, proof that the lie was told.

(via Lie Telling Medium Of Choice)

Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media ★

If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I'd do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I'd do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.

(via Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media)

What Kind Of Content Is Popular On The Internet? ★

So, in conclusion, I think it is safe to say that the Internet is not just for porn. It's mostly for social media, search, shopping, and other utilities. And when it comes to content, geeks and gamers are still a very important audience on the Internet. I wonder if it will always be that way.

(via What Kind Of Content Is Popular On The Internet?)

The Best Way to Change a Corporate Culture ★

Performance reviews and training programs define the firm's expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what's important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don't — emphasize the firm's priorities.

"You change a culture with stories. Right now your stories are about how hard you work people. Like the woman you forced to work on her wedding day. You may not be proud of it, but it's the story you tell. That story conveys your culture simply and reliably. And I'm certain you're not the only one who tells it. You can be sure the bride tells it. And all her friends. If you want to change the culture, you have to change the stories."

To start a culture change all we need to do is two simple things:

Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.

Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.

(via The Best Way to Change a Corporate Culture)

Build an Insanely Great Web Service ★

New Concept vs. Doesn't Suck vs. Fast Follower vs. Niche

Your website falls into one of four categories:

New concept: If you fall into this category, your product or service type does not have a name yet. It has no market space, category, or even articulated need yet. In a decade, the number of these concepts that actually gain traction is tiny. The number of them that get through the early-adopter phase to the mainstream (i.e. reach the 3-year milestone) is even smaller. In other words, good luck!

Doesn't Suck: This one is easier. This is a service you can describe as "[something] that doesn't suck." Google first offered "search that doesn't suck," and then followed it up with Gmail, which is "email that doesn't suck." In other words, don't be afraid to go after mature markets in which the current services are not that good. Spend a couple of days browsing online and you will see plenty of such opportunities.

Fast Follower: This applies to a new concept that makes your jaw drop and you think "OMG, this is so cool." And then you realize that doing something similar would actually be pretty simple. The first one to market with a new concept is not always the winner. It just looks that way because the originator gets lost in the dustbin of history when the better venture out-executes it. You need access to capital to do this right, because you have to move fast, which means hiring an A-Team. And A-Teams like to be paid a lot.

Niche: There are thousands of these. Your niche might be geographic or a user type. Most niches are limited in scale and so do not require much capital. These are ripe for bootstrapping. But don't think niches are easy. Users will still be very demanding.

(via Build an Insanely Great Web Service)

The 10 Online Ad Formats People Hate Most ★

Now this is something that the romanian online people should take a serious look at! Without any intention to sound harsh all these seem to be exactly what most of the romanian onliners are using. Yuck!

We asked usability testing firm Catalyst Groupto help us come up with a list of online ad formats people hate most.They are:

Banner ads below headers

Ads that look like content

Dancing ads

Auto-expanding half-page ads

Banners next to logos

Billboards in the top right corner

Google text links interrupting content

Ads with hidden close buttons

Interstitials

Page Take-overs

(via The 10 Online Ad Formats People Hate Most)

Ten Commandments from Entrepreneurial 'Evangelist' Guy Kawasaki - Knowledge@Wharton ★

Make meaning, not money

Make a mantra, not a mission statement

Jump curves

In product design, "roll the DICEE." (nb: Deep Intelligence Complete Elegance Emotive)

Don't worry, be "crappy"

Polarize people

Let 100 flowers blossom

Churn, baby, churn

Niche yourself

Follow the 10-20-30 rule

Don't let the bozos get you down

(via Ten Commandments from Entrepreneurial 'Evangelist' Guy Kawasaki - Knowledge@Wharton)

Chris Anderson’s Counterintuitive Rules For Charging For Media Online ★

In one slide, Anderson comes up with the following rules for media companies trying to figure out how to make money online:

The best model is a mix of free and paid

You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere,

Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site,

Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better

This is somewhat counterintuitive because it means media sites that want to charge for content should charge for their niche stuff instead of their most popular content. But that is exactly the right way to look at it if you want to maximize your advertising revenues. Let the popular content be paid for by advertising, and the niche, exclusive content can be sold to fewer people at a higher price. Anderson, whose last book was the Long Tail, predicts in media: “The head of the curve will be free and the tail of the curve will be paid.”

(via Chris Anderson’s Counterintuitive Rules For Charging For Media Online)

Cloud Futures Pt. 3: Focused Clouds ★

If you can’t be ‘best‘ or ‘cheapest‘, that only leaves being ‘first’. Since Amazon Web Services (AWS) clinched the ‘first’ and ‘best’ titles for the general marketplace, your best bet is to pick a subset of the market to focus on. Focused clouds find a sweet spot and exploit it.

(via Cloud Futures Pt. 3: Focused Clouds « DailyCloud)

Tips on Innovation & Enterprenuership from Jeff Bezos ★

The trick to being an entrepreneur is to know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible. The trick is to be stubborn about the vision, but flexible about tactics

[...] failure is not that expensive and it is part of work. If something fails, then you are going to shut it down and that is going to cut your losses. [...] However, the biggest focus should be errors of ommission, he pointed out. These are chances not taken.

You need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas and senior executives encourage ideas,

[...] prerequsites for innovation and inventing, but the biggest one is willingness to fail. You need to think for the long term and be misunderstood for a long period of time. “If you can’t do those things, then you need to limit yourself to sustainable innovation.”

(via Tips on Innovation & Enterprenuership from Jeff Bezos)

Open Letter to Google App Engine: Billing for CPU time is Wrong

2009-06-16T01:34:00.000+03:00

I've been planning to write this post since Google App Engine firstly announced a billing system for App Engine. Meanwhile, I thought it would have been more useful to show some problems to the system hoping that the team will reconsider some of the quotas and the way the billing system is supposed to work.

The Google App Engine platform has been offered since the beginning under specific CPU, space and API quotas. Leaving aside the tons of applications that have been deployed on App Engine for playing or testing purposes or just for the coolness factor, I strongly believe that others have evaluated the alternatives and have picked up the platform to develop true applications and while doing so they have considered the original limitations/quotas.

Later on Google has previewed what would become during February the billing system. And I don't think this was a surprise to anyone (in fact I would have expected to see the tons of open bugs fixed or at least explained before seeing a billing system, but this is probably just how I see things).

CPU time, defined as

The total processing time for handling requests, including time spent running the app and performing datastore operations. This does not include time spent waiting for other services, such as waiting for a URL fetch to return or the image service to transform an image.

is part of the billing system. As you can notice right from the definition it includes internal API time. Basically, this means that you'll have to pay for something you have no control of (a very simple parallel to other pay-per-use services would be Amazon asking you to pay for their sporadic hardware replacements).

See note 1

Meanwhile, the Google App Engine forums were (and still are) full of reports of the internal infrastructure misbehavior and this having a clear impact on the applications' reported performance. I should also mention that there were cases when the Google monitoring tools were not even catching themselves the issues, not to mention that the team is failing to provide any real feedback about these problems.

Last but not least, Google App Engine is also reducing the CPU time original quota based on so called resource usage statistics for a recent 7-day period. But they fail to mention if the average was computed based on active apps only or using all the test applications that cannot be deleted or how recent these statistics are considering I've seen the same number mentioned couple of months ago.

Summarizing, I think billing for CPU time is wrong and I am suggesting the Google App Engine team to reconsider it because:

the terms are not well defined [2]
it is not clear how they are measured
there have been repeated problems on the platform and these are impacting the CPU analytics
it includes framework API internal calls CPU usage and this is not under developers' control
framework API calls are already billable separately

[1] The picture shows a datastore timeout error for an extremely basic 15 record fetch operation (log record from Jun.7th)

[2] While the cpu_time metric is defined on the Quotas page, the logs are including other CPU related metrics which are not clearly defined.

Notable bits

2009-06-12T00:45:00.001+03:00

Large-scale graph computing at Google ★

In Pregel, programs are expressed as a sequence of iterations. In each iteration, a vertex can, independently of other vertices, receive messages sent to it in the previous iteration, send messages to other vertices, modify its own and its outgoing edges' states, and mutate the graph's topology

Geeking with Greg: On the front lines of the Netflix Prize ★

We found that most nearest-neighbor techniques work best on 50 or fewer neighbors, which means these methods can't exploit all the information a viewer's ratings may contain. Latent-factor models have the opposite weakness: They are bad at detecting strong associations among a few closely related films, such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

What’s your business mantra ★

Because it’s easy to get sidetracked (or just blinded by all of the possibilities out there) I often suggest to companies that they come up with a “mantra”. It’s oversimplified and doesn’t work for every situation (and of course needs to be revisited as the business changes over time) but the idea is to boil the key drivers of the company down to a sentence or two – maybe some broad categories that define they most important areas of focus or possibly something that looks like a statement of purpose.

Ruby slippers ★

If you could make one thing come true that would change everything for your project, do you know what the one thing would be?

But for many sites, many companies, there isn't a thing. They can't articulate it. They have no wish. If you have no wish, how can it possibly come true?

Free and Geeky Places Worth Visiting in California - Travel Tips from John Graham-Cumming, Author of The Geek Atlas ★

In the San Francisco Chronicle, John Graham-Cumming recently detailed five uber-geeky spots in California and Nevada that won't cost you a penny to visit. From visiting the Computer History Museum to checking out the Joint Genome Institute, even if you're traveling on a budget you'll find plenty to do.

Adding HTML entities using CSS content ★

How do you use the CSS content property to add html entities?

A Lesson From Morty ★

But the point Morty made rang true to me and I've lived by his rule ever since. I never ever say that a specific provision is "standard". Nothing is standard. You either need it or you don't. Explain why

What Drives Consumer Adoption Of New Technologies? ★

So it seems to me that consumers are driven to new experiences that are simple and useful and/or entertaining. It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology. You have to be the first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.

Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years

iPhone - mobile browser with a killer touch screen interface

Facebook - a social net with real utility

Wii - gesture based user interface for gaming

Hulu - your favorite TV shows in a fantastic web UI

FlipCam - a video cam that fits in your pocket comfortably

Rock Band - everyone can be a rock star for a few minutes

Mafia Wars - a natively social game built for social nets

Blogger - a printing press for everyone

Pandora - drop dead simple personalized radio

Twitter - blogging everyone can do in less than a minute

Extremely good comments:

Pierre here

Sometimes the best products / innovations are the ones which are open for everybody else to innovate on top of them. I call this innovation^2 (squared).

Finally products need to be simple, viral, usable, and FAST (eg. to adopt, understand, use etc.) - users have less and less time available for new products.

Steven Kane here

peer pressure - "so many people i know are into this, its not so alien, I should try it" (facebook, iphone, twitter)

media saturation - "i keep hearing so much about this, i should check it out" (facebook, iphone, twitter, wii, blogging, guitar hero, rock band, most "green" things)

familiarity - "oh that's new but so similar to what I already know and like, why not?" (mafia wars, hulu, twitter, pandora)

anxiety and insecurity - "holy moley it feels like everyone is into this, i don't want to be a luddite or out of fashion, i better check it out" (iphone, twitter, facebook, most "green" things)

Jim Kerr (long comment worth reading it all)

The most important engine driving consumer adoption of new technologies is when they remove an artificial barrier to consumer desire. I describe this as "consumers abhor a vacuum." The company that can fill this vacuum will have consumers flocking to its doors.

Ian Stewart (long comment worth reading it all) brings up: relative advantage, compatibility, simplicity, trialability, observability.

johndodds: Simplicity and purpose

Hemlock: An Open-Source Real-Time Web Platform ★

Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York

Is It Apache Hadoop or Yahoo Hadoop?

2009-06-11T17:42:00.001+03:00

Hadoop is probably the most complete and largely used of the 7 MapReduce implementations implementations I have counted. The project was initiated at Yahoo! and some time ago it was contributed to Apache Software Foundation. By looking at the committers page, it looks like 13 out of 22 committers are from Yahoo!, so this being said, I cannot stop wondering what is Yahoo! Hadoop?

First answer

Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.

I'll let you decide if this is PR BS only or not.

Second Answer

The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop has been tested and deployed at Yahoo! on the largest Hadoop clusters in the world.

Now, this makes a lot of sense: Yahoo! Hadoop is a version of Hadoop that has been tested and patched internally.

Still confused?

But my confusion still persists:

why the patches haven't been applied to the source base hosted by Apache?
why is it not a tag on the source base hosted by Apache? Or at most a separate branch?
why Yahoo! has decided to host it completely separately on GitHub.

And I guess there are only two possible answers:

either Yahoo! has no idea how to run an open source project (nb this is hard to believe)
or Yahoo! has decided to fork back Hadoop and take full control over it.

What do you think?

Romania on Google Maps

2009-06-09T21:38:00.003+03:00

I am not only disappointed, but really frustrated by the status of Google Maps (Mihnea has an excellent list of facts -- link in title)

Here are some facts to help you digest the ugly truth:

Romania has the 9th largest territory and the 7th largest population among the European Union member states

Bucharest is the 6th largest city in the EU by population within city limits

Bulgaria, who joined the EU at the same time, has Google street maps

Apple has been selling Google Maps-enabled iPhones in the country for over a year now

even an Android device will soon hit the local market

A Schema-less Relational Database

2009-06-08T09:02:00.000+03:00

A relational database management system (RDBMS) imposes a fixed schema, so why would I use schema-less and relational database in the same sentence?

I will not write an introduction about what relational database are and what are the differences between them and other storage alternatives and I'll jump directly to the subject: is it be possible to use a row-based storage in a schema-less mode? Or to make it more explicit: is it possible to store free format objects/data in a fixed format?

We have to agree that at the first glance this looks like the eternal hammer hypothesis: give me a hammer and everything will look like a nail. But in this case things are a lot simpler.

So, what is the solution?

Most of the languages support one form or another of object serialization in binary or pure text format. Java has serialization in binary format, Python has marshaling and (c)pickle. Ruby has marshaling too and the list can go on and on. Both Google with protobuf and Facebook with Thrift have proposed their own high performance binary serialization mechanisms. Besides all these existing mechanisms there is also an universal object marshaling protocol: JSON.

By now the solution should become quite obvious: instead of persisting the object by storing it field by field, we would just serialize the whole object with all its properties. Basically, the table will need just 2 fields: an ID and a field that can store our serialized object. Like FriendFeed is doing it (nb Jackrabbit -- the open source implementation of Java Content Repository spec -- was using this solution for quite a while). And if you think this is not the best idea, I'll just say that most (if not all) of the alternative storage solution are using similar storage solutions.

What do you lose?

Referential integrity

Referential integrity in the sense of foreign keys will be lost. You can maintain it at the application level though.

Indexes

Serialized object in either binary or text format are pretty useless in indexes. So, if you need to search based on specific object properties then you'll have to implement your own solution. For example, Jackrabbit is using Lucene to keep an external index, while FriendFeed is using the database by creating indexes on-request.

What do you win?

A solid storage engine

You don't have to recreate or implement yourself the storage mechanism. The solution will use one that is proved to be solid.

Drivers and Tools

Most of the existing RDBMS are providing additional administration and visualization tools. Not to mention their drivers tested by tons of applications.

Last, but not least, you'll keep any other feature offered by your relational database (f.e. clustering).

I'll not end the post without throwing out the real question:

When is a relational database schema-less approach appropriate?

Resources:

Quick Reference to Alternative data storages

2009-05-28T11:17:00.002+03:00

Collaborative effort: Please help me fill in the gaps in the tables below by providing missing data, references to interesting articles, metrics, etc.. Please feel free to suggest new criteria to be included.

This is work in progress..

While it may probably not be exhaustive, my intention is to provide a quick reference to BASE systems (Basically Available, Soft State, Eventually consistent, as opposed to ACID: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) that would offer newcomers an overview of the existing projects in the field.

So far, I've been looking for filling in information about the following characteristics:

Data model
Partitioning
Persistence
Rebalancing (elasticity)
Replication (clustering)

I have also included notes about the implementation language and the protocols that can be used with each solution.

If you think I should include other criteria please do let me know.

The projects included so far in the list: Cassandra, CloudBase, CouchDB, Dynomite, HBase, Hypertable, Kai, LightCloud, LucidDB, Memcached, MemcacheDB, MonetDB, MongoDB, Neptune, Redis, Ringo, Scalaris, ThruDB, Tokyo Cabinet + Tyrant, Voldermort.

Alternative Data Storages

Project	Data model	Partitioning	Persistence	Rebalancing	Replication
Cassandra	Column-family (BigTable^[5], Dynamo⁶)	Y^[n4]	disk	Y	Y
CloudBase	HDFS/Hadoop^[n3]	Y	disk	Y	Y
CouchDB	Doc-oriented	?^[n2]	disk	?^[n2]	?^[n2]
Dynomite	Blob (Dynamo⁶)	Y	pluggable	Y	Y
HBase	Column-family (BigTable^[5])	Y	disk	Y	Y
Hypertable	Column-family (BigTable^[5])	Y	DFS (HDFS)	?	Y
Kai	Blob	?	disk	?	?
LightCloud	check Tokyo Tyrant^[n5]
LucidDB	Column-based	?	disk	?	N
Memcached ^[n1]	Blob	Y	RAM	Y	N
MemcacheDB	Blob	?	BerkleyDB	?	Y
MonetDB
MongoDB	Doc-oriented	Y			Y
Neptune
Redis
Ringo	Blob	Y	disk	Y	Y
Scalaris	Blob	Y	RAM		Y
ThruDB	Doc-oriented
Tokyo Cabinet + Tyrant
Voldemort	Structured / Blob / Text	Y	pluggable	N	Y

Notes

[n1] Memcached: a distributed memory object caching system
[n2] CouchDB partitioning and replication: according to a 2009 Summer of code proposal: While distributed deployments have been achieved with the help of proxies and smart external scripting, the core of CouchDB itself does not currently support distributing the database across multiple machines. More references about CouchDB cluster:
- CouchDB Cluster
- couchdb-lounge: Clustering framework for CouchDB
[n3] All other criteria for CloudBase have been deduced based on the HDFS/Hadoop capabilities
[n4] Cassandra: Consistent hashing vs order-preserving partitioning in distributed databases
[n5] LightCloud seems to be a set of management scripts (Python) for Tokyo Tyrant

Implementation details

Project	Impl.	Client protocol	Refs
Cassandra	Java	Thrift^[4]	[1], [2], [3]
CloudBase	Java	JDBC (Java)
CouchDB	Erlang	HTTP + JSON	[1], [2], [3]
Dynomite	Erlang	Thrift^[4]	[1], [3]
HBase	Java
Hypertable	C++	C++ API, Thrift^[4]
Kai	Erlang
LightCloud	Python + Tokyo Tyrant	Python
LucidDB	Java/C++	JDBC (Java)
Memcached	C	all^*
MemcacheDB	C	all^* (memcached protocol)
MonetDB	C
MongoDB	C++	API (Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, C++, Perl, Erlang)
Neptune	Java
Redis	C
Ringo	Erlang	HTTP
Scalaris	Erlang
ThruDB	C
Tokyo Cabinet + Tyrant	C	C, Perl, Ruby, Java, Lua
Voldemort	Java	Java

Performance

I usually do not trust micro-benchmarks. I know that performance measuring is an art. But I also know that some are looking for this sort of data and sometimes even the smallest piece of information is more helpful than nothing.

Project	reads/s	writes/s	refs
Cassandra
CloudBase
CouchDB
Dynomite
HBase
Hypertable
Kai
LightCloud	See: Tokyo Tyrant results + this
LucidDB
Memcached	here, 2007, here
MemcacheDB	benchmark data
MonetDB
MongoDB	Performance testing
Neptune
Redis
Ringo
Scalaris
ThruDB
Tokyo Cabinet + Tyrant
Voldemort

Other projects

I have found a couple of other projects, but I couldn't decide if they fit in or not. In case you consider that I should include them please do let me know (a helpful argument is also highly appreciated)

I'd like to also mention the FriendFeed usage of MySQL, which while not being a new system in itself it was conceived to behave like a BASE .

Resources:

Google, Newspapers and Advertising

2009-05-27T01:32:00.000+03:00

Update: US newspaper quarter ad sales dropped almost 29% and other numbers in the industry are far for looking encouraging. Meanwhile, Google's ad revenue is growing. The discussions between newspapers and Google seem to intensify.

From a recent interview published on FT.com with Eric Schmidt:

FT: In their quest for revenues newspapers have started talking about trying to persuade you, Google, and specifically Google News, to share a little bit more of the revenue, specifically from their stories that appear on Google News. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?

ES: We’ve decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic. So we want to provide incredible numbers of users going to their sites, their content, which is why we urge them to make it deeper, stronger and use better tools and so forth. From our perspective, that’s where the real source would be. In our model, and what we’re doing today, the vast majority of the revenue that comes directly from reading newspapers, in fact, goes to them through all these mechanisms. The real issue here is that when people are reading the news online, we’re not monetising it in aggregate, so if we were to transfer money we would be taking money from something unrelated to newspapers and just paying them, which doesn’t seem like a good sustainable model for anybody.

FT: And don’t you think that there is a risk for you, as well, if you fail to find, perhaps, more of a revenue-sharing model, say, with something like Google News? Your sources of news for that service that you provide will just dry up? You risk killing the goose that’s laying the golden egg?

ES: This is the co-dependence that we were talking about earlier. From our perspective, we depend on the production of very, very high-quality content. If the people who are producing that are getting laid off, it’s really a tragedy for both. So we need the high-quality content. There’s a debate in the industry of exactly how to get it but, ultimately, the problem is not us taking money from some other pocket and subsidising it, ultimately the solution is to build products that really are so good that we make enough money from advertising and subscriptions, to a degree, that they make sense and that there’s enough money to pay for the construction of this high-quality content.

Or simply put:

Google has no plans to share the revenues generated by their aggregation tools with the newspapers
Google drives traffic.
Newspapers should look into finding out better ways to monetize the traffic they get from Google.

I'm wondering if Google is not working on some products to be licensed to newspapers for monetizing the traffic sent back to them.

Some stats about the US newspaper industry (I cannot stop wondering when will our local market start learning something from this):

Newspaper quarter ad sales shrank 28.9% ($2.6bil) (in a year-to-year comparison)
Print ad sales declined 29.7% to $5.9 billion
Online sales down 13.4% to $696.3 million
Classifieds down 42.3% to $1.5 billion
Ad sales collapse 16.6% to $37.8 billion in 2008. The worst decline ever.
2009 revenues will likely come in lower than $30 billion, less than they did in 1987
Employment advertising shrank 67.4% to $205.4 million
Real Estate down 45.6% to $336.9 million
Auto down 43.4% to $332.8 million
National campaigns down 25.9% to $1.1 billion
Retail down 23.7% to $3.3 billion
'Other' down 16.5% to $587.7 million

Resources:

Worst quarter for newspapers: Sales dive $2.6B

Is Online Advertising Overrated?

2009-05-25T09:32:00.000+03:00

This was the (debate) topic for the last two WebClub meetings. While I haven't been there, the subject got so much coverage by the blogs that it caught my attention. And just to wet your taste here are a couple of quotes:

Pe de o parte se discută despre "eficiența" mediului online, pe de alta despre susținerea acestuia în lupta cu... aici nu prea înțeleg unde este dușmanul.

Ciprian Stavar

Am fost socat (acesta este cuvantul) de faptul ca oamenii din online sustineau faptul ca online-ul nu este eficient.

Mihai Dragan

At this point I've remembered a topic I've asked my Twitter friends about:

Can anyone explain how TV rating points are measured? I'm wondering why is it considered a more reliable stat than what is used on web

Twitter

I always wondered about that. IMO if they're not recording what runs on ca 70% of all TV sets the stats are unreliable.

FlashDriveDT

using "peoplemeters", meaning electrical devices statistically&relevant delivered or using questionnaires... not reliable at all.

luczian

TV is a traditional media and people/ brands are used to it, internet is new.....still in RO (in 140 characters this sums it up)

[...], but they have faith in this media tool because they are used to buy at CPP and don't understand the CPC's precision

only such a person can say that TV rating points are more "reliable" than web stats

Raluca Goia

Let's also take a look at Google has to say about TV vs web

What if the ads we saw when watching TV were always just what we wanted to see? Well, we believe it is possible to make TV ads more relevant to viewers and to deliver more value to advertisers.
Television is becoming more like the web. Just as users click with their mouse to choose what's most relevant to them on the web, viewers send signals about what they want to see on television with clicks of the remote control.

The Official Google Blog

What about classic media?

Advertisers love data almost as much as Google does. They think it tells them where to spend their money and the return on investment they get. For decades, advertisers accepted dubious measurements of magazine readership (which assume that every allegedly well-worn copy is passed around to large groups) and broadcast audiences. Then along came the most measurable medium in history, the internet, where advertisers can learn about customers than ever before. (nb: my underline)

Rishad Tobaccowala quoted in What Would Google Do?

or quoting Eric Schmidt about Google advertising initiatives in radio and print:

In both cases they didn’t work well enough. We measure our businesses very, very carefully and in both the print and the radio businesses we could not seem to invent or get enough of a signal back to make the network or value really spin – that’s one way to describe it. In our model what happens is as people click on ads and as they use our services we get all sorts of ways to improve our products. And with all that customer feedback we can make it better. But because of the unique structure of radio where it’s a broadcast to a relatively unidentifiable radio, there’s not very much information of what the radio is doing, and similarly for print ads, we could not get that signal. And that’s, ultimately, I think why we have moved on.

FT.com interview with Erich Schmidt

Then, you might think that Ionut is right:

[...] e posibil ca motivul pentru care internetul nu obtine un procent mai mare din bugete sa fie unul mult mai simplu. Nu neaparat eficienta, inteleasa sau nu, satisfacatoare sau nu, nu neaparat raspunsurile directe si performanta, ci ceva mult mai simplu: depasirea sau nu a asteptarilor clientilor.

Ionut Oprea (aka clickio)

But when you see what the romanian online is up to: here and here (the only thing I can think of when seeing these is that they are completely disconsidering their main clients: the readers), you'll probably reach the same conclusion as Vali, while they should probably spend some time thinking about what Dragos Novac is saying or Dragos Manac was writing the other day or Seth Godin's advise.

La noi, lucrurile au ramas in stadiul de portal. Bagam banii doar in alea, ca sigur acolo e publicul nostru. Altfel, de ce ar veni 100.000 de oameni pe portalul X?

Vali Petcu

Resources:

In case you have two hours, thanks to Costin, you can watch both meetings in full:

7 Flavors of MapReduce

2009-05-20T09:17:00.000+03:00

I am pretty sure that those reading this post already know what MapReduce is (in case you want to refresh your memories here is the PDF). I'm also pretty sure that you've already heard about the open source implementation of MapReduce contributed by Yahoo to Apache Foundation: Hadoop and you have probably heard also about Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

At least that's pretty much all I knew about MapReduce and its implementations. But I have discovered a few other solutions that offer a mapreduce implementation (disclaimer: I haven't tried these projects and I don't know their current status).

Disco

Description: Disco is an open-source implementation of the Map-Reduce framework for distributed computing. As the original framework, Disco supports parallel computations over large data sets on unreliable cluster of computers.

Project: http://discoproject.org/

Skynet

Description: Skynet is an open source Ruby implementation of Google’s MapReduce framework, created at Geni. With Skynet, one can easily convert a time-consuming serial task, such as a computationally expensive Rails migration, into a distributed program running on many computers. If you’d like to learn more about MapReduce, see my intro at the bottom of this document.

Project: http://skynet.rubyforge.org/

FileMap

Description: FileMap is a lightweight system for applying Unix-style file processing tools to large amounts of data stored in files. It provides full map-reduce functionality without requiring that you switch your processing to any particular language or runtime environment, install any special software, or have root on your storage and processing nodes.

Project: http://mfisk.github.com/filemap/

GreenPlum

Description: Greenplum Database is a software solution built to support the next generation of data warehousing and large-scale analytics processing. Supporting SQL and MapReduce parallel processing, Greenplum Database offers industry-leading performance at low cost for companies managing terabytes to petabytes of data.

Project: http://www.greenplum.com/

Hadoop

Description: The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing, including Hadoop Core, our flagship sub-project, provides the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem (HDFS) and support for the MapReduce distributed computing framework.

Project: http://hadoop.apache.org/

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Description: Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Project: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/

There is also a project from Microsoft research that seems to related to mapreduce: Dryad (investigating programming models for writing parallel and distributed programs to scale from a small cluster to a large data-center) and its DryadLINQ module (make large-scale, distributed cluster computing simple, simple enough for ordinary programmers).

Do you know any others? Also, if you have any experience with any of these projects, I'd really appreciate if you can share it with us. Links to posts covering any of the projects are welcome.

QS: Business Rules for Our Time

2009-05-19T21:43:00.002+03:00

After reading Alan Webber's recommendations in this post:

Rule #3: Ask the last question first. The last question is, what's the point of the exercise

Rule #23: Keep two lists, one that holds what gets you up in the morning and one for what keeps you up at night

Rule #4: Don't implement solutions. Prevent problems.

I am strongly considering buying his boook: Rules of Thumb.

Has any of you read it?

Update: Here you can find an interview with the book author.

And if I am at thought provoking reads, I would strongly recommend the KillerInnovations series.

Quick Guide on How to Behave at a Presentation

2009-05-19T08:16:00.001+03:00

Today I've spent half a day at a VMWare event organized by IDG in Bucharest (my thanks to the organizers for the invitation). While I'm planning to write another post about how to learn at a vendor event, this post will be a bit different.

I have discovered that quite a few people present at such events do not know how to behave. And I am not talking here about the socializing part, nor about common sense (as in switching off your mobile while attending a presentation, not picking your nose in public, etc), but rather to the way they interact with the presenter and others in the audience during a session. So, here is my short list on how to behave at a presentation:

Raise your hand. We all learnt this from the school, but it looks like over years some tend to forget it. It is impolite to speak without permission, so raising your hand will signal that you have something to say.
Introduce yourself. You already know the name of the speaker, so considering you are trying to create a conversation, it would be polite to introduce yourself. In case your question is interesting for the rest of the audience, some may consider contacting you afterwards or citing you.
Make sure others we'll hear you. The presenter's time is shared between all participants so it would be nice that others will benefit of your question. If it is a private question, you can wait for after the session.
Be short and focused. Do keep in mind that there are others in the room and they are there for the presentation (and not for you).
1. If it is a question: ask your question. In case your question needs some context make sure you are able to formulate that in at most one sentence.
2. If you have more than one question, make sure you ask permission for asking all of them. Some presenters may prefer to address questions from multiple persons in the room.
3. If it is a comment: make sure you ask for presenter's permission. The audience is interested in what the presenter has to say and in case you are not an expert in the field others will not care about your comment.
4. Don't offer free advise to the presenter if he is not asking for it. While you might think that you have a better answer, I'm pretty sure that you don't know the whole context.
5. Do not rant. And I'll say it again: Do not rant. In case you are not specifically asked for your opinion, I'll most probably not be interested on your comments to comments, comments to questions, etc. And others in the audience may probably feel the same.
In case your question was not completely answered, it is better to continue the conversation with the presenter after the session. Others have the right to ask their questions too.

"It doesn't hurt to ask". Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission.

Seth Godin

Dedicated to all those that do not know how to behave at a presentation.

Disclaimer: as you can imagine by now, this post was caused by a couple of annoying people at the event. While I am pretty sure they will not read the post and most probably next time they will annoy once again the presenter, me and the rest of the audience, I'll probably have a couple of printed copies in my pocket and I'll make sure to handle them one at that time.

Google: Words vs Meaning

2009-05-16T00:03:00.001+03:00

Transparency

Whenever we build out new products and features at Google, we try to ensure that we provide users with two key components: transparency and control.

By looking at the messages the Google App Engine team is posting in reply to reported issues, I have a couple of hypothesis:

the Google App Engine team is not aware of this policy
the Google App Engine team is not part of Google
the above paragraph is just PR

I hope you'll pick the right one(s).

Listening

Another thing I've noticed about the openness of Google is that they consider that opening the communication chains is equivalent to listening to your community. I'll tell you what: having a mailing list or a forum or a blog is not listening to your community and even less building a community. In fact, asking for feedback and not listening to it is much more frustrating than not doing it at all (just check the issue tracker for Google App Engine issue tracker or its corresponding Google Group to learn how to ignore your community).

So, I'll let you decide: is Google really transparent? is Google listening to his community?

DevWorld Retrospective

2009-05-13T18:29:00.001+03:00

Monday marked the first edition of the DevWorld.ro an event organized by IDG and addressed to developers and designers.

The good

I really liked the format of the event with some short sessions at the beginning, followed by specialized sessions for developers and designers and a panel
I liked most of the sessions. I know it is very difficult to make everyone happy about it, so this is just my feedback
I liked the fact that attendees have used the breaks to socialize and I've heard a lot of interesting discussions
The selected projects for the contest were quite good. Their presentations were good too.
The feedback they have received back looked to be in the right spirit.

The bad

There was no internet connection and I had to buy it myself from the hotel desk. While I'm aware that getting an internet connection arrangement may be difficult and/or expensive (to somehow confirm this hypothesis, I've noticed that too many such events were no providing an internet connection) I think the organizers should try harder to get one.
The space allocated for breaks was quite small and it hardly accommodated all the event participants
Most of the sessions were longer than scheduled and so the agenda was not respected. While I do think that the speakers were the ones responsible for this issue, the organizers should have set up a process to keep it under control
For the last couple of hours of the event there was no water.

What I'd like

I'd like to see people in the audience getting more involved during the sessions
I'd like to see people trying to connect with as many others as possible (instead of spending the breaks with the group they came in)
and I'd definitely like to see the next edition.

Last, as I couldn't run the whole presentation I'm embedding it here:

Programatori cu capul in nori

View more presentations from Alex Popescu.

PS: Thanks to the fact that the schedule was not respected, I've had the chance to present to the full audience (and I confess I was quite happy with that).

Is there anything I've forgot?

JQuery Popup Dialogs Plugins

2009-05-04T20:34:00.001+03:00

A set of jQuery popup, dialog, gallery plugins through two different pairs of eyes: jQuery Popup Dialog and Gallery Plugin Reviews and 10+ promising jQuery Lightbox-Clones Plugin.

The reviewed plugins are:

FancyBox (both articles)
FaceBox (both articles)
Impromptu (1st article only)
BlockUI (1st article only)
nyroModal (both articles)
FancyZoom (both articles)
Boxy (1st article only)
Flyout (1st article only)
Pirobox (2nd article only)
ThickBox (2nd article only)
prettyPhoto (2nd article only)
Interface Imagebox (2nd article only)
jQuery lightBox plugin (2nd article only)
Greybox Redux (2nd article only)

I only have used FaceBox as it pretty much covered everything I needed. It's design, look and feel resembles the one of the Facebook dialogs (the name also suggests that). I've also found Coda Popup Bubbles, but haven't used it.

Have you used any of these plugins? Which one would you recommend?

The Bell-Shaped Blog Interactions

2009-05-01T12:21:00.001+03:00

In a guest post over Louis Gray's blog, Hutch Carpenter presents the 4 blogging phases and the way they are influencing the level of 7 different types of interactions with the readers:

And what are "interactions"?

Allowing blog comments
Responding to blog comments
Commenting on FriendFeed about your blog
Tweeting links to your blog posts
Digging your blog
Stumbling your blog
Pimping your blog on others' blogs

Judging on the level of interaction I get, I'd like to conclude that my blog falls in the "industry legend" category, but for doing so I'd have to include the tons of spam I've received. Otherwise, I'll remain on the border between a newbie and the one still trying to figure it out :-).

7 Models for Online Product Delivery

2009-04-30T11:51:00.000+03:00

An absolute brilliant and definitely must read from Dion Hintchcliffe: Building Modern Web Apps? Better Have A Deep Competency in Web 2.0, Open APIs, Widgets, Social Apps, and Much More (if the link doesn't work try the Google cache)

Dion presents 7 different models for delivering online applications:

Web sites: This the classic model for Web presence.
Syndication: Countless aggregation services now exist that make a site's information embedded in their services as well as a way to offer users a method for pulling information from a site and experienced in a means of their choosing, from Google Reader and Newsgator to the innovative Yahoo! Pipes.
Web 2.0 applications: in this context we're referring to the fact that Web 2.0 apps package up the 3rd major type of networked value: user participation.
Open APIs and Web services: This is one of the most important long-term decisions most online businesses can make.
Web widgets: Selecting parts of a Web site and it's data and packaging it up to make it run inside a portable, user distributable widget has been growing more and more popular over the last few years.
Social networking applications: This is an amazingly fast moving field as you can see from a recent post on the latest happenings on the OpenSocial blog, to the extent it's hard even for well-funded companies to keep up.
Semantic Web and Web 3.0: The Semantic Web, one of the original visions for the World Wide Web, has taken a while to arrive but it's beginning to look like it may hit critical mass in the next 12-24 months.

Dion goes on and explains why adopting the new distribution models is essential for new business.

[...] Unfortunately, the number of capable practitioners of these new distribution models remains relatively small compared to the large body of experts in traditional Web product development. Demand is also low for these new skills as most organizations have been painfully slow to appreciate how much online product development has changed.[...]

QS: Romania a $2bn Virtualization Market?

2009-04-27T09:33:00.000+03:00

Looks like I'm staying on the quest for strategy topic and asking the following question:

Is Romania a $2bn virtualization market?

The question was raised after reading an article published on Wall-Street.ro:

The virtualization market is estimated at $2bn in 2008 according to studies quoted by Sebastian Pascu, Red Hat Certified Engineer/Romsym Data

While I doubt the correctness of the above number, I think there are a couple of interesting questions I'd like to get answered:

Which are the largest data centers in Romania?
How many servers are hosted by governmental institutions?
What virtualization providers are present on the market?

If you have any answers to the above questions or you'd like to add some more please drop me a note.

Resources:

QS: Why Asesoft and eMAG?

2009-04-26T22:37:00.001+03:00

While I've been reading about it all over the internet, I still cannot find a good answer to why Asesoft has bought 51% of the online retailer eMAG. I am definitely unaware of the online retailing market so I'd really love to have an answer from the market experts to:

Why has Asesoft taken over 51% of eMAG online retailer?

The official announcement mentions that this is just a financial investment coming from Asesoft to help eMAG consolidate on the market, but I'd say that it doesn't make for a good take over justification. Not being an expert, I'd speculate that:

Asesoft is interested in the eMAG distribution chain and eMAG will become a strategic part of Asesoft Distribution (in favor of this hypothesis comes the fact that Asesoft has also acquired a division of Flamingo International specialized in distribution)
eMAG needed a lot of money that they couldn't get without giving up control

What's your opinion?