Archive for the 'commentary' Category

YouTube Scalability Talk

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Cuong Do of YouTube / Google recently gave a Google Tech Talk on scalability.
I found it interesting in light of my own comments on YouTube’s 45 TB a while back.
Here are my notes from his talk, a mix of what he said and my commentary:
In the summer of 2006, they grew from 30 million pages […]

Why I do not use RAR

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

We recently adopted a policy (ooh, so official sounding…) at work that we do not use the RAR file format. Oasis Digital being a small firm, the “we” to make this particular decision was just me. Someone quite reasonably asked, why not?
Here is why I don’t use RAR:

The RAR archiver GUI tool is Windows-only, though […]

Next Big Language = JavaScript

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

There’s a lot of buzz about Steve Yegge’s “port” of Rails to JavaScript, and Steve has now provided (in his funny, self-deprecating style) the background of how it came to be. He doesn’t quite say it explicitly in this post, but I think it reveals that the “Next Big Language” he has been hinting […]

BaseJumpr: BaseCamp -> ActiveCollab

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

BaseJumpr has a fascinating service offering: they export your data from your Basecamp account, producing a set of files ready to import in to ActiveCollab, the open source Basecamp-sorta-clone-like-program. They then, if you wish to buy their hosting service, create an instance of ActiveCollab for you and import your data there. (They host your […]

Linus Torvalds explains distributed source control

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

On several occasions over the last year, I’ve pointed out that distributed source control tools are dramatically better than centralized tools. It’s quite hard for me to explain why. This is probably because of sloppy and incomplete thinking on my part, but it doesn’t help that most of the audiences / people I’ve said this […]

A utility bill worth looking at?

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Here in Dardenne Prairie, MO (a suburb of St. Louis; see what WikiPedia has to say about it) our electricity is supplied by the Cuivre River Electric Cooperative. CREC surprised me this month with a genuinely informative addition to the data on the bill: a graph of usage over the last year.

My expectations of utility […]