A little late now, but for those who may have missed it…
It is codenamed "half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed" to give an idea where we stand in the grand scheme of things and to commemorate the many fruitful discussions we had during its development.
Link: FFmpeg 0.5 Released
While your designs can never control people, they can encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. The psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an equation that explains why people do the crazy things they do. Lewin asserts that behavior is a function of a person and his environment: B=f(P,E). You can’t change a person’s nature, but you can design the environment he moves around in.
via A List Apart: Articles: The Elements of Social Architecture.
Yesterday [3/12/09], we flipped the switch and moved Jaiku to App Engine. Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.
via Jaikido Blog: JaikuEngine is now open source!.
Presenting solutions such as Google’s BigTable and Amazon Dynamo, Magnusson said that distributed databases allow us to manage huge data volumes (BigTable is designed for petabyte tables) but issues of high availability while distributing across a number of systems bring a set of requirements that often requires the solution to diverge from the relational model and lean more towards key-value or document stores.
Gojko Adzic » QCon London 2009: Database projects to watch closely.
…we've created a new EC2 pricing model, which we call Reserved Instances. After you purchase such an instance for a one-time fee, you have the option to launch an EC2 instance of a certain instance type, in a particular availability zone, for a period of either 1 of 3 years. Your launch is guaranteed to succeed; there's no chance of encountering any transient limitations in EC2 capacity. You have no obligation to run the instances full time, so you'll pay even less if you choose to turn them off when you are not using them.
via Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances.
If you are storing all of your data in a relational database, and the load on that database exceeds its capacity, there is no automatic solution that allows you to simply add more hardware and scale up. (One day, there will be, but that’s for another post). In the meantime, most websites are building their own scalable clusters using sharding.
Link: Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups
It seems to bill itself as the “The First Instant URL Caching Website”. Sort of like the Way Back Machine but it backups up URLs
specify and it seems to be caching the full page, assets and all.
via BackupUrl.com - Create a cached copy of any url.
Introducing Geode, an experimental add-on to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 ahead of the implementation of geolocation in a future product release. Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today, and users can tell us what they think of the experience it provides. It includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data.
via Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Geode.
Despite the rough translation you still get the point…
[Translated via Google Translate]
…but very often we use a disproportionately long time to get the pages to function properly in a browser that when a small minority of users. This time it would have been much better to use to make real good tool for users, rather than to correct errors that occur only in IE6. Therefore we encourage the Find the users who have the option to upgrade your IE6 to a newer version.
Link: FINN labs
This group of numbers is from Brett Slatkin in Building Scalable Web Apps with Google App Engine.
Link: Numbers Everyone Should Know | High Scalability
