That said, I use JRuby much more often than Scala - BTW I wish that I new Scala better. I don't have much free time right now, but when I do I was planning on mastering Haskell. However, since Haskell and Scala have some things (like type inferencing) in common, perhaps Scala would be a better choice for my work. Tough call though.
I have used Rails a lot in the last 3 years, but I don't much use PHP except for simple stuff. So, I may be wrong about this, but I believe that PHP does scale slightly better that Rails. So what?
For me, Rails hits the sweet spot for small web applications that need to be written inexpensively and are easy (and inexpensive) to modify and extend.
Rails is all about saving development costs. For large scale systems with many users, writing back end web services in Java or Scala makes a lot of sense.
I explain to my customers the tradeoffs of runtime efficiency vs. less expensive development. Usually, depending on circumstances, it is an easy enough decision to make.
BTW, the Lift web app framework (written in Scala, slightly similar to Rails) might even make Scala popular for web interfaces - who knows?
A small device with very long battery life. Also, the Android SDK with Eclipse plugins is a nice dev environment, so there may be lots of small usefull apps. That said, a tablet device might need different types of apps (e.g. geo location may not be of as much use?)
Not at all retarded: speeding up Javascript runtime performance with compilation, JITs, etc. will obviously help server side frameworks like CouchDB that use Javascript (although CouchDB is written mostly in Erlang).
I understand that most people are more concerned with Javascript performance in the browser which is what the article was about, so my original post probably was off topic.
I have recently been writing about what I call the "new frugality." With an estimated 40% of the world's (fake and inflated) wealth gone in the last year, it is finally becoming obvious to many more people, companies, and government that all expenditures need to be judged on value (preferably long term).
Unfortunately for me, virtually all of my recent consulting work has been taking open source projects, making a few customizations or enhancements, and designing a good deployment strategy. On one hand, this is not good because my revenues are down and I enjoy from-scratch development work. On the other hand, this is good because the profitability of my customers makes my future revenue streams more stable.
Linux, web platforms + frameworks, etc. all make IT more relevant because they increase the value to cost ratio.
Actually, pushing back is a good idea. In the last week, I have contacting my senators and congress woman concerning legislation that might make it difficult to have community and personal gardens (House and Senate bills HR 875 and S 425). I also contacted my congress woman to ask her to support Ron Paul's bills to add transparency to the Federal Reserve.
One thing that disappoints me about my family and friends: they never seem to want to take the time to talk to their representatives about important issues.
For one thing, just using one language all the time is boring:-)
My list:
1. Ruby: my default language for small utilities, and for low volume web portals (with Rails/Merb)
2. Java: high performance web and server side stuff
3. Common Lisp: research programming, and some applications requiring very high performance
Then, seldom used:
4. Prolog: seldom use it anymore, but for some things it is the best
5. Smalltalk: research (mostly NLP) and sometimes Seaside
In other words, have a few core languages, but keep an open mind. I found myself not using Erlang after learning it, but knowing Erlang makes it easier to use things like CouchDB that are written in Erlang. Same for Python: it was worth learning the language because I sometimes use programs written in Python.
First: I probably only spend about 100 to 150 hours a year working on open source projects.
That said, open source is a key resource in my business. I live in a remote area in the mountains of Arizona so I mostly work remotely from home. This means that I compete with friends and colleagues in Russia, Vietnam, Brazil, and India whose cost of living is a lot less than in the USA.
One way I compete is by very aggressively using open source projects and building on them for consulting jobs. Customers, especially in this shitty economy (which is going to get much, much, much worse) care a lot about getting things done inexpensively.
The other way that open source makes money for me is that I write a lot (really enjoy writing both free material ad published books) and open source projects are good material, and any form of extra documentation is a good thing. -Mark
Seriously, are we talking about portability between services like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine? Why? They offer different platforms, capabilities, and support different application spaces. (BTW, AWS rocks!)
On the other hand, I insist on a migration path off of a cloud service: not too much trouble with AWS because you install whatever you want on their servers, and you could lease alternative servers (but loose support for Simple Storage Service, Simple Queue Service, etc.). So yes, if you really buy into all of Amazon's infrastructure, moving to your own servers would be real work. That said, Amazon is a stable company and they keep reducing their prices.
I have worked through a Google App Engine tutorial by running their development kit locally, but I really don't have any practical experience with it. In principle, you could move a small web app from Google App Engine hosting to your own server, but you would obviously lose the instance scalability, and be running their data store in a one server emulation mode.
Edward Teller hired my Dad into the Physics department at UC Berkeley and I remember him as a gentleman - he was occasionally at our house. Once my parents had a costume party and Teller was provided with a bird costume - he did not want to wear the mask so he had these big white wings on. The SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen ran a story the next day saying that Teller was dressed as the angel of peace. Until Teller died a few years ago, my Dad would occasionally travel to Berkeley to visit with him.
Re:Backing up personal data in the "cloud"
on
Offline Gmail Launched
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Answer to my own question: Gears is just using embedded sqlite - should be easy to access local email, docs, google reader data, etc. in my own programs (check!)
Backing up personal data in the "cloud"
on
Offline Gmail Launched
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I use GData APIs to backup my Google docs and about once a week use POP3 to locally backup my Gmail. I require/want data formats that are open and easy to process with Ruby scripts, etc. I export my Google docs in OpenOffice.org format (check!). POP3 mailbox data is easy to process (check!).
How easy it is to access Gears local data? Is the file format well documented? (Why look it up when I can ask Slashdot:-)
Barack Obama is probably the best person for the job at this point in our country's history.
That said, unless we quickly transition from a military-based empire to a leaner and more economically competitive country then things will go badly for us.
The economic crash is a world-wide phenomenon and basically everyone needs to consume a little less than they produce. A pay as we go plan is needed. The current bailouts are intended to extend the status-quo a little longer - probably not what we need!
The ACM Queue journals and Communications of the ACM are released as PDFs - very useful when searching my MacBook files for research or reading material. I especially like the way I get a paper version of Communications of the ACM to read (mostly cover to cover) and then I permanently keep the (searchable) PDF version.
Dr. Dobb's Journal has become a very thin magazine and for the type of content I think that a web based only presense will hopefully work well for them.
I have two good friends who are retired school psychologists from New York ad everytme I read about New York's financial problems, I think of them.
Same thing in California: two relatives are teachers, and one is just about to retire on a teachers pension. I think that California is very close to bankruptcy.
Pensions may sound good, but it may be that only federal government pensions may pay out because the federal government can print money ad pay out in highly devalued dollars).
I would suggest using at least two quality options from:
1. Apple's MobileMe (used to be called.Mac): you get only 20 gigs of storage with a basic subscription, but storage upgrades are cheap enough.
2. high quality managed (or partially managed) hosting - if you need this anyway for business use, get extra disk space. Make sure that their backups are regular and secure.
3. Other paid for storage options.
4. back up to DVD-Rs, and recopy every 2 or 3 years. I buy different brands, and rotate which I use. Redundant copies, redundant copies, redundant copies...
Basically, secure long range backup requires laying out some money.
For video, giving copies to friends and family members is good also, except that DVD-Rs have a short shelf life, unless you pay a lot extra for gold foil DVD-Rs.
I view open source software as something that is produced for practical motivations:
1. drive the cost of basic infrastructure towards zero so more money is available for a business's specific problems and applications. I am an independent consultant and from my point of view when the costs of projects are reduced, then there can be more projects. Also, projects are judged based on cost vs. benefit, so more projects can be successful.
2. large companies like IBM make money off of services - open source increases their profits more than the money the contribute to open source projects
I suspect that very long term open source will be even more widely deployed.
That said, I also believe in a healthy commercial software ecosystem. For example, I sometimes use very expensive commercial Common Lisp tools even though the open source tools are also very good. Computer games are probably another area where commercial products will be used more than open source because game development is high cost and high risk.
I am in my mid-fifties, so I am in the same situation. The big difference that I notice in my work is the start-up time when switching programming languages and development tools: whenever I switch between Ruby, Common Lisp, and Java it takes about 5 minutes to click in to whatever new set of tools that I am using. After a half day I get even more tuned in.
So, I used to switch around using development tools and now I try to work in much longer time blocks before switching development contexts.
I think that exercise a few times a day really helps. I find that even 15 minute walks help concentration and getting into nature really helps (I live a block from a national forest land trailhead, and this picture was taken about 8 miles from where I live: http://www.markwatson.com/pictures/Mark5.jpg -- try not to get jealous).
For Omega-3, organic cold-pressed flax oil is both tasty and offers a lot of the benefits of fish oil. Lots of organic fruits and vegetables helps, at least in a good "placebo" way:-)
Lastly, as long as I am tossing out opinions not backed by any real evidence, I would say that a happy attitude helps concentration and work. As Joseph Campbell said "follow your bliss" and do what makes you happy. I have always had a knack for really enjoying whatever I am working on, and that seems to help.
I don't care a whole lot who wins, if it is a fair election. That said, from what I have been reading, the republicans have pulled out all the stops in suppressing voters in groups that are polling strongly pro-Obama (e.g., active duty military, students, minorities.)
Who ever does win will not be able to keep election promises since the economy is probably going to keep getting worse.
Speaking of the economy, I think that the only real money that the government should spend is on critical infrastructure (education, roads, defend our borders in the least expensive way possible, support local agriculture and in general push local sustainable business and infrastructure,...) Notice that I did not include government sponsored health care (would be nice if we could afford it though.)
I think that it is obvious that the "being an empire" thing is not worth the money that it costs.
Hello CodeBuster, you have that absolutely right: just like on the web anyone can publish whatever they want on the semantic web.
There are a lot of good ideas for provenance and general trust propagation, but I have not seen this problem really solved.
It could be that businesses will simply only accept RDF data sources from companies and individuals that they trust. Sort of like blogs: I read abut 10 blogs a day that are written by people who I know and trust (at least to write interesting:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Hello Rob,
Scala runs *much* faster than JRuby.
That said, I use JRuby much more often than Scala - BTW I wish that I new Scala better. I don't have much free time right now, but when I do I was planning on mastering Haskell. However, since Haskell and Scala have some things (like type inferencing) in common, perhaps Scala would be a better choice for my work. Tough call though.
I have used Rails a lot in the last 3 years, but I don't much use PHP except for simple stuff. So, I may be wrong about this, but I believe that PHP does scale slightly better that Rails. So what?
For me, Rails hits the sweet spot for small web applications that need to be written inexpensively and are easy (and inexpensive) to modify and extend.
Rails is all about saving development costs. For large scale systems with many users, writing back end web services in Java or Scala makes a lot of sense.
I explain to my customers the tradeoffs of runtime efficiency vs. less expensive development. Usually, depending on circumstances, it is an easy enough decision to make.
BTW, the Lift web app framework (written in Scala, slightly similar to Rails) might even make Scala popular for web interfaces - who knows?
A small device with very long battery life. Also, the Android SDK with Eclipse plugins is a nice dev environment, so there may be lots of small usefull apps. That said, a tablet device might need different types of apps (e.g. geo location may not be of as much use?)
Not at all retarded: speeding up Javascript runtime performance with compilation, JITs, etc. will obviously help server side frameworks like CouchDB that use Javascript (although CouchDB is written mostly in Erlang).
I understand that most people are more concerned with Javascript performance in the browser which is what the article was about, so my original post probably was off topic.
Oops - I just noticed in my subject that I said "Java", not "Javascript" which is what I meant. Oh Well :-)
Have you built CouchDB from source? It requires and uses Mozilla's Javascript implementation. CouchDb server side scripting is done with Javascript.
I see that my original post was judged offtopic - a hint that Slashdoters are not quite up on their tech -- just bullshit.
Server side Javascript will become important - I am willing to take bets, my friends :-)
BTW, CouchDB rocks!
For example, projects like CouchDB which uses Javascript map/reduce functions to implement "views" on stored documents.
I have recently been writing about what I call the "new frugality." With an estimated 40% of the world's (fake and inflated) wealth gone in the last year, it is finally becoming obvious to many more people, companies, and government that all expenditures need to be judged on value (preferably long term).
Unfortunately for me, virtually all of my recent consulting work has been taking open source projects, making a few customizations or enhancements, and designing a good deployment strategy. On one hand, this is not good because my revenues are down and I enjoy from-scratch development work. On the other hand, this is good because the profitability of my customers makes my future revenue streams more stable.
Linux, web platforms + frameworks, etc. all make IT more relevant because they increase the value to cost ratio.
Get over it :-(
Actually, pushing back is a good idea. In the last week, I have contacting my senators and congress woman concerning legislation that might make it difficult to have community and personal gardens (House and Senate bills HR 875 and S 425). I also contacted my congress woman to ask her to support Ron Paul's bills to add transparency to the Federal Reserve.
One thing that disappoints me about my family and friends: they never seem to want to take the time to talk to their representatives about important issues.
For one thing, just using one language all the time is boring :-)
My list:
1. Ruby: my default language for small utilities, and for low volume web portals (with Rails/Merb)
2. Java: high performance web and server side stuff
3. Common Lisp: research programming, and some applications requiring very high performance
Then, seldom used:
4. Prolog: seldom use it anymore, but for some things it is the best
5. Smalltalk: research (mostly NLP) and sometimes Seaside
In other words, have a few core languages, but keep an open mind. I found myself not using Erlang after learning it, but knowing Erlang makes it easier to use things like CouchDB that are written in Erlang. Same for Python: it was worth learning the language because I sometimes use programs written in Python.
First: I probably only spend about 100 to 150 hours a year working on open source projects.
That said, open source is a key resource in my business. I live in a remote area in the mountains of Arizona so I mostly work remotely from home. This means that I compete with friends and colleagues in Russia, Vietnam, Brazil, and India whose cost of living is a lot less than in the USA.
One way I compete is by very aggressively using open source projects and building on them for consulting jobs. Customers, especially in this shitty economy (which is going to get much, much, much worse) care a lot about getting things done inexpensively.
The other way that open source makes money for me is that I write a lot (really enjoy writing both free material ad published books) and open source projects are good material, and any form of extra documentation is a good thing.
-Mark
That is funny - I would mod you up if I had the points.
Seriously, are we talking about portability between services like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine? Why? They offer different platforms, capabilities, and support different application spaces. (BTW, AWS rocks!)
On the other hand, I insist on a migration path off of a cloud service: not too much trouble with AWS because you install whatever you want on their servers, and you could lease alternative servers (but loose support for Simple Storage Service, Simple Queue Service, etc.). So yes, if you really buy into all of Amazon's infrastructure, moving to your own servers would be real work. That said, Amazon is a stable company and they keep reducing their prices.
I have worked through a Google App Engine tutorial by running their development kit locally, but I really don't have any practical experience with it. In principle, you could move a small web app from Google App Engine hosting to your own server, but you would obviously lose the instance scalability, and be running their data store in a one server emulation mode.
Edward Teller hired my Dad into the Physics department at UC Berkeley and I remember him as a gentleman - he was occasionally at our house. Once my parents had a costume party and Teller was provided with a bird costume - he did not want to wear the mask so he had these big white wings on. The SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen ran a story the next day saying that Teller was dressed as the angel of peace. Until Teller died a few years ago, my Dad would occasionally travel to Berkeley to visit with him.
Answer to my own question: Gears is just using embedded sqlite - should be easy to access local email, docs, google reader data, etc. in my own programs (check!)
I use GData APIs to backup my Google docs and about once a week use POP3 to locally backup my Gmail. I require/want data formats that are open and easy to process with Ruby scripts, etc. I export my Google docs in OpenOffice.org format (check!). POP3 mailbox data is easy to process (check!).
How easy it is to access Gears local data? Is the file format well documented? (Why look it up when I can ask Slashdot :-)
No, republicans "borrow and spend". Democrats "tax and spend". The republican approach is even worse than the democratic approach.
Bush ran up even higher relative deficits than Reagan, and that is saying something!
BTW, I think that the time for dogmatic democrat vs. republican dogma is no longer appropriate.
Barack Obama is probably the best person for the job at this point in our country's history.
That said, unless we quickly transition from a military-based empire to a leaner and more economically competitive country then things will go badly for us.
The economic crash is a world-wide phenomenon and basically everyone needs to consume a little less than they produce. A pay as we go plan is needed. The current bailouts are intended to extend the status-quo a little longer - probably not what we need!
The ACM Queue journals and Communications of the ACM are released as PDFs - very useful when searching my MacBook files for research or reading material. I especially like the way I get a paper version of Communications of the ACM to read (mostly cover to cover) and then I permanently keep the (searchable) PDF version.
Dr. Dobb's Journal has become a very thin magazine and for the type of content I think that a web based only presense will hopefully work well for them.
I have two good friends who are retired school psychologists from New York ad everytme I read about New York's financial problems, I think of them.
Same thing in California: two relatives are teachers, and one is just about to retire on a teachers pension. I think that California is very close to bankruptcy.
Pensions may sound good, but it may be that only federal government pensions may pay out because the federal government can print money ad pay out in highly devalued dollars).
I would suggest using at least two quality options from:
1. Apple's MobileMe (used to be called .Mac): you get only 20 gigs of storage with a basic subscription, but storage upgrades are cheap enough.
2. high quality managed (or partially managed) hosting - if you need this anyway for business use, get extra disk space. Make sure that their backups are regular and secure.
3. Other paid for storage options.
4. back up to DVD-Rs, and recopy every 2 or 3 years. I buy different brands, and rotate which I use. Redundant copies, redundant copies, redundant copies...
Basically, secure long range backup requires laying out some money.
For video, giving copies to friends and family members is good also, except that DVD-Rs have a short shelf life, unless you pay a lot extra for gold foil DVD-Rs.
I view open source software as something that is produced for practical motivations:
1. drive the cost of basic infrastructure towards zero so more money is available for a business's specific problems and applications. I am an independent consultant and from my point of view when the costs of projects are reduced, then there can be more projects. Also, projects are judged based on cost vs. benefit, so more projects can be successful.
2. large companies like IBM make money off of services - open source increases their profits more than the money the contribute to open source projects
I suspect that very long term open source will be even more widely deployed.
That said, I also believe in a healthy commercial software ecosystem. For example, I sometimes use very expensive commercial Common Lisp tools even though the open source tools are also very good. Computer games are probably another area where commercial products will be used more than open source because game development is high cost and high risk.
I am in my mid-fifties, so I am in the same situation. The big difference that I notice in my work is the start-up time when switching programming languages and development tools: whenever I switch between Ruby, Common Lisp, and Java it takes about 5 minutes to click in to whatever new set of tools that I am using. After a half day I get even more tuned in.
So, I used to switch around using development tools and now I try to work in much longer time blocks before switching development contexts.
I think that exercise a few times a day really helps. I find that even 15 minute walks help concentration and getting into nature really helps (I live a block from a national forest land trailhead, and this picture was taken about 8 miles from where I live: http://www.markwatson.com/pictures/Mark5.jpg -- try not to get jealous).
For Omega-3, organic cold-pressed flax oil is both tasty and offers a lot of the benefits of fish oil. Lots of organic fruits and vegetables helps, at least in a good "placebo" way :-)
Lastly, as long as I am tossing out opinions not backed by any real evidence, I would say that a happy attitude helps concentration and work. As Joseph Campbell said "follow your bliss" and do what makes you happy. I have always had a knack for really enjoying whatever I am working on, and that seems to help.
-Mark
I don't care a whole lot who wins, if it is a fair election. That said, from what I have been reading, the republicans have pulled out all the stops in suppressing voters in groups that are polling strongly pro-Obama (e.g., active duty military, students, minorities.)
Who ever does win will not be able to keep election promises since the economy is probably going to keep getting worse.
Speaking of the economy, I think that the only real money that the government should spend is on critical infrastructure (education, roads, defend our borders in the least expensive way possible, support local agriculture and in general push local sustainable business and infrastructure,...) Notice that I did not include government sponsored health care (would be nice if we could afford it though.)
I think that it is obvious that the "being an empire" thing is not worth the money that it costs.
Hello CodeBuster, you have that absolutely right: just like on the web anyone can publish whatever they want on the semantic web.
There are a lot of good ideas for provenance and general trust propagation, but I have not seen this problem really solved.
It could be that businesses will simply only accept RDF data sources from companies and individuals that they trust. Sort of like blogs: I read abut 10 blogs a day that are written by people who I know and trust (at least to write interesting :-)