Web-based IM has never made much sense to me - IM that isn't always running w/ push support isn't much different than rapid-fire e-mail. - John Harding
Google Talk in gmail is great, because I always have a gmail window open anyway. This could be better than nothing if you want to ask a quick question of someone who's online somewhere with a "real" client, but it's clearly not the same. - ⓞnor
I tend to use it as a replacement for SMS because I already have a flat rate data plan and I have more people's GTalk accounts than phone numbers - Adewale Oshineye
The contractor who worked my house says that he prefers remodels to new construction because he enjoys solving the problems that come up in a remodel.
Although craftsmen cannot recompile to fix their bugs, the systems that craftsmen work on are generally less complex than those in software engineering. For example, the extra baseboard detail discussed in the article is unlikely to cause a problem elsewhere in the house. - Gary Burd
Cynically, I'd say that remodels are more likely to run over estimate for reasons the contractor can't be blamed for, whereas with new construction everything is their responsibility from the beginning so they don't have an excuse for cost overruns and schedule delays. - ⓞnor
"Kilim is a message-passing framwork for Java that provides ultra-lightweight threads and facilities for fast, safe, zero-copy messaging between these threads.
It consists of a bytecode postprocessor (a "weaver"), a run time library with buffered mailboxes (multi-producer, single consumer queues) and a user-level scheduler and a type system that puts certain constraints on pointer aliasing within messages to ensure interference-freedom between threads." - Gary Burd
Do you think it's... good? We could all use something like that, but I'm afraid of overarching frameworks you have to sell your soul to. - ⓞnor
+1 to @e3r and "I'm afraid of overarching frameworks you have to sell your soul to". - DeWitt Clinton
bytecode postprocessor + concurrent programming.. I'm assuming that everyone else is a little scared by debugging stuff running with this, too? - Nick Lothian
The vs Erlang microbenchmarks look impressive (at 25 min point in video) - Nick Lothian
There are a few interesting tidbits in the article: the server is implemented in C++ and Erlang; peak concurrent users is in the millions; they tested the service by rolling out web page <-> backend interaction before rolling out the UI. - Gary Burd
For those who don't know Gary, he was one of two main engineers that designed and built the Google Talk backend. - Joe Beda
@Gary good to know you. Erlang does seem like a good choice for high performance networking computing. I'm using ejabberd which was written in Erlang and it runs ever so smoothly. - Wil
The Notes on Facebook chat didn't actually say how they solve the presence scaling problem. Do they try to keep the global presence states on very few centralized servers, or they spread the presence states on many smaller servers where each server only has a very thin slice of the global view? - Michael Wei
As far as I can tell, the note does not describe how Facebook solves the presence scaling problem. - Gary Burd
"With Google Trends for Websites, you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of your favorite websites. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one." - Gary Burd
"Mergelab delivers news about your friends from across the web.
We discover photos, status updates, posts, and wishlists automatically and through user contributed links." - Gary Burd