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

Google Talk might be able use the upcoming iPhone push feature: http://tinyurl.com/6yjhho - Gary Burd

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

There's also a link to an accompanying Google Tech Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... - Kevin Scott

+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

Amusing how the cars on I-5 move about as fast as the restaurant turns. - ⓞnor

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

We had a three person office four years ago. Now there are three office buildings. - Gary Burd

Looks like MS (except possibly shorter) - Paul Buchheit

Nice view of the lake too. Personally, I can't wait to move in... The fact that it's one block from my house doesn't hurt either :-) - Steve Lacey

Is that picture taken from the west or the east side of the buildings? I can't quite figure out. - Michael Wei

The picture was taken from the west side of the building. Here's the spot on a map: http://tinyurl.com/6y3e6e - 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

SmugMug scales up and down using EC2. - Gary Burd

I sent this from my phone using http://mail2ff.com. - Gary Burd

Thanks Gary! mail2ff is very nice. Now I can easily post pics from my iPhone. - Scott Ludwig

FF should adopt a few office cats. - Tudor Bosman

Thanks for doing mail2ff! - Robert Scoble

is the + a literal character? - Tyler

The + is the literal character. - Gary Burd

Joe Armstrong shows how to build RPC abstractions using Erlang's send, receive and link primitives. - Gary Burd

You work? - Joe Beda

Or did it take that long to get there? - DeWitt Clinton

@jbeda: Yes, I work. Here's a picture of the office: http://tinyurl.com/5em8g7 - Gary Burd

Very nice! It isn't the canal in Fremont, but it isn't bad either. :) - Joe Beda

nice - Paul Buchheit

All the cool kids are gchatting: http://tinyurl.com/ywmmqc - Gary Burd

Heh -- I remember when we were throwing names around. I still think that Google Ping would have been a cool name for the service. - Joe Beda

I missed this before, and when I saw the date, thought it was an april fool's joke. But it's not - http://code.google.com/p/erlan... - DeWitt Clinton

"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