"CouchDBX has super simplistic GUI that lets you start and stop (yay) CouchDB and launch Futon, the admin client in your favourite browser. That’s it. CouchDBX is an independent installation, so you can use it even if you have a CouchDB installation on your system, both versions will not interfere (you just can’t run them in parallel)." - James Prudente via Bookmarklet
"Understanding what is and isn't "premature" is what separates senior engineers from junior engineers." - James Prudente via Bookmarklet
Required reading. On a very specific note...I'm not exactly sure the context of his comment "I want every asset I serve to be as cheap to serve as possible allowing me to handle larger and larger spikes." Does that boil down to caching? Take the complex stuff offline and take the bits that can be popular and make them cheap. - Hayes Haugen
I think caching is a way to achieve what he's talking about, super efficient delivery, minimal resource requirements, etc. But, it's not always the best use of resources. A complicated backend/frontend cache mechanism can use more resources that a bunch of flat files. If flat files solve the problem, don't bother with the memcached, etc. - James Prudente
"Microsoft is buying Portugal's MobiComp for an undisclosed amount. Mobicomp is an interesting startup that wrote software to allow backup and restoration of mobile data and mobile posting of content to Web Facebook and other socnets. MobiComp was founded in 2000 and is based in the city of Braga." - James Prudente via Bookmarklet
"Today, I am delighted to announce that I have assigned ownership of the Coherent library to Apple. Naturally, I can’t speak for my employer regarding what future products might include this library, but I can say my hope is that this will ultimately make Coherent a better tool for Web developers." - James Prudente via Bookmarklet
"We sync and optimize cache to bring in a set of your photos stored in the cloud on the Dashwire service and make it super fast to browse through, edit and share. This feature allows us to introduce new things like the ability to upload photos from your computer and have them instantly show up on your phone" - James Prudente via Bookmarklet
"It's all about interaction with your stuff and sharing what you're up to with friends. Dashwire is really an amazing bit of software and for $free it's a no-brainer that it gets a spot of honor on our Mobile devices. Top job gents, top job." - James Prudente via Bookmarklet
Hmm.. $15-30 more for the carbon fiber frame. It looks even cooler, but I think I'd be happy with the all metal one. They both apparently weigh 5 ounces. A Wave, by comparison weighs 8.5 ounces (70% more!). - Kevin Fox
That does look pretty awesome. First time I've seen one. Thanks, folks. Swiss Army Knife of the 21st century... - Kamilah Gill
Just opened my pop for lunch with my CX, it does the rugged manly duties at the office. - James Prudente
"runit is a cross-platform Unix init scheme with service supervision, a replacement for sysvinit, and other init schemes. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, MacOSX, Solaris, and can easily be adapted to other Unix operating systems." - James Prudente
"In an alternative scheme called "process supervision", each important process is looked after by a tiny supervising process, which deals with starting and stopping the important process on request, and re-starting it when it exits unexpectedly. Those supervising processes are in turn reliably supervised by other supervising processes, in a hierarchy extending up to the "master" UNIX process with PID 1, typically "init".
(The process supervision pattern is long-established, and is even built into the programming language Erlang, which is used for ultra-reliable telecoms applications.)" - James Prudente
"Apple doesn’t sell ads, it sells hardware. But if the web requires Flash or Silverlight to run, Adobe or Microsoft can either intentionally kill alternative platforms like the Mac (or Linux), or simply make them work so poorly due to their own incompetence that those platforms risk becoming non-viable. Adobe has already proven its incompetence in delivering Flash for the Mac (and really any platform outside of Windows), and I shouldn’t need to recap Microsoft’s historical readiness to destroy anything that isn’t Windows." - James Prudente
Take what Cringly was talking about the other day (apple builds office on the web) mix in safari for window, google dropping its name from gears and other trends like squirrelfish and you start to see whats coming. Microsoft fought hard against allowing online apps to be as powerful and useful as those available on your desktop, but fortunately the horse was already out of the barn. - James Prudente
"The analogy here is in making sure your invitations aren't just bald come-ons for your application "a friend said something - click here to find out what" - with a forced install on the way, but instead are clearly bearing gifts to the receiving user, so they will want to click on the link after seeing what is in store." - James Prudente
Screencast of using fuzed and ec2 to scale a simple rails app. Pretty contrived example but shows how fuzed is used to control the cluster. Pretty cool. - James Prudente
"Drosera has been replaced by an improved debugger built into the Web Inspector." - James Prudente
Unlike Drosera, the new web inspector is usable. Still has a long ways to go against firebug, but at least there is an emergency option for safari/webkit debugging. - James Prudente
"Think atom vs. molecule… where the show is a molecule and each scene (let alone act) is an atom. Video is a far more dynamic media than text, true… but lacking any real SEO mojo, video cannot really succeed or explode until it is broken up into atoms." - James Prudente
"For the folks that are serious, you can spend as much as 50% of your energy building analysis and optimization tools, but of course, that can be the difference between a viral site that retains users well versus a crappy site that bleeds users. I generally prioritize this as a peer to the product experience, perhaps even higher, since I often overrule product functionality based on real data." - James Prudente
Our render workers are totally “dumb”. They’re literally bare-bones CentOS 5 AMIs (you can build your own, or use RightScale’s, or whatever you’d like) with a single extra script on them which is executed from /etc/rc.d/rc.local. What does that script do? It fetches intelligence. - James Prudente
When i follow the link to this photo on Dashwire, I can navigate to other shared photos. Is it only if you share via email that you get a link to a photo in isolation from all others? - Randy Moss
Yes, but that's changing. We're making it so if that picture is already public it will take you to normal public picture view instead of the share page. If the picture is private it will take you just to the share page. - Hayes Haugen
If you share by sms, email, or any of the supported web services it generates the share link. If at the time you visit the share link the image is public, then we show you the public page version of the link. If you are on a mobile device, have disabled your public page or made the image private, we show the share page version. This change is committed, and hopefully will roll out this morning. - James Prudente
"The best way to implement joins with BigTable is: don't. You--pause for dramatic effect--duplicate data instead of normalize it. *shudder*" - James Prudente
