When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · April
· · · · 25 (2 entries)
LAMP and MARS · At that Rails conference, when I was talking to Obie Fernandez, he asked, more or less “How can Sun love us? We’re not Java” and I said, more or less, “Hey, you’re programmers, you write software and there have to be computers to run it, we sell computers, why wouldn’t we love you?” Anyhow, we touched on parallelism a bit and I talked up the T1; Obie took that ball and ran with it, saying all sorts of positive things about synergy between Rails’ shared-nothing architecture and our multicore systems. Yeah, well, good in theory, but I’m too old to make that kind of prediction without running some tests. Hah, it turns out that Joyent has been doing that, and have 76 PDF slides on the subject. If you care about big-system scaling issues, read the whole thing; a little long, but amusing and with hardly any bullet lists. If you’re a Sun shareholder looking for a pick-me up, check out slides 40-41, 49, and 52-74. Oh, I gather that the T1, Solaris, and ZFS are OK for Java too. [Update: The title was just “SAMR”, as in LAMP with two new letters. Enough people didn’t get it that I was forced to think about it, and MARS works better anyhow.] [Update: Bryan Cantrill shows how to profile Rails with DTrace.]
Real-Time Journalism · I got email late yesterday from David Berlind: “Hey, can I call you for a minute?” He wanted commentary on a story he was writing that I think is about the potential for intellectual-property lock-ins on RSS and Atom extensions. I say “I think is about” because the headline is “Will or could RSS get forked?”. After a few minutes’ chat, David asked if he could record for a podcast, and even though I only had a cellphone, the audio came out OK. The conversation was rhythmic: David brought up a succession of potential issues and answered each along the lines of “Yes, it’s reasonable to worry about that, but in this case I don’t see any particular problems.” Plus I emitted a mercifully-brief rant on the difference between protocols, data, and software. On the one hand, I thought David could have been a little clearer that I was pushing back against the thrust of his story, but on the other hand he included the whole conversation right there in the piece, so anyone who actually cares can listen and find out what I actually said, not what I think I said nor what David reported I said. I find this raw barely-intermediated journalism (we talk on the phone this afternoon, it’s on the Web in hours) a little shocking still. On balance, it’s better than the way we used to do things.
