Author Archive

IO2008: Rough notes from Selected Sessions at Google IO Day 2

Google IO notes continued from earlier in the day: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/05/29/IO2008RoughNotesFromMarissaMayerDay2KeynoteAtGoogleIO.aspx and yesterday: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/05/29/RoughNotesFromSelectedSessionsAtGoogleIODay1.aspx. Google Web Toolkit and Client-Server Communications · Speaker: Miquel Mendez · GWT client/server communication options: o Frames o Form Panel o XHR: RequestBuilder (be careful don’t to start too many—many browsers have limits) o XML RPC · XML Encoding/Decoding: com.google.gwt.xml defines XML…

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IO2008: Rough notes from Marissa Mayer Day 2 Keynote at Google IO

Continued from Yesterday (day 1): Rough notes from Selected Sessions at Google IO Day 1. Marissa Mayer Keynote: A Glimpse Under the Hood at Google · Showed iGoogle and talked about how Google Gadgets are a great way to get broad distribution and are a form of advertising. · Search is number 2 most used…

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Rough notes from Selected Sessions at Google IO Day 1

Rough notes from the sessions I attended at Google IO. The sessions are going to be available in Video so, if you want more detail (or more accuracy :-)), you can check out the videos. Vic Gundotra Keynote: · 2 hour session walking through entire conference material mostly with demos: Open Social, Google Web Toolkit,…

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Petascale SQL DB at Yahoo!

Wednesday Yahoo announced they have a built a petascale, distributed relational database. In Yahoo Claims Record With Petabyte Database, the details are thin but they built on the PostgreSQL relational database system. In Size matters: Yahoo claims 2-petabyte database is world’s biggest, busiest, the system is described as an over 2 petabyte repository of user…

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Search Cashback!

Search drives the online commerce world by bringing sellers and buyers together. As a seller, you most important task is getting your site to rank high organically and to have your advertisements placed most prominently and most frequently to user interested in buying and only to users interested in your product. A buyer chooses a…

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Cloud Computing Growth Rate

Cloud Computing Growth Rate

There is no question that cloud computing is going to a big part of the future of server-side systems. What I find interesting is the speed with which this is happening. Look at recent network traffic growth rates from AWS: From: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/05/lots-of-bits.html AWS is now consuming considerably more bandwidth than Amazon’s global web sites. Phenomenal…

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Erlang and High-Scale System Software

I’ve been involved with high scale systems software projects, mostly database engines, for the last 20 years and I’ve watched the transition from low level and proprietary languages to C. Then C to C++. Recently I’ve been thinking a bit about what’s next. Back in the very early 90’s when I was Lead Architect on…

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Why I love Full Text Search

I’ve spent a big part of my life working on structured storage engines, first in DB2 and later in SQL Server. And yet, even though I fully understand the value of fully schematized data, I love full text search and view it as a vital access method for all content wherever it’s stored. There are…

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Inteviewing Program Managers

Some time back I got a question on what I look for when hiring a Program Manager from the leader of a 5 to 10 person startup. I make no promise that what I look for is typical of what others look for – it almost certainly is not. However, when I’m leading an engineering…

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Mike Burrows: Early Days at DEC, through Microsoft, to Google

I forget what brought it up but sometime back Sriram Krishnan forwarded me this article on Mike Burrows and his work through Dec, Microsoft, and Google (The Genius: Mike Burrows’ self-effacing journey through Silicon Valley). I enjoyed the read. Mike has done a lot over the years but perhaps his best known works of recent…

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Client-Side Power Consumption

The years of Moore’s law growth without regard to power consumption are now over. On the data center side, power isn’t close to the largest cost of running a large service but it is one of the largest controllable costs and it has been in the press frequently of late. On the client side, battery…

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Rough Notes from Yahoo! Web 2.0 Key Note

My rough notes from the Web 2.0 Keynote by Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh: · Yahoo! is making three big bets: 1. Be the starting point for all consumers 2. Be the must buy for advertisers 3. Provide an Open Platform · Focus of today’s talk is on the later, open platform. · Yahoo! broad set…

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Laptop SSD Performance Degradation Problems

Flash SSDs in laptops have generated considerable excitement over the last year and are in use at both extremes of the laptop market. At the very low end, where only very small storage amounts can be funded, NAND Flash is below the below the disk price floor. Mechanical disks with all their complexity are very…

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Jim Gray Systems Lab Opens

It’s not often I come across three interesting notes in the same day but here’s another. Earlier today the Jim Gray Systems Lab was announced and it will be lead by long time database pioneer David DeWitt. This is great to see for a large variety of reasons. First of all it’s wonderful to see…

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Amazon AWS Drops Egress Charges

Earlier today, Amazon AWS announced a reduction in egress charges. The new charges: · $0.100 per GB – data transfer in · $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out · $0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out · $0.110 per GB – next 100 TB…

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Windows Live Mesh is Here!

Live Mesh has been under development for a couple of years now. Now it’s hear in “technology preview” form. I think the first public mention was probably back in March of last year in a blog entry by Mary Jo Foley that mentioned Windows Live Core (http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=349). Last night Amit Mital, General Manager of Windows…

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