AsynchronousBlog

• Synergy / http://synergy2.sf.net/
• Multi-{platform,machine} keyboard/mouse transport; use two desktops from one machine.
• Nomic game on c2 wiki / http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NomicGame
• Why is it that even though I’ve spent time looking around the c2.com wiki, I’ve never seemed to see it all?
• Gnome Desktop integration bounties / http://www.gnome.org/bounties/#categories
• An idea who’s time has come. With all this open code around, let’s get it talking to eachother!
• D-BUS / http://freedesktop.org/Software/dbus/doc/dbus-tutorial.html
• Hmm. I guess HTTP doesn’t solve all problems. ;) Still, I think application-application level networking is best solved with HTTP and something like an MONITOR verb in HTTP…
• High-concurrent-performance server computing
• C10K / http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
• High-Perf Server Architecture / http://pl.atyp.us/content/tech/servers.html
• Brilliant > “Efficient locking schemes are notoriously hard to design, because of what I call Scylla and Charybdis after the monsters in the Odyssey. Scylla is locking that’s too simplistic and/or coarse-grained, serializing activities that can or should proceed in parallel and thus sacrificing performance and scalability; Charybdis is overly complex or fine-grained locking, with space for locks and time for lock operations again sapping performance. Near Scylla are shoals representing deadlock and livelock conditions; near Charybdis are shoals representing race conditions. In between, there’s a narrow channel that represents locking which is both efficient and correct…or is there? Since locking tends to be deeply tied to program logic, it’s often impossible to design a good locking scheme without fundamentally changing how the program works. This is why people hate locking, and try to rationalize their use of non-scalable single-threaded approaches.”
• SEDA / http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/
• SEDA slides / http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/talks/seda-lecture-stanford.pdf
• Stanford lecture on Staged Event-Driven Architecture [SEDA] … pretty, detailed gnuplot graphs. ;)
• Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) / http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html/index.html
• Not anti-SEDA, but pro-threads, and pro-thread-advancement. Advocates a hybrid model where well-implemented user-level] threads are used with a limited number of event-based stages.
• Extreme Markup Languages 2002 — Paul Prescod : “Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate” / http://www.mulberrytech.com/Extreme/Proceedings/html/2002/Prescod01/EML2002Prescod01.html#t1
• Derivative Works [Parsing] / http://bobfoster.com/plog/index.php?m=200301#6
• Programming techniques from 1964 make the world go round.

A friend pointed me to http://www.ozzie.net/blog/stories/2003/11/14/640kbOughtToBeEnoughForAnyone.html…

Very interesting. I’ve been reading good things about WinFS, and generally about other facets of Longhorn, since the PDC.

And now micros~1 is releasing the Word and Excel XML schemas… with perhaps-not-unreasonable licenses.

I don’t have a lot of stock with the “official” WS-* specs or technology stack they’re creating, so that analogy is lost on me. ;) His analogy is empty: all those awesome Amazon WS efforts are based on REST, not SOAP + WS-*…

Providing the infrastructure to get applications storing structured, relational data sets is a GoodThing. I have a bad feeling there will be an extra level of useless complexity to it, though.

I don’t think that it’s going to be useful. Programs are only as useful as they provide services — not data — to other programs. All those cool tools that he mentioned should be HTTP servers, and speak to eachother [and to the OS] via well-defined and common [RESTful ;)] interfaces.

The GNOME people almost got it right — but chose fsck’ing CORBA as their IPC mech. tsk-tsk-tsk. Especially because at the time it was clear HTTP was winning. Ah, well — I didn’t see it either.

Perhaps a storage mechanism can assist in that, but if it’s only at the data-transfer level, interesting functionality [mostly queries, I’ve been thinking, but also application semantics and manipulation constraints] will need to be re-implemented all over the place. And that’s the hard part.

It has snowed in the past … even over a month ago. But this is the first time it hasn’t immediately melted. I give you: First Snow.

We turned on the radio this morning to hear of schools being closed. Crazy.

I wonder if this will prompt Magic Hat to start brewing their seasonal Heart of Darkness Stout. Given they’re located in So. Burlington [just down the highway], perhaps that’s a good indication of what comes next.