Over the last few years I’ve worked with a few different styles of CEO. Some were great. They cared about employee morale and worked to solve problems created by problematic career middle-managers. They inspired employees and worked to help everyone realize their contribution to the company’s success. Other CEOs I’ve worked with didn’t have a handle on issues in the company. They almost gleefully stifled creativity and smothered morale. I’d like to share a tragic story about one of these CEOs.
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Not this again. Wired has an article by Daniel Roth pondering the rights we should grant to human-like machines. The article was influenced by Roth’s discomfort watching an Elmo doll giggle when engulfed in flames. He contrasts this with his lack of emotion when the crew from Office Space destroy the office printer. Because of his discomfort seeing Elmo burn he asks about the ethics of interacting with machines.
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Last night I had a couple glasses of the sake, specifically doburoku, I brewed over the last two weeks. The taste is pretty good for my first try. It is a bit sweet and very smooth. Each glass went down real easy and didn’t leave me reeling due to the taste or alcohol content. I suspect it contains about 12-15% alocohol by volume which makes one glass of sake comparable to a glass of wine. The recipe I used says the final product would be about 15-18% alcohol by volume but I think I used a bit too much water while brewing. You can read more about the technical aspects of brewing sake on Wikipedia or take a look at the recipe I followed. Read on for more about my brewing process. (more…)
I’ve been digging around lately for a Boston area user group dedicated to architectural scalability and I haven’t been able to find one. Other user groups that I regularly attend have meetings centered around scalability once in a while, but I’m looking for something with a schedule dedicated to the topic. It’s a hot topic in the industry right now with a lot happening on different fronts and there should be some ongoing professional discussion dedicated what goes into growing an application.
Here are some of the topics I want to talk about:
- Data growth and access – What kind of DBMS topologies allow maximum scalability without breaking the budget? What if the budget wasn’t a problem? How do you migrate your data model from hundreds of users to millions of users? Should you partition user data across shards or keep it in a central database? How do you profile data access paterns? Is your application mostly-read or mostly-write? When should you use an LDAP directory for data storage? When should you use MySQL and when should you use Oracle?
- Application server scaling – app server clustering, web server integration, load balancing, application session management, data caching
- Web Tier – load balancing reverse proxies, data caching, working with HTTP, considerations for exposing functionality via REST
- Language conisderations and platform choices – Dynamic languages vs. Static languages, Linux vs. Windows, Solaris vs. Linux, RedHat vs. Oracle, IBM vs. Oracle – How do you make these choices? What evaluation critera are most important? Which ones are misleading?
- Framework scalability – How can you scale if your framework can’t? Does Rails really scale better than Spring Web MVC? Where do PHP frameworks fit in? What are the alternatives? This is where we will investigate what you gain and lose by binding yourself to a particular framework, how to keep the coupling to a minimum and how to use your framework as a solid foundation instead viewing it as a cage.
- Emerging technology – Should you become familiar with Map Reduce and Hadoop? What kind of impact do object databases have on your application? Should you buy your own Sun or Dell boxes or use Amazon’s EC2 and S3?
- Application architecture – How do you write an application that scales? What does your application look like as it grows from servicing hundreds to millions of users? How does it handle session management? How does it access datastores? Are there any design patterns that are helpful? What are the anti-patterns to be aware of?
Like I said, I haven’t found a group dedicated to discussing these topics. If you know of one in the Boston area please let me know. Assuming there isn’t one I am willing to start one. I’d like to start off small and meet at coffee shops around Burlington or Lowell. I have no delusions that this is going to start off or even become as big as NEJUG is now. If it starts off as a few people getting together to talk about scalability trends, cool caching solutions and specific products then I’d call it a good start.
The meeting location is still TBD and will be based on how many people are interested in attending. It will probably be somewhere in Burlington, MA. There is no planned presentation at this time. Instead we will have a meet and greet and then discuss scalability trends and news, what approaches to scalability are commonly used now and what are the plans for the future.
If you are interested in coming or in finding out more information please email me at <my first name>@<my domain name>.<my tld> or leave a comment below. Please make sure to include your email address when you fill out the form so that I can get in touch with you – your email address will not be displayed on my site.
I got the second of my two new toys tonight: a Dell Inspiron E1505 with the following:
- Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz T5200
- 2 GB Dual Channel DDR RAM
- ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 256 MB RAM
- 80 GB SATA 7200 RPM hard drive
- 15.4″ WSXGA+ screen
and…
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