Sam’s random musings

Behind The Scenes of Google Scalability

The recent Data-Intensive Computing Symposium brought together experts in system design, programming, parallel algorithms, data management, scientific applications, and information-based applications to better understand existing capabilities in the development and application of large-scale computing systems, and to explore future opportunities.

Always interesting to read and see presentations on how the really big boys do it

(Via High Scalability - Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites..)

<

p>DTerm: give your Mac a little shell love”

DTerm is a utility just released by Decimus Software Inc. It’s a Leopard-only app that provides a hotkey-triggered HUD which allows shell commands to be run from anywhere in OS X. In case you’re wondering why, just imagine what less window switching and screen clutter could mean for productivity on jobs that require both Finder and Terminal. Yes, you can do a lot with Quicksilver, but DTerm provides bash name completion with a dropdown, context sensitivity to your current path and full output with clipboard features. You can also type ⌘-↩ in the HUD to run the command in the Terminal, which will open up to your current path.

This is a very addictive application for the geekiest around you. Well not totally the geekiest, because they might not know what a ui is other then a terminal window….

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Feature Richness and User Engagement:

Summary: The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment — especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.

Face is right, it is worth reading to the end. I got more out of it the second read…

(Via Mind-NOX.)

Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide:

It’s so regular you could set your watch by it. The decay of a community is just as predictable as the decay of certain stable nuclear isotopes. As soon as an open source project, language, or what-have-you achieves a certain notoriety%u2014its half-life, if you will%u2014they swarm in, seemingly draining the very life out of the community itself. They are the Help Vampires. And I’m here to stop them.

SO RIGHT ON IT HURTS

FileBrowse - a media browser companion for Finder:

Romain Guy at The Apple Blog has penned a nice walkthrough of an interesting new app called FileBrowse, which acts as more of a streamlined tool for media file browsing and manipulating tasks, as opposed to a full-fledged Finder replacement (cuz we all know how well that’s going). FileBrowse makes use of subtle display and 3D elements to provide more information when rooting through folders of images, music and video. As you can see, it draws Windows XP-like thumbnails on folders of images, allowing one to peek at what’s inside without actually having to crack it open. It also offers far more information (like metadata) when viewing items individually, and it even renders album artwork on music folders, along with video file previews, a unique visual grouping system, and more.

FileBrowse looks like an interesting app, so check out Romain’s walkthrough if you’ve been feeling the Finder is a bit lacking in these departments lately. At $25 though, it probably won’t be for everyone, but it’s nice to see some new file browsing tools that focus on a few things, and doing them well.

This is one of the nicest ui’s for browsing the filesystem of images and other filetypes) that I have seen in a long time.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Slides from Performance Tuning Best Practices and Index and Coding Strategies:

OK, back from the Users Conference, which was an absolute blast (will write about my thoughts on that a little later today). I’ve finally gotten around to cleaning up two slide decks for my Index Tuning and Coding Techniques for Optimal Performance and Performance Tuning Best Practices. I exported the slides to PDF format so that there were no cross platform issues. Cheers!

There are some good ideas here…

(Via Planet MySQL.)

MySQL Gotchas:

So, the “MySQL Gotchas” page was mentioned in one of the talks at the conference last week. The page itself is at:

http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html

Now, to go through it all…..

This is a good list, lots of good tips and thoughts, DB stuff can get heady and esoteric but there is a wealth on information here, might come across as a little anti MySQL but I don’t think so.

(Via Planet MySQL.)

On IPs, hostnames, and MySQL:

some good thoughts on making a mysql server more robust

(Via Planet MySQL.)