I’ve had these browser windows open for a couple of days and figured I would drop the links in here. Carlos Perez writes up Manageability - Nuggets of Wisdom from eBay’s Architecture, which summarizes a presentation on how eBay has achieved scalability. Interesting stuff.
Christian Bauer writes about using triggers to store the history of an object and points to the Hibernate wiki which includes a Hibernate Interceptor implementation of a history logger.
Software Development
If you think the news agencies are fully impartial, check out this headline: Yahoo! News - Bush Claimed Right to Waive Torture Laws. This headline is true on the surface. But, a headline that more accurately sums up the article would be “Bush agreed to follow torture laws”. Here’s the full quote from the memo:
“I accept the legal conclusion of the attorney general and the Department of Justice (news - web sites) that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time,” the president said in the memo, entitled “Humane Treatment of al-Qaida and Taliban Detainees.”
Readers of my blog (and folks who know me personally) know that I am not a supporter of this President or his Administration. However, I think that the headline chosen is sloppy reporting. With plenty of real failings in this administration, it seems silly to go and produce and article that mischaracterizes some documentation that clarifies the administration’s position on torture.
Politics
This is certainly a big deal. With a number of teams racing to win the X-Prize by launching passengers into space, Scaled Composites has successfully sent a man into space. The craft used cost just $20 million. With a price tag like that, it’s not unreasonable to think that at some point not too-far-off commercial space travel will be a reality.
Technology
Via Boing Boing: TypeNow.net Themed Fonts Movie and Music Fonts contains a whole bunch of fonts recognizable from movies, music and miscellaneous brands. Very spiffy. There’s also a nice collection at Uncle Bear.
Random
Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and EFF-dude, spoke to Microsoft about DRM and why it sucks. This is one of the best summaries of why DRM is so colossally bad. From a MSFT standpoint:
None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures.
He also makes the excellent point that anti-circumvention law (aka the DMCA) allows copyright holders to invent new copyright law as they wish. He gives the example that there’s no copyright law that disallows purchasing copyrighted goods from other countries and using them here. The DMCA, however, prevents you from taking a French DVD and using it here. Luckily, for music, there’s AllOfMP3, a Russian site that sells you music in your choice of formats. It’s legal in Russia, so it’s legal to buy and use here.
Music
As anyone who’s read my blog for a bit would guess, I’m pleased to see another person (particularly one as widely read as Tim Bray) rant in favor of test-driven development. I agree with his assessment… TDD has had a bigger impact on the programs I write than OO did.
Software Development
You never know when you might need audio files of George W. Bush’s speeches. These folks provide MP3 files plus you can get CD-quality copies of these files for just $10 on CD-ROM.
Politics
On a whim, I decided to see if there was new news of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Indeed there is. The “eating and working out” part of the game mentioned sounds like the kind of thing that could make the game a drag if it’s done poorly. The GTA series has had great gameplay, though, so I have faith that Rockstar North will get it right.
Random
Apparently, the record labels have started paying radio stations to play songs as ads. It is illegal for record labels to pay stations to play songs. But, it is apparently legal for them to take out ads on the stations. Unless there are regulations on how much advertising a station can have within an hour of programming (and it’s possible that there are such regulations), it seems like the stations can just keep increasing their advertising slots per hour until most of what you hear on the radio is directly paid for.
By the way, this is once again why CDs cost so much.
Music
Zilverline is a search engine that you can use for your files (or for your intranet, as I’m doing). It uses Lucene under the covers. I found it quite easy to set up. If you know Lucene query syntax, you can get very good search results. I’ve passed along an idea that should help get excellent results just entering straight keywords. We’ve got 91,000 documents indexed in there, and the searches are zippy even on a fairly modest box. Lucene is certainly very performant.
Kudos to Michael Franken for putting together Zilverline and making it available! (Soon to be open source, apparently. For now it’s just free.)
Software Development
