3amOpsGuy

Saw a young guy get on the DLR at bank with a limp. There was a bit of commotion as he excused himself past people and asked someone to shift out the disabled seats.

All the time I'm thinking 'typical Londoners, they could have made that so much easier for that poor guy if they just held back for 2 seconds'

He got off at Canary Wharf minus the limp! I laughed for about an hour.

Yeah for scientific computing specifically i was more expecting to see concerns like ensuring intermediate working state is persisted to a durable medium and facilitating restarting from a working state "dump" instead of from the top each time.

They're probably one of the few projects with such a track record that we can take them at their word. Thoroughly audited will mean exactly that.

They're most definitely not amateurs, see the back catalogue for examples of 'how to do it right'

>> I used ballet because people start young

More than 75% of the British population has access to the Internet[1] today.

Less than 0.5% of the sampled population had participated in ballet at least once in the course of a year, in the most recent survey year I could find[2].

There are less similarities than there are differences in the computing / Internet to ballet comparison. I don't feel it's a useful argument.

1. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/rdit2/internet-access-quarterl...

2. http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/research/TP_Y5FiguresArts.x...

There's too much prior art for this. Back around 97-99 there were plenty of shareware apps shipped on magazine cover CDs for reading ebooks.

They mostly adopted a quasi-skeuomorphic presentation, complete with (crappy) page turn animations in response to the user clicking next. It was often labelled along the lines of "Now With 3D Page Turning!"

These have come to be common features of NoSQL in general. I wouldn't be too surprised to see them here in a product marketed as NoSQL.

The other attributes i'm not too fussed about personally, i figure i can always work around them or face the question "am i using the right tool for this job?" but the fsync one still gives me the heeby-jeebies (even though it's never bitten me despite many many TBs of data).

Cassandra does periodic fsync's (although it can be configured). I understand HBase and Mongo have similar shennanigans.

It didn't really shock me when the Reiser thing came to light. I remember back around 2003-2004 (possibly before) when there was all the hoo-haa on the lkml between Reiser's scratchy personality and his attacks on Torvalds, Cox et al., but backed up with a brilliant FS.

It genuinely was faster, especially for lots of small files (the common case in 2003). It was night and day difference when running a busy mail server. It had lots of nice things too, e.g. it was reliably possible to grow a reiserFS while the FS was online / mounted, which was a neat trick in conjunction with LVM.

There were some folks who stepped into the fray to try and lubricate the relationships a little - allowing the community at large to benefit from Reiser's work, by avoiding the need for the tempered Reiser to interact with others while his work was integrated. That never really happened though, there was noone to successfully defang the Torvalds side of the bun fight (which is entirely understandable).

So when the case came to light, i couldn't help wondering if it was more than likely true.

Yeah. Also pretty much anything by Kenneth Reitz (although i can't warm to the args lib for some reason) is worth a good look.

Could probably do a top 7 just by Reitz:

  From: https://github.com/kennethreitz

  1. Requests
  2. CLINT - Easy CLI tools inc cross platform colour
  3. Envoy - "subprocess for humans"
  4. Tablib - csv, excel and plenty others, tabular data
  5. python-guide - A work in progress book
  6. dynamo - Amazon Dynamo as a python dict
  7. gistapi.py

Safari for iOS is probably a less obscure example - as you scroll down the page, the address bar will scroll off screen.

These interactions are expected by their users, and they know how to navigate around them.

I wouldn't be hasty and say i don't think it'd be a material concern, on the contrary, it could make for some interesting A/B testing!

I think you're missing a trick. Genuinely chrome-less could be pretty useful, and more attractive.

The small black navigation bar at the top of the screen could be done away with, if you change your URL structure to be more easily understood & manipulated.

From shoulder surfing various people of various levels of tech experience, i've noticed they are quite happy to edit a logically structured url in the address bar to navigate where they want to go quickly. For example, if the site doesn't provide an easy "up one level" ability.

I'm sure they'll provide performance examples in due course but we should be conscious how difficult it is to do this in practice.

Sure they can take the shortcut and just produce some single case and claim 'faster than a.n. other db' and that will probably satisfy the 'my db is faster than your db' brigade.

However, based on the effort that appears to have gone into this product to get it to this stage, they probably wouldn't be happy with that.

More power to them!

I'd imagine this will expand, as Facebook Zero has (same idea, but free Facebook access instead).

It's widely deployed these days, throughout the country not just in London.

I'm not really sure what they're supposed to do. You don't see them working late Friday / Saturday nights (the revellers just get a bit too rowdy around the delicate camera i suppose).

I should probably do a FOIA request and see what they achieve in my area.

>> and the first on the chopping block will probably be yours.

Unfortunately this often won't be the case. The algorithm used for selection in the oom killer will try to preserve processes which have accumulated higher CPU time - on a typical server, the most active process will often be the one consuming all the memory.

This can lead to a painful situation where critical processes like sshd, or your shell, are killed off to allow more space for the runaway app. Quickly leading to a hard reset being the only recovery option.

I don't know. Take QT for example, I'm happy to risk blowing my leg off with c++ just because I feel really productive with Qt, it truly is a wonderfully productive library, and the external ecosystem is supportive, whatever complex visualisation I want to draw, I can often find a lib that's happy to draw into a qpixmap - c++ on its own or with boost etc. doesn't leave me feeling as productive.

GTK feels drawn out to me in comparison.

nginx made it into the base install? That's another fairly significant, at least in my mind, vote of confidence for nginx.

3amopsguy@gmail.com

They are good. I'd enjoy reading more from their ops guys - likely others wouldn't though :-( a significant portion of ops concerns would probably appear unsexy to non ops people, but horses for courses, whatever floats your boat and all that. I love it.

In the UK the last operator to stop doing this (Vodafone) stopped around 2004, the others in the 2-3 years before that.

Was really handy for a car-phone (remember those!) sim which meant the car rang pre-bluetooth days.

Less relevant these days but i also have an old BMW E38 i cherish which would benefit from such a setup were it available today.

The POF one tickles me, i love the whole approach.

The genius in it is not spending untold time and money building the latest whizz-bang responsive gui, or never getting launched because the "web scale" back end isn't the worlds most perfect design yet. It's all just hacked together organically, with the simplest, path of least resistance choices taken at every stage.

I love that this succeeds, i love that it's not over ambitious, i love that it costs the owner minimal maintenance time.

Hats off to that man!

Intel are just about to release the "NUC" Next Unit of Computing. Looks pretty reasonable, but significantly more powerful and thus expensive than a PI.

>> after I finish reversing the VideoCore IV

I've only just stumbled across details of your efforts in the past couple of days.

I wish you every success, if you were to be successful, you would open the door to impressively cheap possibilities.

The retina MacBook is heavier than I expected. Appreciate chopping out an optical drive doesn't magically shave 1kg off but I'm still slightly disappointed, despite placing an order regardless.

It's impressive how much money you can save on the leccy bill by switching to a virtualised lab.

The only things i cant virtualise well enough are cisco ios or sparc openboot prompt shenannigans. I still fire up an old ultra 80 every so often and it actually draws surprisingly little. It does sound like a jet taking off unfortunately though... The old ultra 60s with the sound deadening kits fitted were impressively quiet, but all these antiques are bin fodder now.

Haha typical timing, i've not touched GH in days, and right when i want to...

Ho hum. Some HN distraction time for me then!

EDIT: Youtube too? Checked on http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youtube.com also

I don't think it's possible to configure the gopro to overwrite old footage - unless something's changed in a recent firmware.

I have a roadhawk mounted (and wired into the fuse box). The video quality is sub standard for the price, and especially poor compared to even the previous go pro at night. However the software does work quite well and unfortunately the device paid for itself ~2 years ago when i was clipped with no witness and the other party presenting a fabricated story. Until then i had felt a bit guilty about using the camera - i don't necessarily think these are a great idea, but i have to go with my experience and it worked well for me.

NB: all these options are useless for "the other driver did X" often they will only help prove what you did or did not do. I mistakenly thought of it as a way to capture what actions other drivers took but it doesnt work well for that use case.

Any plans for NoSQL patterns? I'd be happy to share some useful schemas for column stores like Cassandra.

That device had passed me by, this was a useful link, although it appears there are problems getting the boards shipped out.

The specs look excellent for the price.

Skunk Works is a great read. It's enlightening how advanced these guys were in the 60's, I tend to think of the 80s and 90s as being the time when we raced forward technically but it was probably the 60s and 70s were the fastest pace.

Mountain, meet molehill.