Posts

Fred Wilson has some interesting thoughts on Google: Google is a different company than it was even a year ago. It’s still got the world’s best search engine and I use it maybe a hundred times a day and really can’t think of not using it. It’s like firefox, a fundamental part of my daily web experience, a starting point for most anything and everything. Search for Google is like Windows for Microsoft, it’s the product that pays the bills for everything else and is ubiquitous. ...

Ryan Tomayko has written a very informative post about how they use Rails to connect to multiple databases for scalability purposes on his project. You should also check out this post by Blaine Cook, another engineer at Twitter.

Jamais Cascio makes some interesting observations about the One Laptop Per Child project, which I agree with completely.

A remembrance of the man, not the writer.

Apple has released a startlingly up front press release explaining that the release of OS X 10.5 is being pushed from June to October because resources were moved to the iPhone project. All of the people who argue that Apple’s personal computer business is taking a back seat to development of other devices just got some additional ammo. Hopefully this means Leopard will have even more cool features when it is released. ...

InformationWeek reports that IT wages are at their highest levels since 2001 and are going up worldwide. I never believed that offshoring was the industrywide crisis it was made out to be (just like H1B visas weren’t), and it looks like the new numbers are vindicating that.

Since the start of the US Attorney scandal, we’ve been hearing a lot about “voter fraud”. Josh Marshall explains what that really means in practice.

San Francisco Columnist and longtime Well conference host Jon Carroll weighs in on the blogger code of conduct controversy today, comparing it to the lessons learned on the Well over the past twenty years. Good stuff. I liked this part in particular: Almost as soon as the Well started, the calls went out: There should be rules. The people online then were disproportionately libertarian. They were First Amendment absolutists. Say what you want, and let the community sort it out. Good information will drive out bad. ...

Interesting interview with Alex Payne from the Twitter development team. He says that Twitter’s scalability issues are in part due to the fact that Ruby and Rails are just slow. Here’s a taste: It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow. ...

Aw, hell. Kurt Vonnegut passed away last night as a result of injuries suffered in a fall a few weeks ago. Thanks for everything, Kurt.