January 2009
12 posts
Response to: "Among the stupidest tech articles... →
mrgan:
As of this week, Gmail has reached perfection: You no longer have to be online to read or write messages.
Like every other desktop email client ever, that is.
If you’re still tied to a desktop app—whether Outlook, the Mac’s Mail program, or anything else that sees your local hard drive, rather than a Web server, as its brain—then you’re doing it wrong.
Well, I’m convinced. I guess I’ll...
Consistent Hashing and Data Servers
It’s time for LEXATEXY to boot their N solr, sql and BDB servers. N is such an alluring number, isn’t it? You can tell someone that if N isn’t enough, we can add one to it. It’s still N! But when you’ve got a bunch of data sitting on A, B, and C, and then you add a D, what do you do? You’d have to “re-balance,” which sounds like something my car...
Bulk Upload to Amazon SimpleDB →
So… you still can’t actually do this.
John Resig - OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript →
Awesome. (Is CBLAS for javascript?)
Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm ›... →
APIs, (specifically ours), what are they good for?
Things that have happened to me on Amazon's EC2
(Dark Cloud II by Daniel Staver)
Love hate relationship with the Amazon EC2 service blossoms deep in LEXATEXY’s veins. Are these problems endemic of anyone trying to do things on more than a few computers? We’re at a point now where people will slowly forget what it’s like to have to call a guy to pull the power on your computer. Remote hands! Paying a $200 setup fee to...
Distributing Solr Nicely
Sometime in early 08 it became clear to LEXATEXY that our biggest client’s solr servers had too many documents on them. [Rule of thumb for “how many documents is too many?”: 15 million. I can upgrade, you bargain. What if I have a super-machine bought with my recently closed VC round?
15 million.]
You’ve already got a pretty reliable thing handling 15 million...
Solr Tips Of The Day
(Part 1 of many of my Fake Solr Consultancy Service, I plan to call it Lexatexy or BARISMO) oh and I will only consult to coffee companies or yacht club membership sites. In my dream world LEXATEXY does not do actual work, he says Hm a lot and is not under any deadlines or commitments. He is the text retrieval kin of Steve Miller’s titular “Joker”
YOUR COMMIT RULE OF THUMB
...
Profiling Java methods with the heap profiling... →
When something in java takes a long time, you can do jmap -histo pid to see where the memory is, kill -QUIT pid to see what it is currently doing, and this to see the % of where all the calls are. (I am currently debugging Solr commit slowness on 2 of our index shards, they are 20x as slow to commit as the others and I don’t know why. More later.)
APPROXIMATION OF A CUBIC BEZIER CURVE BY CIRCULAR ... →
The RBR of this paper is through the roof. Anyone got an HPGL/2 to HPGL converter that does something like this?
