Canada | An early appointment with electoral destiny | Economist.com (1)
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The Conservatives have managed to get 70 government bills, including three budgets and two economic statements, through parliament and have survived more than 40 votes of confidence.
Technology, business and the law | The big data dump | Economist.com (1)
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This has led to a new boom industry of specialised e-discovery service providers which merrily charge $125-600 an hour.
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Martin said:
Crazy. How to clutter the judicial system.
Online storage | Thanks for the memory | Economist.com (1)
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A mathematical trick may allow people to scatter their computer files across the world's hard disks
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Martin said:
The maths trick is simpler than we could think...
The world wide web | The second browser war | Economist.com (1)
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It is, in short, the scenario that Microsoft has dreaded ever since Netscape.
Tech.view | Who holds the key? | Economist.com (1)
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The struggle to balance openness and control
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Martin said:
Resisting the inclination to control is often a major factor in a company’s success.
How to fix Rails helpers (15)
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Eric Chapweske (6)
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Rail Spikes - Home (34)
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Many Rails applications have this basic structure in their helpers folder: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 application_helper.rb accounts_helper.rb audits_helper.rb comments_helper.rb images_helper.rb orders_helper.rb posts_helper.rb sessions_helper.rb users_helper.rb ... etc. The most important file, as we all know, is application_helper.rb, because this is where code goes to die. It’s often a few hundred lines of randomly added, unrelated methods. This is a confusing, scary place for methods to be. Here’s a few ...
MRI Ruby + MySQL + Threads == Stop the world... JRuby doesn't (2)
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Aaron (78)
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Hungry Machine - All (6)
1 month, 4 weeks
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As we have been internally discussing how to scale our databases from 10's of millions of rows to 100's of millions, database sharding came up. Depending on your data model and your application, sharding data into tables by some natural key is great if any given request uses only one shard. FiveRun's DataFabric seems to help with that. Its obviously best to shard the data in the most used way, but occasionally you'll need to ...
iPhone Local Search Apps: Jumping the Shark Already? (1)
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Sebastien Provencher (5)
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The Praized Blog (5)
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As most people following the tech industry know, July was “iPhone 3G” month. In the local search space, the Kelsey Group (via Mike Boland) recently published an analysis of 25 representative local search iPhone apps. I haven’t read the document but I’m sure it’s excellent as always. In a case of “I don’t know if I should be laughing or crying” though, I stumbled upon this Information Week article that talks about a restaurant app ...
Turing'd (1)
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The Technium (133)
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Over the years I've had many opportunities to work with professionals from various fields. In every endeavor, computer technology is utterly transformative. But not every field gets this. Some scientists, licensed experts, and professionals are allergic to new technology. I had an epiphany recently on why some varieties of professionals are more welcoming of disruptive technology than others. I realized the types of pros who are most eager to employ the latest technology are those ...
Trust customers over VCs (26)
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David (577)
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Signal vs. Noise (1083)
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Venture capitalists are glorified gamblers in the Ace-from-Casino sense of the word. They try their best to collect intel on the players, but ultimately still just place bets. Bets that usually fail more often than they succeed. It’s the 1-in-10 blowout payoff that makes sure the piano keeps playing for them while the tune goes mum for the rest of their bets. Those are potentially good-enough odds for a VC to make a decent return ...
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Ian Betteridge said:
Robert comments on this that "Not enough companies treat users like customers." Perhaps because, for many Web 2.0 companies, their users aren't their customers: they're looking for advertisers, who are really their customers. Everyone else is just eyeballs they're selling.
Turn Your iPhone into a Barcode Scanner with ScanLife’s App (17)
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Amanda MacArthur (1)
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Mashable! (4387)
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ScanLife has a new app out [iTunes link] for iPhone - a scanning application that uses the iPhone camera as a link from products to websites. This application has been available on regular camera phones for some time now, but with the widespread usage of the iPhone, it’s possible that this could be the time for growth. With this application, you can scan an ScanLife EZcode (see right) and be directed to a website. Don’t ...
Turn Your iPhone into a Barcode Scanner with ScanLife’s App (10)
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Amanda MacArthur (1)
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Mashable! (4387)
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ScanLife has a new app out [iTunes link] for iPhone - a scanning application that uses the iPhone camera as a link from products to websites. This application has been available on regular camera phones for some time now, but with the widespread usage of the iPhone, it’s possible that this could be the time for growth. With this application, you can scan an ScanLife EZcode (see right) and be directed to a website. Don’t ...
Another One for the Machine (18)
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The Technium (133)
2 months
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Computers have mastered chess and checkers, beating the best human players. Nowadays cheap computerized or even online players can beat most ordinary humans. The ancient game of Go, however, has long resisted the efforts by engineers to construct a Go-computer than can beat a human Go master. Some Go fans believed computers would never be able to beat a Go master. The vast combinatorial sums of possible moves are much greater in Go than chess, ...
Asynchronous DB: DBSlayer & HTTP - igvita.com (27)
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Ilya Grigorik (48)
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igvita.com (48)
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You hit a web 2.0 nerve and that magical 'viral coefficient' is working with full force, except now you' have a problem: scaling the database. No problem, you say, we have a few tricks up our sleeve: faster disks, loads of memory, dataset sharding, load balancing, connection pooling, master-master and master-slave replication schemes, multiple caching layers... anything to minimize the latency of the database call. The problem is that dreaded dynamic request which cuts through ...
"No, but..." instead of "No" (17)
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Matt (919)
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Signal vs. Noise (1083)
2 months, 1 week
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We asked our new payroll service if they could mail paystubs to employees. The company rep’s response: No, but each stub is stuffed in an envelope and sealed. If you put a stamp on it, it could be mailed easily. That is what most of my clients do, when they payroll reports and envelopes arrive, they just stick a stamp on them and drop em in the mail, pretty easy. Great tone to that reply. ...
The need for speed: Making Basecamp faster (20)
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Jason (507)
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Signal vs. Noise (1083)
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Some new features are sexy. They come with shiny new interfaces, extra buttons, more power. These are obvious and easy to spot. They are fun to develop and fun to release. However, there’s another side to improving a product that doesn’t get as much respect. It’s the optimization. Nothing new, but everything better. Small tweaks here, hardware upgrades there. Everything runs more smoothly but you don’t really notice it. You feel it, but there’s nothing ...
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Chip R said:
We can learn two things from this post: (1) RPM has been useful for them (2) They need outside help with SQL optimization (i.e. the designer of Active Record is not a DB expert)
