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  Test-Driven Development? Give me a break...

Update: At the bottom of this post, I've linked to two large and quite different discussions of this post, both of which are worth reading... Update 2: If the contents of this post make you angry, okay. It was written somewhat brashly. But, if the title alone makes you angry, and you decide this is an article about "Why Testing Code Sucks" without having read it, you've missed the point. Or I explained it badly :-)Some things programmers say can be massive red flags. When I h...

   Test driven,Application design,tool     2011-10-17 10:19:16

  How to check which Ohai plugin hangs in chef client run

Ohai plugins are very important components in chef client which aims to provide resource management automation on a server. The data discovered by Ohai plugins are describing the current state of the server and they will be used to maintain the server in a desired state. Each Ohai plugin discovers a specific pierce of information about the server such as cpu, memory, middleware etc. However, there are rare occasions(well I am a bit optimistic here) someone may find that the chef client...

   HOW TO,CHEF-CLIENT,OHAI,UPTIME,HANG     2017-12-24 22:09:59

  CASSANDRA data model

Cassandra is an open source distributed database, it combines dynamic key/value and column oriented feature of Bigtable. Features of Cassandra are: Flexible schema, no need to design schema first, it's very convenient to add or delete strings Support range search on keys High usability, extensible. The single node error will not affect the cluster. We can think Cassandra's data model as a 4 or 5 dimensional Hash. COLUMN Columns is the smallest data unit in Cassandra, it is a 3 dimensional data...

   Cassandra,database,sort     2013-06-08 22:07:40

  Taking C Seriously

Dennis Ritchie, a co-creator of Unix and C, passed away a few weeks ago, and was honored with many online tributes this weekend for a Dennis Ritchie Day advocated by Tim O’Reilly.It should hardly be necessary to state the importance of Ritchie’s work. C is the #2 language in use today according to the TIOBE rankings (which, while criticized in some quarters, are at least the best system we currently have for gauging such things). In fact, TIOBE’s pre...

   C,Efficiency,Memorization,Dennis Ritchie     2011-11-03 13:42:14

  Coder or Clown?

That’s the challenge. Sit down with someone you’ve never met and try to work out if they are a coder or a clown. I don’t mean to insult anyone, of course, and I’m the first to acknowledge the years of training and effort that goes into being a professional clown. But some coders, oh boy. Like the time I interviewed a recent graduate. I’ll call her Ada. Full of sympathy for the novice programmer I started with a gentle warm-up, a soft-ball question to break the ...

   Coder,Clown,State,Profile,Category     2011-08-28 23:04:46

  A Clash of Titans Between Elon Musk and Larry Page over AGI's Future

Artificial General Intelligence(AGI) has long been a topic of fascination and concern for technology leaders, with some seeing it as humanity's ultimate tool, while others view it as an existential threat. This clash of perspectives was on full display during the acquisition of DeepMind by Google in 2014, as two tech titans, Elon Musk and Larry Page, found themselves on opposite sides of the debate. While Page saw AGI as a necessary and desirable step in humanity's evolution, Musk was more wary ...

   AI,LARRY PAGE,ELON MUSK,AGI     2023-04-30 11:13:53

  How Speeding The "Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime" Could Change This Modern World

Math breakthroughs don't often capture the headlines--but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life. Last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms was presented by a group of MIT researchers. It's possible that under cert...

   FFT,Speed-up,Fast fourier transform     2012-03-20 07:47:04

  Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company

Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group. It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physica...

   Start,Company,Creative,Innovation,Techno     2011-08-16 08:38:35

  RAM is the new disk...

Jim Gray, a man who has contributed greatly to technology over the past 40 years, is credited with saying that memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape. With the proliferation of "real-time" web applications and systems that require massive scalability, how are hardware and software relating to this meme? Tim Bray, in his discussions about grid computing before it became such a hot topic, pointed out how advances in hardware around RAM and networking were allowing for the creation...

   RAM,Flash,Memory,,Future,Disk     2011-08-12 07:34:27

  Some Thoughts on Twitter's Availability Problems

As a regular user of Twitter I've felt the waves of frustration wash over me these past couple of weeks as the service has been hit by one outage after another. This led me to start pondering the problem space [especially as it relates to what I'm currently working on at work] and deduce that the service must have some serious architectural flaws which have nothing to do with the reason usually thrown about by non-technical pundits (i.e. Ruby on Rails is to blame). Some of my suspicions ...

   Twitter,Architecture,Availability,Design     2011-08-12 07:39:21