RDMA in Java? WTF

Why have I not heard of this before?

http://www.infoq.com/articles/Java-7-Sockets-Direct-Protocol

My guess is this feature will have a few bugs, but very cool.
-JD

ruler

I think you are on to something there...
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/08/mit-ruler-draws-straight-lines-brings-them-to-life/


-JD

Everything is a String!

I need to figure out a way to add a new line of questioning to my candidate interview process.
Programmers that make everything a String (in a typed language) really are missing something fundamental and are just going to be an overall waste of time.

Here is sort of a double whammy example:


if( val.equals("1") ) {
}else {
}

Not only are we using a String, where an int would be better, but we are using an int where a boolean would be better.
In some cases I can tolerate using an int (perhaps we are creating a model and everything needs to be a number), but Strings man.. Fucking Strings Everywhere!

HBASE vs Cassandra

Ouch..

Jonathan Ellis: HBase is a steaming pile of poo that will eat your data and crush your soul, and here is an extensive list of technical reasons why that is the case.

Some Guy at MapR: Cassandra was replaced by HBase at Facebook, also at least we aren't MongoDB. Plus we magically fixed all the above issues by adding some "Enterprise" fairy dust (for only $5000 per node).

http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/big-data-debate-will-hbase-dominate-nosq/240159475

Ceph vs HDFS

For the data nerds out there:
I've been considering for a while if it wouldn't be better to dump HDFS and replace it with Ceph. HDFS just feels so broken/fragile/abandoned. Like at some point in 2008, everyone jumped on the HDFS bandwagon, and by 2010 everyone had jumped off. Leaving just a few lonely holdouts to gaze at the Jira carnage.

http://ceph.com/ceph-storage/file-system/

Now with data locality for Hadoop Jobs.
http://www.mail-archive.com/ceph-users@lists.ceph.com/msg02306.html

The one thing MapR has over Cloudera is a nice Posix interface. I suspect Ceph is even better AND 100% open source. I'm going to give it 1 year before this becomes mainstream. By then enough people will have blazed the trail to make this a sure thing.

-JD

NewNeoNeuDb-palooza

File under: Yet another waste of time.

Gibson is a high efficiency, tree based memory cache server. It is not meant to replace a database, since it was written to be a key-value store to be used as a cache server, but it's not the usual cache server.

...

Gibson is different, it uses a special tree based structure allowing the user to perform operations on multiple  key sets using a prefix expression achieving the same performance grades.

http://gibson-db.in