Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
Ryan McIntyre: "Given five or six performance doublings since 1995 courtesy of improvements in clock speed, bus speed, architecture changes from 32 to 64 bit, additional cache memory and faster RAM, a conservative estimate would be that today’s single CPU 1-U “pizza box” web server is roughly fifty times faster than last decade’s model. Couple [...]
David Temkin: "Another difference between ISVs and Web sites is in the type of developer they employ and the assumptions those developers bring to the table. Rarely do developers at Web companies have experience creating interactive client applications; nearly all of the developers at Web companies are server developers, and the people working on the [...]
In: building online products|cool tools|management & operations|software
23 Jan 2005As recently as 18 months ago it seemed there wasn’t much to handle software product development except either bug databases, generic wikis and intranet platforms, or maybe expensive and (for my purposes) cumbersome enterprise software, which is not what I’m interested about. Now that I’m looking again at this though (we need something to keep [...]
Here’s data sampled from this PDF about Livejournal presented by the Danga team (Lisa and Brad): 100+ servers 5+ million accounts, about half active 50M+ dynamic page views/day The document explains all the steps over five years from one shared server to the current infrastructure, with users spread around database clusters, two proxy/load-balancing layers (at [...]
Drew McLellan writes about the downside of incremental upgrades to web applications: "Do everything you can, no matter how sound your reasoning, to group process and interface changes together into a package. Call it a new version or whatever and tell the user about the changes you
Even with all the help Moore’s Law provides, it seems there’s a never-ending need for more web scalability, which probably reflects that companies no longer want to just through more hardware at a problem and instead try to get better bang for the buck through improved software architecture, and that increased online use (in hours [...]
The Allmusic beta preview I’ve seen looks nice, though it felt a bit sluggish (the dll-based architecture and long-winded URLs are still there) and there are some bugs left, so I’m not sure the site is really ready for launch today as advertised (search gets me a javascript error, that alone is a showstopper). One [...]
David Sifry: "And we’re striving to handle the load. But to be perfectly frank, it isn’t easy. We’ve had some bugs and some outages – and for that I am truly sorry. I don’t think the service is fast enough or stable enough. So, stability and fast response time is job #1, over new features [...]
A few minutes ago I was getting an error while trying to logon at Orkut. Ain’t it strange that Login.aspx spits out this: "Generated Wed, 05 May 2004 21:15:34 GMT by www.orkut.com (squid)" Squid on NT? Well, actually, yes. But isn’t .NET good enough to handle caching? It gets more tricky because apparently Orkut runs [...]
Jason Fried: "We recently added a new feature to Basecamp that people have been asking for since we launched back in February. It’s a simple little feature called comment editing (people have always been able to edit their posts, just not their comments on a post). Yep, now people can edit their comments after they [...]
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.