Monday, November 30, 2009

Road trip to Mt Rainier & Seattle via Weed

Last weekend I went on a road trip to Mt Rainier and Seattle WA via Portland. Portland, OR during Thanksgiving eve and couple that with non-stop rains it wasn't the best time to visit what seemed like a deserted city.

A nice lake on the way to Rainier and the sunny weather mislead us into believing that it would be nice at the summit too. Boy were we wrong..





We headed to Mt Rainier only to find out that the trails needed snow shoes and ski season wasn't going to open until mid-December. Not that I wanted to ski, but bad weather followed us here too. We went as far as the visitor center and still did not catch a glimpse of the summit.







Strangely, Seattle turned out to be nice. It didn't rain for almost 1.5 days straight! If you visit Seattle, make sure you visit the Museum of Flight. My friends who did the Underground Tour said it was also worth it. There were several other places we could've visited but we ran out of time.

We drove past Mt Shastha, CA on our way back and pretended that it was Mt Rainier and justified our long trip to WA.

Mt Shastha from Weed, CA (Yes, Weed is a city in CA and no they don't sell weed).




Until next time....

Roast of NoSQL (by Brian Aker)

For those of you who've been drinking a little too much of the NoSQL Kool-aid lately, here's a funny video by the MySQL hacker Brian Aker picking on Map-reduce:

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Mark Reinhold said - Let there be Closures!

Yes! Finally, somebody is listening - JDK7 might have Closures after all.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

They took his Jars!

(They Took His Dog! (Southpark))

Great! Google announced a new programming language called Go. It looks a like a cross between JavaScript x Python x C. Why go invent another language, like we don't already have enough? There's Scala, Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, not to mention plain Ruby... Does this mean they gave up on C++0x? Looks like it.

I read this y'day on someone's blog and I couldn't agree with him more:

Source: Benjamin Black


Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Debate on Dynamo and Cassandra

Very lengthy and heated debate on Amazon Dynamo and Facebook/Apache Cassandra - Dynamo - Part I: a followup and re-rebuttals. Mostly from the Clustering heavyweights at Facebook. Funny and educative.

Five Years of Firefox

Go to Spreadfirefox.com

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Some interesting software technology trends

Google search trends:



Job trends (Relative numbers, not absolute):



"complex event processing", "jms", "j2ee", "spring", "soa", "cluster programming", "distributed cache" Job Trends graph

Friday, November 06, 2009

The Startup Founder Visa Movement

After mulling over whether to post this link or not for a while, worrying whether some might find such topics "unsavory" I decided to post this anyway.

There are many luminaries in the Industry who support this. Naturally, there will also be many against this (justifiably so).

Anyway...here it is. There are a lot of links to follow in this article: Startup Founder Visa Movement

Cheers!

Thursday, November 05, 2009

I *heart* LINQ

.Net 4 is looking more and more attractive. I absolutely loved and at the same time was jealous of the LINQ feature in .Net.

Now with PLINQ (Parallel LINQ) it just become so attractive that it's almost illegal. At least that's how I see it compared to the language features in Java, which hasn't changed since 1.5.

Those of you who are familiar with Event Stream Processing and Continuous Queries, PLINQ is like a dream come true.

Sure, we have Fork-Join and the awesome "java.util.concurrency" package but the language features are somewhat lacking. Where are Closures, to start with?

This presentation by Stephen Toub is a very good introduction - Parallel programming in .Net 4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Fall colors (or false colors) in Sonoma, CA

Last weekend I drove all the way up to Sonoma with friends hoping to see Fall colors. After doing a lot of research on the best place to view Fall colors in California, I settled on Annadel State Park in Sonoma county. Man...were we in for a disappointment.

Upong reaching Annadel SP, we realized that all the trees were still green and showed no signs of changing color. It had rained a week ago and the ground was still moist. What were we thinking? If you want to see Fall colors in CA, you should just do it in your neighborhood park. Most of the trees here don't change color.





Anyway, we did a 4-5 mile loop hike to Lake Ilsanjo in Annadel. The only highlight was a small snake that crossed our path.



Next time, we'll just go to New England or Oregon or Seattle.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Volatiles and concurrency - there's still so much to learn

I was trying my hand at tuning some concurrency code last week. The good folks at the Concurrency-interest group showed me how just much there is yet to learn. Sigh..

Here is the Thread - Lazy fetching and volatile fields

Ashwin.

NoSQL East 2009 summaries

Useful notes - day 1 and day 2. Conference site.