Bill McCoy: Announcing Open Publication Distribution System

Bill McCoy: Announcing Open Publication Distribution System: "Announcing Open Publication Distribution System

Stanza, the leading iPhone eBook software, includes an excellent online catalog system that enables users to seamlessly acquire free and commercial content from within the application. The Lexcycle team built this system in an open, extensible manner using Atom. Adobe and Lexcycle have been working together on Adobe PDF and EPUB eBook support, and now we are deepening that collaboration in working together, along with the Internet Archive and others, to establish an open architecture enabling widespread discovery, description, and access of book and other published material on the open web."

Build Your Own Multitouch Surface Computer | Maximum PC

Build Your Own Multitouch Surface Computer | Maximum PC: "It all started while we were researching an article on future user interfaces. Touch interfaces are hardly futuristic at this point, but multi-touch hardware like the Microsoft Surface or the iPhone is just starting to become a big deal, and we decided to see what big things are going on in that field. What we found that surprised us the most wasn’t anything about the future of multitouch; it was about something that people are doing right now."

WireTap Anywhere | Ambrosia Software, Inc.

WireTap Anywhere | Ambrosia Software, Inc.

How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data - Bret Taylor's blog

Follow that story...
Relational model fading.

How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data - Bret Taylor's blog: "How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
February 27, 2009
Background

We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed. Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and 'likes' to friend lists.

As our database has grown, we have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. We did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as we grew, scaling our existing features to accomodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features."

LL Future

Evidently Perl 6 and Ruby are lightweight languages!

Whatever. Sounds like this conference was really interesting. One comment by Larry Wall surprised me:

“We learn natural languages by repeating what other people say. We learn programming languages by copying what other people do, and eventually, we discover the meaning”

Reminds me of Kent Beck: "Monkey see, monkey do."
And Richard Gabriel's essay: Designed As Designer.

Open Source Postcards from Japan: ”Lightweight Language Future”: Japan’s Largest Dynamic Language Conference Held in Tokyo: "”Lightweight Language Future”: Japan’s Largest Dynamic Language Conference Held in Tokyo
On August 30th, approximately 1000 “Lightweight Language” enthusiasts gathered in Nakano, Tokyo, for the sixth annual Conference named “Lightweight Language Future” that was held by LL Future Organization http://ll.jus.or.jp/2008/info (Japanese)."

The Mitsos Reverse Launch

Breakthrough in paragliding...

The Mitsos Reverse Launch: "The main advantages of the technique are:

* Better overall control of the glider.
* You can steer the glider as it comes up.
* You can stop it overshooting in strong winds.
* No need to release the brakes at all."

Google Reader (162)

Looks like just the thing for TV and Mt. Tam trails!

Google Reader (162): "Lupine Bike & Adventure Lights
from Cool Tools

In the winter I mountain bike one to two nights a week after dark on fast technical single track trails. I have built my own lights and purchased commercially-available lighting systems upwards of $400. I have tried halogen, HID, and LED lighting systems. Until now they were all a compromise. I am now using the Lupine Tesla 700 LED light, and I have to say it makes everything I have used up to this point seem like a silly toy. Weighing a mere 102g, this light outshines my brightest HID system, is more efficient than my smallest halogen, and has the best construction, controls, and mounting system I have seen in a light."