Tracy

"RRS pricing starts at a base tier of $0.10 per Gigabyte per month, 33% cheaper than the more durable storage." - Tracy

"Cages is a Java library of distributed synchronization primitives that uses the Apache ZooKeeper system. If you can run a ZooKeeper machine or cluster, then you can use Cages to synchronize and coordinate data access, data manipulation and data processing, configuration change and more esoteric things like cluster membership across multiple machines." - Tracy

"One of the challenges that comes with moving to MongoDB is figuring how to best model your data. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for designing schemas for RDBMSs, these rules don't always apply to MongoDB. The simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema-free data structures means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. Not only that, MongoDB has several unique features, such as atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of schemas that make sense." - Tracy

"We are proposing to require that most ABS issuers file a computer program that gives effect to the flow of funds, or “waterfall,” provisions of the transaction. We are proposing that the computer program be filed on EDGAR in the form of downloadable source code in Python. … (page 205)" - Tracy

So will the source code that runs the new world economy be written in Python ? Could be worse, but I'd worry about the precision of floating point numbers if these snippets were actually used with CPython ... - Andrew Perry

doh! - Tracy

Good stuff. - Tracy

"Rivest, a professor at MIT who worked with Shamir and Len Adleman to design the original RSA algorithm, also said that he still gets email and calls from people wanting to use the MD5 hash function, which he designed in 1991. MD5 was widely used, but has been shown to have several weaknesses in recent years. "I always say to them, 'Don't you understand that MD5 is an extinct hash function? It's dead,'" Rivest said." - Tracy

"The area where we are having trouble right now is that purple section in the middle that says "memcaches". Specifically, we are having problems with memcachedb, which is where we store a bunch of precomputed listings, like all the listing pages, profile pages, inboxes; pretty much any list on reddit that is too expensive to calculate on the fly. A few years ago, we decided to md5 all of our cache keys. We did this because at the time memcached (which is what memcachedb is based on) could only take keys of a certain length. In fact, the version it is based on still has this limitation. MD5ing the keys was a good solution to this problem, so we thought." - Tracy

Clojure + Google AppEngine - Tracy

"I've written a textbook entitled "Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective". It will be published by CRC Press, part of the Taylor and Francis group, on 2nd April 2009. The book is aimed at computer science and engineering undergraduates studing machine learning and artificial intelligence. There are lots of Python code examples in the book, and the code is available here. Where special datasets are used they are provided with the code, and there are links to additional datasets at the bottom of the page." - Tracy

Python driven coffee roasting. - Tracy

"Much like MP3, H.264 is currently liberally licensed and also has a license that changes from year to year, depending on market conditions. This means that something that’s free today might not be free tomorrow. Like sending an H.264 file over the Internet." - Tracy

"The AppVault Pro V1.1 and AppVault Lite V1.1 infringed copyright of the AppBox Pro and AppBox Lite. The AppVault Pro/Lite application is available since Jan 4, 2010. They have just same graphics, layouts and features with different color for Ruler, Level, Battery, Tip Calc, Periodic Calc, and more in the AppBox Pro." - Tracy

Has anybody tried both apps? It would suck to get knocked out for feature competition but you shouldn't be stealing the design. After a couple of quick searches I'm still not sure. AppVault: http://www.geardiary.com/2009... AppBox: http://www.148apps.com/reviews... The bubble levels are very similar. Also, for AppVault, it kinda looks like they said "copy AppBox, but make it look vault/crypt-ish instead". The fact that there are app-aggregators is pretty interesting. - Tracy

"Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is launching a new service dubbed API-status.com today, a website that displays realtime availability and performance of popular, public APIs." - Tracy

"Earlier blog posts by some of the paper's authors characterized MapReduce as "a major step backwards."5,6 In this article, we address several misconceptions about MapReduce in these three publications:" - Tracy

"For example, the automatically generated code to parse a Rankings protocol buffer record runs in 20 nanoseconds per record as compared to the 1,731 nanoseconds required per record to parse the textual input format used in the Hadoop benchmark mentioned earlier." - Tracy

"Of the secret chemicals, 151 are made in quantities of more than 1 million tons a year and 10 are used specifically in children's products, according to the EPA." - Tracy

"In early 2003, officials in Georgia returned nearly 7,000 pounds to Beef Products after cooks who were making meatloaf for state prisoners detected a “very strong odor of ammonia” in 60-pound blocks of the trimmings, state records show. “It was frozen, but you could still smell ammonia,” said Dr. Charles Tant, a Georgia agriculture department official. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” - Tracy

"Unaware that the meat was treated with ammonia — since it was not on the label — Georgia officials assumed it was accidentally contaminated and alerted the agriculture department. In their complaint, the officials noted that the level of ammonia in the beef was similar to levels found in contamination incidents involving chicken and milk that had sickened schoolchildren." - Tracy

"Soon after getting initial approval from the agriculture department, the company devised a plan to make a less alkaline version of the beef, internal company documents show" ... "Samples of the treated beef obtained by The Times this month showed a pH as low as 7.75, according to an analysis by two laboratories. Dr. Michael P. Doyle, a food industry consultant and director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, said one point on the exponential pH scale was a considerable difference, and “could have a significant effect on the antimicrobial effectiveness of the ammonia.” - Tracy

"With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone." - Tracy

I need more free time. - Tracy

"Bayer CropScience LP must pay about $2 million for losses sustained by two Missouri farmers when an experimental variety of rice the company was testing cross-bred with their crops, a federal jury ruled." - Tracy

"The variety eventually "contaminated" more than 30 percent of U.S. ricelands, Don Downing, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said at the start of the trial." - Tracy

Tick tock. Looking more likely that genetically engineered crops could trigger a collapse of the industrial food system. A bias towards optimism and human errors capable of self-replication does not bode well. - Tracy

"If the hub supports XML entity expansion (and some implementations clearly do), the attacker could easily create a feed that is minuscule on their end, but would expand considerably when pushed to the victim’s server." Heh. XML sucks for data representation. WhereTF are the NoXML meetings? I'll buy the pizza. Long live JSON. Die XML-scum. Regardless, a lot of these server abuse issues have to be dealt with for any type of server that will be processing untrusted input. - Tracy

"In the meantime, I'm happy to say that I think every issue he points out has already been or can easily be mitigated in the hubs that are out there, the biggest help being automatic subscription refreshing (http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com/svn...) which can narrow the window of any attack significantly." http://groups.google.com/group... - Tracy

Sometimes I feel like a Caltrans worker late at night. I'm not sure that I agree that "Maintenance really is easy." There have been some architectural changes that had to be performed in-flight that I called many things but easy wasn't one of them. Things are really interesting with so many public APIs changing so frequently. - Tracy