The Cave

Yay!

I enjoyed the Myth books when they first came out (yes, I’m not exactly a spry young college puke. Deal with it.) but the opening chapter ‘quotes’ were always well chosen.

Language – just like OS and other tools – is all too often looked to as the primary performance factor when designing a system (“needs to be C++”, “can’t be Java”, “dear lord won’t Python totally suck?” What fools these mortals be.

Another fascinating Erlang post. I really need to find some time to play around with Erlang. And more interesting Erlang bits, plus code.

Excellent advice on design considerations for “extremely super-scaled applications“. I’ve done similarly in some scenarios, where warranted. These kinds of things become more important as your load (seriously) scales up, and equally are overkill and painful to use when not warranted. Right tool, right job.

Now that’s cute. Multi-tabbed RDP client, and freeware to boot. Very handy.

Kosh: Ahh — you seek meaning. Talia Winters: Yes. Kosh: Then listen to the music, not the song.

New features in Oracle 11g. Holy f*ck! Color me impressed: The (many) smarter adaptive and self-tuning features are welcome Lots of performance improvements. A few that notably caught my eye: simple_integer Faster DML triggers NFS server-side connection pooling LOBs lots of load-blancing perks /*+result_cache*/ SQL hint and a related ALTER command _newsort_enabled={TRUE|FALSE} “Interval partitioning for [...]

JasperReports 2.0 was just released.

WotC announced Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Some actual details can be found in this post. More v4 news here.

Guido speaks again. Interesting stuff, even if you’re not playing with P3K any time soon.

I’d never heard of this before arriving at MA, but then again I’d never worked on a Windows system running in the Unix model – lots of processes. The Desktop Heap limitations in Windows 2000 were a major source of annoyance, puzzlement and constraint for WMOS, due to its architecture – lots of processes (>100 [...]

Powertoy for Vista.

WCurses is a curses module for Python that works under Microsoft Windows. Handy.