User: anders

Channels

Stanford Seminar - Joe Armstrong of Ericsson

Another good Joe Armstrong talk.

  • systems that they originally designed purely for fault-tolerance did better on scalability benchmarks than systems designed for scalability. Led to the observation that they are related and instead of a tradeoff (“you can have either scalability or fault-tolerance”), instead you have “you can have both or neither”
  • according to Alan Kay, messaging was really the key idea of OOP, as it truly decouples objects (original idea in Smalltalk/Squeak, but lost in XEROX PARC work)
  • error handling must be external because the machine the error happened on might be dead. Design fundamentally is to not have to program differently for everything running on one machine vs multiple machines.
  • Erlang terms are designed to be serialized/deserialized without parsing (just very low level marshalling). Part of the reason that databases like Riak can be so fast.

distributed systems erlang

Idea: private channels

Will require a bit more of a social network concept functioning with followers/etc. But it would be good to be able to designate that posts in a channel can only be viewed by users that you have specifically designated.

meta

Allowing a user to edit their posts wouldn’t be hard, technically. I’m kind of thinking that I like the current setup though, where you can delete, but not edit. It encourages you to not put too much into a single post. It also fits with the “publish” nature of the site. Once you’ve hit “submit”, it’s kind of like sending an email; anyone else could get/read it immediately. So you should think before you submit instead of after.

meta

As of last week, Phoenix and I have our Dutch resident ID cards (good for two years), are officially registered with the city of Utrecht, and have our Burgerservicenummer’s (BSNs), which are the tax ids.

We still need domestic bank accounts (we were waiting on BSNs) so Phoenix can get paid, we can pay our rent in Euros, and we can get chip and pin debit cards, which a lot of kiosks and stores here basically require. Unfortunately, it looks like I may never be able to get one. The woman at the bank claimed that I could not open an account without an employment contract with a Dutch company. It seems like there’s probably a way around that, but in the meantime, we may only have one account between us.

netherlands

Netflix for the rest of us

Docker container for overseas Netflix proxy

devops

Introducing GIFV

imgur details how they are making mp4s out of gifs

Monads Without Pretension

Monad tutorial using Python and objects.

functional

Consensus Filters

Algorithms for approximate consensus. Nodes can asymptotically all converge on (roughly) the same value with very small amount of inter-node communication.

distributed systems

Hello there!

Finch is my new super-simple micro blogging platform.

I just want somewhere to very quickly dump random links, ideas, and code snippets without all the overhead of a proper blog setup. Stuff too big for twitter but too random to put on my main blog.

It’s written in Go using a sqlite database.

meta