A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting at MIT on Cloud Computing. One of the questions from the audience was how cloud computing impacts high performance computing. The response was that in a cloud of inexpensive commodity servers, scientific applications must learn to spread applications across large numbers of parallel compute nodes. This [...]

I switched to Wordpress. Let’s see if anyone notices.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend Edward Tufte’s lecture in Boston thanks to StreamBase. This was one of his standard lectures on information presentation, for which he has become famous. As usual, it came complete with a set of his books. This was convenient since sometime in my last 4 [...]

I replaced my Sony Reader with a hipper new Amazon Kindle, and I’m totally disappointed. The Kindle has a few good ideas, but it is terribly executed. I’m returning it today (something Amazon is making pleasant enough) and buying another Reader.
Read on for more detail…

Catching up on email this Saturday, I got the opportunity to take a survey about my experience evaluating Bungee Connect. Evaluating bungee connect has been something that has popped onto my radar several times. They purport to be an application platform for web applications. They have their own language, their own ui toolkit, their [...]

The opening keynote for this year’s VLDB was a great presentation by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, describing their data management challenges. I particularly appreciated it because it echoed something I’ve been saying for a few years now: Web-scale companies have problems which cannot be managed with standard RDBMS, or with any common research systems, [...]

A few weeks ago Bruce Schneier discovered a classic economics paper, “The Market for Lemons”. The paper describes the behavior of markets where sellers have detailed information about the products, particularly the quality of the products, that buyers do not have. It uses the example of used cars.
In these markets, the price buyers are willing [...]

I was chatting last night with a Web 2.0-oriented friend of mine, and applications that support disconnected operation and synchronization came up. These have been in the noos a bit lately, with the release of the Ruby on Rails based Joyent Slingshot and talk of the Flash based Adobe Apollo.
The cliche that those who [...]

Two weeks ago I got a new laptop from work. After extensive hemming and hawing, I went with an Apple MacBook (the black one, cause it looks hotter^Wmore professional). Previous to this I had been running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T40 bought around the founding of StreamBase. My goal for the change was to [...]

I got invited into the Beta at Me.dium, a new collaborative/social browsing system. It’s no dis-similar from the third-party-comments system I was pondering back in the spring, if anyone remembers that. However, rather than being focussed on comments, it is also focussed on real-time browsing. You get a side-bar that shows you what people are [...]