Posted by tibbetts Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:12:37 GMT
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...
Read more...Posted by tibbetts Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:14:27 GMT
I just got back from the launch party for Buy It Like You Mean It, a startup non-profit that is "enabling the socially conscious consumer". I'm a big fan of what they are doing. As a free-market capitalist, I like to think that the power of markets can solve all kinds of problems. As a realist (and Wall Street technology vendor), I realize that market actors can have wildly different information and expertise.
Consumer goods suffer greatly from this problem. They are produced and distributed by large and complex organizations. Consumers, particularly in traditional retail settings, have little to go on but what it says on the box and the brand. And in recent times, brands have become commodities themselves, with everyone from Martha Stewart to Sesame Street selling their name. In order to make this market work, we need better technology at the point of sale.
Enter Buy It Like You Mean It.
Read more...Posted by tibbetts Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:05:24 GMT
If you've talked to me about programming languages and Wall Street in the last 4 years, I've probably mentioned kx. This is a company which makes a combination programming environment and database based on a language called q which is derived from APL. (Yes, APL, the language invented in 1957 before there was a computer to run it on.) And this environment is in turn used by many of the top quants on Wall Street (and other parts of the financial world) for both research and production systems. Becoming a kx programmer is a good way to double your salary and quadruple your job security.
Well, it's been going around my corner of the blogosphere that kdb+ is now free for personal use. I first heard about it from Marc Adler. You can go download it from the kx download page. This represents a big step towards openness, which I think will be good for everyone.
The q environment is impressive, you have to give them that. There is an emphasis on brevity; the OSX binary of kdb+ is only 227K. That's smaller than the ncurses library it ships with. And brevity doesn't stop there. Utterances in the language are well known for their complexity and impenetrable internal logic. A lot of q code makes obfuscated perl look clear and verbose. It doesn't help that the culture of kx programmers discourages commenting. Error handling is tricky at best, and modularity and maintainability are in short supply. For confusion, q adds a bunch of SQL keywords on top of the previous language, k, in an almost but not quite fully compatible way.
But for all the faults you can kind find some really interesting features in q. And if nothing else, it is an example of a novel programming language, tightly integrated with a data management system, finding commercial success, which is always nice to see. And if you learn it, you might find a sweet job on wall street as a result.
Posted by tibbetts Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:34:00 GMT
A few days ago I found myself giving database advice to a friend with a new startup. His problem is a pretty common one: he has a very large corpus of data, over which he will run compute-intensive proprietary algorithms. Both the data and the computation will require a cluster of machines. He has a prototype based on Postgres. His question to me: should I continue to use a row store (Postgres) or should I use new technology, specifically a column store?
If you read the title of the post, you can already guess that my answer was neither.
Read more...Posted by tibbetts Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:32:19 GMT
Many in the blogosphere noticed when Stonebraker and Dewitt at The Database Column took offense at the idea that map-reduce is the solution to many of life's problems. The idea that a simple idea, promoted by a services company, can blow away 20+ years of distributed database research, bothers them for some reason. Sure, it may not be the best solution to every problem, but it is a sufficient solution to many problems.
Google is quietly at it again, this time with the Google AppEngine.
Read more...Posted by tibbetts Sun, 13 Jan 2008 02:50:13 GMT
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 own (browser-based) IDE, and their own code library and source control system. In my day job I create and sell a novel application platform (for streaming applications), so I like to look at new platforms on many levels. I signed up, and was shortly invited into the bungee beta.
Suffice to say the evaluation didn't go well for me. It isn't clear that there were any problems with the product. But I kept getting blocked by other things in the evaluation. I had trouble logging in. Trouble figuring out their programming paradigm. Trouble deciding what the tool is good for. And more.
After taking their survey, I decided to capture for myself what I learned about the my own bungee connect evaluation process.
Read more...Posted by tibbetts Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:32:00 GMT
If you haven't heard already, Steve Jobs is expected to announce on Monday that iTunes will begin offering 24-hour movie rental for $4. This is widely reported not just by traditional rumor sites, but by people like Salon. And, by and large, people have been complaining about the price. Including me. Digging deeper, I have an armchair economist answer as to why this price feels wrong.
Read more...Posted by tibbetts Sun, 02 Dec 2007 01:11:49 GMT
Most business books have only one good idea. In second-class business books, it's common to name the book after the idea, in the hopes of building some brand recognition. The Change Function fits right into this cliche, providing one good idea, the change function itself. Helpfully, Pip Coburn has the good taste not to pad is his book with many other ideas. Instead, he applies his one good idea to several case studies. If you just want the one idea, read the rest of this post (information wants to be free, after all). If you want case studies and details about applying the idea to an organization, pick up Coburn's book.
Posted by tibbetts Sun, 28 Oct 2007 13:26:00 GMT
I'm still in Montreal, and still thinking about a lot of what I saw and learned at OOSPLA. But I wanted to jot down some links while the cool things were still fresh in my mind. So here is a short set of links worth following that I picked up while at OOPSLA.
Read more...Posted by tibbetts Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:59:24 GMT
Today was my first day at OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal. After a brief exposure to the amazing "Underground City" (really a shopping mall that is infecting downtown like a cancer), I crashed a workshop for which I had not signed up, and had a completely different experience than I had planned at The Popularity Cycle of Graphical Tools, UML, and Libraries of Associations.
The title implied it was the workshop about graphical programming languages and tools. As an author of a graphical programming language, StreamBase StreamSQL EventFlow, it seemed like the place to be. My plan had been to pick up some contacts in the graphical languages space, and learn about what has come before. However, the participants (with one vocal exception) had already accepted as a given that UML would eventually decline in popularity, to be replaced by a and they were focused on what would come next.
