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Scalr
By it’s own description, “Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2″. While I haven’t yet tried it, there certainly seems to be a market for management tools riding on top of EC2. Rightscale.com, a commercial alternative to Scalr, can attest to that.
I find the type of automation offered fairly compelling. We are approaching the day where deploying your application at internet scale will be push-button simple. Perhap’s Time’s person of the year this time ’round should be a cloud.
Standalone, Java implementation of Bloom Filters
I wrote an implementation of Bloom Filters which you can download from here. This implementation offers some advantages
- Pluggable hash functions
- Pluggable “bit stores” (an array of bits)
- An option to store the bloom filter in a file on disk. This allows for bloom filters bigger than your JVM heap by using Memory Mapped Files
- An option to store the bloom filter in ram.
Instructions for using the bloom filter are in the javadocs.
Standalone, Java implementation of Cuckoo Hashing
While spending some time with Bloom Filters, I came across an interesting hashing technique called Cuckoo Hashing. In short, Cuckoo Hashing is a technique for building a hashtable with guaranteed O(1) access time. Very useful. Unfortunately, after poking around the net a bit, I wasn’t able to find any standalone implementations in Java. So I wrote one. If you find it useful, please drop me a line.
Scrum Master
I’m now a certified Scrum Master.
Cloud computing service from microsoft
You can’t make this stuff up. The world is changing. Microsoft is offering a cloud computing service to host your data, much like SimpleDB from Amazon. Wow.
Analytic Hierarchy Process Tool
Have you ever faced a difficult, multi-factored decision? Everyone does. But sometimes the factors involved are more complex than can be held in the human mind. In addition, human beings are not always very good at estimating or compelling themselves to be methodical. Here enters the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a decision support tool for assisting human beings with complex decisions.
I’ve leaned on AHP on occasion, especially when faced with a complex decision and a group of individuals with differing opinions. It’s one of the best tools I’ve found for grounding a decision in the real and in the concrete. It forces a person (or group of persons) to build a heirarchy of decision factors and evaluate their decision using specific measurements. The end result is a decision that’s often surprising, but well grounded and difficult to argue about without being specific. It’s wonderful.
Unfortunately, there are few decent tools especially cheap and/or free ones. A spreadsheet has often been as good as it gets. I’ve been fed up with that situation for years and have finally begun to do something about it — I wrote my own tool. It’s a browser based tool that, for now at least, is free to use though I am not making the source code free — at least not yet. The tool has numerous rough edges, I know, but just enough of it works to make it useful. Caveat emptor, but feel free to use the tool as needed.
The free-for-use AHP tool is available here.
World Wide Telescope — I can hardly wait!
If you haven’t seen a preview yet, you’re missing out. Check this video.
I wish I new the actual release date…. World Wide Telescope
Tools Post 2
Here’s this week’s batch of tools I’ve been using.
- Firefox extension for EC2. I love AWS…
- TrueCrypt. Version 5 is just released as of this writing.
- YSlow. Tool for analyzing why your website is so slow
- Netbeans IDE. After languishing for a long, long time. Netbeans has done an incredible turnaround; enough of a turnaround that I’m willing to experimentally give up IntelliJ. We’ll see…..
How to Ace a Silicon Valley Job Interview
WSDM’08 Video Lectures
The video lectures from WSDM08 are available online.
http://videolectures.net/wsdm08_stanford/