Vlado Handziski

It is way more beautiful in real life :) My own photos will be up once I am back on broadband in two weeks. - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"Last few weeks I was busy implementing CGL Map Reduce a streaming based map reduce implementation that uses a content dissemination network for all its communication. Our main objective behind this implementation is to avoid the overhead imposed by the technique adopted by both Google and Hadoop in their map-reduce implementations, that is communicate data via files." - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

This is good but I wish they'd made Hadoop use a pub-sub system so that they would be comparing pub-sub versus using a distributed file system. As it is they're comparing a different model (pub-sub) written in C++ with Hadoop's Java distributed file system. It's hard to tell if the performance differences they're seeing mean anything. - Adewale Oshineye

"The SWARM of autonomous beings by their very nature will have emergent and complex behavior. They will flock , flirt, dance and interact, and their actions will surprise and astonish even us, their creators. They are simple, but together they will behave in ways more complex than we can predict. A lot like LIFE ." - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"Resource-constrained sensor gateways can use the WebSphere MQ Telemetry Transport (MQtt) protocol to communicate with the WebSphere MQ brokers. It is an open and lightweight publish/subscribe protocol designed specifically for remote telemetry applications and optimized for Networkings over low-bandwidth, high-cost networks. A Java implementation of the client side of the MQtt protocol can be downloaded from this location." - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"The next thing I would like to see is this same test run on very low power servers. Assuming the fairly beefy nodes used above are 350W each (they may well be more), the overall cluster ignoring networking will be 318kW and it ran for 209 seconds which is 18.490kW/hrs. Let’s focus on power and show what can be sorted for 1kW/hr. The kW/hr sort." - James Hamilton - Vlado Handziski

Note how few contestants there were and compare the number of cores used compared to last year's winner. The methodology of this contest is somewhat flawed. They don't seem to compare like with like. - Adewale Oshineye

cool - accesine

"As yet unseen footage of the first stable version of levelHead, an augmented-reality spatial-memory game by Julian Oliver. Warning! This is a spoiler for the first 3 cubes: the easy Red Cube, the tricky Green Cube and the ridiculously difficult Orange Cube." - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"Except Google might well be moving away from XMPP to a binary protocol for Google Talk on mobile devices, in Android, to reduce the communication overhead. While XMPP support will probably get back into Android, maybe a binary protocol (not this one) is better suited to high-volume notifications?" - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

""touched echo" is a minimal medial intervention in public space. The visitors of the Brühl's Terrace (Dresden, Germany) are taken back in time to the night of the terrible air raid on 13th February 1945. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions. While leaning on the balustrade the sound of airplanes and explosions is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through their arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction)." - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"What’s intriguing is the notion that we can learn about Ultra LARGE Scale issues by working at any extreme scale, where the extremes “break” the received software engineering wisdom." - Vlado Handziski

It is nice to see that people are starting to understand that the large scale Internet/Web and the Wireless Sensor Networks communities have a lot to learn from each other. - Vlado Handziski

Miniature optofluidic microscope chip that can be integrated with mobile phones, etc. - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily just wrote this post about people's lack of understanding of error bars in the graphical representation of data. The post is very interesting and I encourage people to take the quiz that he has posted on the correct interpretation of error bars." - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"After many months in the making, we ‘re announcing the Mobile Industry Atlas. The Atlas is a visual map of who’s who in the mobile handset industry, available in glossy A2 wallchart and PDF format. This is a comprehensive map showcasing 400+ leading companies across 30 market sectors, spanning all major players involved from handset design through retailing including development and delivery of hardware, software, SIM cards, services and content." - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"There is a personal motivation in proving that java technology can help solve many of the technical problems of the field. The HA field is very fragmented many many vendors, many standards, few dominant, a lot of proprietary standards. Using the modularity of JBoss we plan on supporting various such protocols out of the box." - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

I think that it should be clear by now that different applications will have different requirements in terms of the naming scheme as well as the underlying notification and subscription routing. The trade-off between the expressiveness of the naming model and the complexity of the matching, routing and forwarding will have to be selected in each case separately. - Vlado Handziski

"Kemp's model, developed with Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum, runs data through an assortment of potential maps -- trees, linear orders, multidimensional spaces, rings, dominance hierarchies, cliques and so on -- and decides which type of relationship best fits the data." - Vlado Handziski

Interview with ..."Jeff Becker of Honeywell Process Solutions about wireless technologies for industrial use including wireless sensor networks, WiFi, wireless for control and an update on the ISA SP100 committee." - Gary Mintchell - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

"Interview with Kris Pister, CTO and founder of Dust Networks discusses wireless sensor networks, what mesh networking is, offers evidence of reliability and security, and discusses the economics of implementing the technology." - Gary Mintchell - Vlado Handziski via Bookmarklet

He definitely won the harts of the people here. More than 250.000 showed up, demonstrating that the spirit of the transatlantic partnership is still very much alive. Winning the battle at home will be much harder... - Vlado Handziski

Returning from almost a week offline and looking at my Inbox makes me wonder why the current generation of Gmail labs extensions is limited to simple UI modifications. With all the data at their disposal, they are in the best position to provide us with powerful AI support to deal with the information torrent... - Vlado Handziski

We were talking about this at lunch and we didn't have any really workable ideas on how to do this. What concrete things can be done to help people "deal with the information torrent?" - Adewale Oshineye

I think one can start with small steps like automatic labeling, priority assignment, etc. For example, if I constantly reply within a small window to messages from particular set of contacts, mark incoming mail from this set with higher priority. - Vlado Handziski

Another example: Labeling based on keywords sometimes fails (a rule labeling all mails containing "Call for Papers" as "cfp" also marks direct correspondence containing the phrase, although this is not in line with the "semantic" meaning of the label -- CfP announcements). Gmail should use the knowledge that a mail has been sent to a lot of other users to increase the precision in labeling such "announcement" mails, etc. - Vlado Handziski

"As the dust is clearing after the storm, a new landscape is unveiling in the mobile industry; one where the balance of power is concentrating around 7 centres of gravity: Adobe, Apple, Google, LiMo, Microsoft, Nokia and Qualcomm. In other words, the industry is transitioning from a horizontal structure of operating system offerings circa 2002 to a vertical structure of complete offerings circa 2008 (as all industries do, based on the double-helix management theory)." - Vlado Handziski

"But I have to wonder: is there a better way? Is there something beyond RHTML, Views, and Templates? What examples would you point to of web development stacks that avoided degenerating into yet more hazardous, difficult to maintain tag soup? Is there anything truly better on the horizon?" - Vlado Handziski

I must say I was a bit disappointed that nobody in the comments mentioned Divmod's Stan (part of Nevow) as alternative. I think it is one of the better ways for generating markup in python. For a lightweight introduction check the "Meet Stan" tutorial: http://www.kieranholland.com/c... - Vlado Handziski

"Why ruin a perfectly good messaging format by throwing this RPC junk into the package?" - Vinoski - Vlado Handziski

"My advice to Google, then, is to just drop all the service and RPC stuff. Seriously. It causes way more problems than it’s worth, it sends people down a fundamentally flawed distributed computing path, and it takes away from what is otherwise a nice message format and structure." - Vinoski - Vlado Handziski

I am enjoying the discussion between Steve and Adewale in the comments... - Vlado Handziski

Maybe the days of Android programming using Python are not that far away... - Vlado Handziski

They are big on Python.. So this is inevitable ;) - Muthu Ramadoss

"They are essentially creating a messaging bus that can provide schema translations with the added benefit of push / pull impedance matching. If REST is a web service (or close enough), then Gnip's a managed ESB." - Jim Stogdill - Vlado Handziski

"Also, the web being the web (and not an enterprise), It seems that there is a growing trend towards the use of XMPP as a generic XML routing bus, a role that makes it look suspiciously like an ESB." - Jim Stogdill - Vlado Handziski

"For all the buzz about the Apple "it just works" mystique, the current iTunes Store design surely doesn't -- at least not the same way the rest of the web does. And I, for one, can't get behind that." - Jeff Atwood - Vlado Handziski

Amen to that. And I wonder how they manage to make it sluggish even on a brand new Vista laptop. - Thomas Brox Røst

:) I for one will be waiting for the Android phones to hit the market later this year - Vlado Handziski

"There’s a spec from the XMPP council called ‘XEP: microblogging over XMPP‘ - and now there’s also something called OpenMicroBlogging.org. Somewhere between these two specs, and perhaps combined together we’ll (as an industry as a whole) achieve interop." - Marc Canter - Vlado Handziski