Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
A few days ago I learned, via a French blog, that I was fined 8,000 euros for quoting a French blogger. I would have known earlier, but the ...
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
Adnane Belmadiaf's blog.
This week, I was delighted to finally reveal Discourse, the app I’ve been working on for most of the last year in secrecy with awesome people. The launch got a lot of attention - we were …
Jehiah 12 - A Personal Annual Report
There’s been a lot of buzz lately in the science blogosphere about a recent experiment where physicists created a gas of quantum particles with a negative temperature – negative as in, …
We wanted Alejandro to have a power wheelchair. We wanted him to be able to move through the world by his own volition and it’s clear that the ability to independently explore his environment is important for his cognitive development on multiple levels. We tried going through the typical process of obtaining a power…
I've been working on a project called Monocle [http://monocle.io] these past few weeks, and it's time to show it to the world. Monocle is an experiment in creating a friendly and intelligent community around sharing quality content with a focus on technology, startups and frankly anything
There comes a time in every photographer's life when they must ask themselves what to do about all those photo RAWs filling up the tiny-compared-to-spinning-platters SSD on their primary machine.
Every so often this article makes the rounds and it annoys me. That isn’t how traffic works and the proposed solutions won’t fix anything. Maybe you can eliminate the annoying stop-and-go, but no one gets home any faster. In fact you can prove that you and everyone behind you get home strictly later than if you had…
UPDATE, 5/7/2013 : Some off-hand remarks in this article about HTML5 drawing speeds generated some controversy in the hackersphere. To read more, see Adrian Holovaty's post In Defense of <canvas> , and my response, Hackers and <canvas> .
“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it” Aung San Suu Kyi: Freedom from Fear Recent events in the UK have been disturbing for believers and s…
Listen to the Post Here Website In the past month or so, I met with a handful of groups who sought guidance on putting together an iOS minimum viable product with a fully functioning backend. These…
My company TMSOFT was recently sued by Lodsys in the eastern district of Texas. I initially thought I was being sued for using a hyperlink in my White Noise application (see below). I know now I’m being sued because the CEO of Lodsys didn’t like what I publicly said about their company. That’s right. I’m being sued…
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
In a discussion about journalism on venture capitalist Fred Wilson's blog, Dave Winer writes: ... professionals make plenty of these kinds of mistakes. For example last week the esteemed NY Times said RSS was software and that it was co-written by a 14-year old on a mail list. It is neither of those things. They never…
Google Reader’s upcoming shutdown and Mailbox’s rapid acquisition have reignited the discussion of free vs. paid services and whether people should pay for products they love to keep them running sustainably.
