Algorithms are a fascinating use case for visualization. To visualize an algorithm, we don’t merely fit data to a chart; there is no primary dataset. Instead there are logical rules that describe behavior. This may be why algorithm visualizations are so unusual, as designers experiment with novel forms to better…
ASCII delimited text solves the problems exporting and importing structured text files and is part of the design of the character set. Unfortunately a lot of people and systems use CSV and other pr…
I was pleasantly surprised when somebody shared my traveling salesman animation to reddit and the post made it all the way to reddit’s default front page (i.e. the top 25). The gif racked up over 1.3 …
Great news: PostgreSQL introduced jsonb support, which is real data type with binary storage and indexing ! This work is a confluence of two projects - our hstore and json, which were existed in PostgreSQL for years in somewhat incomplete forms - hstore (10 years old!) implements key-value storage…
This post covers Elasticsearch 1.1.0. In the months since its publication, Elasticsearch has added a comprehensive overview of correctness issues and their progress towards fixing some of these bugs.
Another great post
While dealing with big genetic data sets I often got stuck with limitation of programming languages in terms of reading big files. Also so...
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
For most data scientists, a toolkit like scipy/matplotlib or R becomes so familiar that it becomes almost an extension of their own mind. When fleshing out an idea, we will just open up ipython, write a few lines of code, and display the plot on the screen to get …
I had summarized/discussed a couple papers ( Haystack , Memcache caching ) about Facebook's architecture before. Facebook uses simple arch...
About a week ago, Randall Munroe published Frequency , the 1331st entry in his xkcd webcomic series. Unlike most xkcd comics, it's animated — actually, 5-by-10 grid of animated GIFs. Each describes a scenario (e.g., "one birth," or "someone locks their keys in their care") and blinks at the scenario's purported…
RabbitMQ is a distributed message queue, and is probably the most popular open-source implementation of the AMQP messaging protocol. It supports a wealth of durability, routing, and fanout strategies, and combines excellent documentation with well-designed protocol extensions. I’d like to set all these wonderful…
An animated look at just how much bigger NFL players have gotten over time.
In the previous post, we discovered the potential for data loss in RabbitMQ clusters . In this oft-requested installation of the Jepsen series, we’ll look at etcd : a new contender in the CP coordination service arena. We’ll also discuss Consul ’s findings with Jepsen.
