Earthquake!

Wow.. just felt my first earthquake in the SF Bay area! Magnitude 5.6 and lasted about 10 seconds!

Click the photo below for a better picture.


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Time to move on.

I've decided that it's time to move on from my current work place onto something different. Being employee #6, it's been great to see how the company has grown... but it's time to try something different.

I've always been fascinated by the mobile space. Think 5-10 years to the future. Will desktop computers still be the main access point for connection to the internet? Compare the number of cellphones in the world verses the number of computers.

My bet is that mobile phones/fit-in-your-pocket internet devices will become more powerful and be *the* preferred way to access our content. With the iPhone and the potentials that it brings, we are starting to see a light out of the stagnation that has been the cell phone industry. I lay the blame mostly on the carriers who want to protect their revenue streams, rather than the exceeding slow technology innovation in the US mobile space. Do you see the phones they have in Europe?

I'm very excited to have accepted a position at mywaves.com. They stream video content onto mobile phones and are very good at doing it. 2M users and 10-15K sign up every day! A very exciting and hot space.

I will also be leaving Java behind and moving full time to Ruby-Rails. When I was doing C/C++, I fought so hard to convince people that the future was Java. I have the same feeling now with Ruby. Java has lots of life and be useful for some time, but I feel its use will become more and more diminished going forward. eg. What technologies are startups using? is it Java? its mostly PHP/Ruby-Rails/Python.

I've been doing more and more development (on the side) in Ruby-Rails and its just easier to get results. It's still a little rough at the moment, but do you remember Java 1.0beta ? :) Look how far things have come. My predications is that the trend will go more towards dynamically typed languages and Java will be regarded as C++ is now.

Anyways.. wish me luck.

Botnets top world's top supercomputers!

I chucked when I read this.

It says that the number of comprised Windows computers that are under Storm Worm control, has more raw distributed computing power than the top supercomputers!

It's really a shame that they are being used to send continuous spam.. think of the things that could be solved if used more constructively.

Dynamo, Highly Available Key-value Store from Amazon

This week I went to the geekSessions meetup which was titled 'Designing Beyond the Database'. It was fairly interesting to hear from real companies about the limitations of Relational Databases (for them) and how they've all moved to implementing their own hash to disk mechanisms. Hadoop was mentioned regularly.

I've had a rough idea on how Amazons S3 works, but Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon.. very cool guy imho) talks about a paper they will be releasing about Amazon Dynamo:

.."Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience....

"..Amazon has developed a number of storage technologies, of which the Amazon Simple Storage Service (also available outside of Amazon and known as Amazon S3), is probably the best known. This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, another highly available and scalable distributed data store built for Amazon’s platform. Dynamo is used to manage the state of services that have very high reliability requirements and need tight control over the tradeoffs between availability, consistency, cost-effectiveness and performance."

Some nice reading if your into this stuff! :)