Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Rockford Lhotka on the [physical] middle tier: don't do it I learned n-tier design from Lhotka about a decade ago. I like his blog style because he is super knowledgeable about MS' .NET/DNA/etc but he doesn't hesitate to criticize the company or its technology. When you read the MS blogs you get the same level of authoritativeness but you do get the sense that there are limits to introspection and self-criticism. I give him bonus points for wishing XSLT was awk Also seen on his blog, for you GoF/pattern folks, is http://www.patternshare.org/ 11:14:35 PM      comment []  trackback []

TivoToGo My tivo just updated itself with TivoToGo, which means I can now download video from Tivo to a desktop PC and watch it there. The codec requirement sounds like it has caused some issues for people, but I was able to enter a password and view a show on my wife's PC (which has a DVD) without a problem. The end result is quite lame though, as I have no idea what my rights are to those files. Tivo says they can be written to DVD, but they cannot be played on a DVD or other computers I think thanks to MS's DRM. They also cannot be put back on the Tivo, unless I hook my laptop's video out up to the TV. Oh wait... the video wasn't transferred there initially. Can it be copied there? Do I need a password or is it hardware-bound? Sigh. To think their engineers spent all this time getting crippled mobile video to work and I still can't watch the Quicktime videos I take with my digital camera on the Tivo. I'm sorry to say I agree with the Tivo deathwatch. Let’s get one thing straight: we love TiVo. We’ve been rooting for them for them since we got our first box (an original 14 hour Series 1 box that we still use to this day) and it’s not that we don’t want them to stick around, but we think it’s time to face facts and admit that this company is in some serious trouble. Nah, their demise is not a foregone conclusion, but given events of the past few months (and as much as it tears us up inside to do this), we’re launching a TiVo deathwatch. 11:00:51 PM      comment []  trackback []

The Sourcefrog decloaks. A little more Bazaar-ng is the name of the arch-like version control software sponsored by Canonical, and they have just launched their new website. A quick glance looks like a very useful template for launching a non-trivial project. They have use cases, anti-goals, and positioning statement(s) comparing bazaar and other vcs. They also credit Tom Lord for his important contributions to the state of the art. Hmmm - They are missing a page listing project risks -- I'd be interested in seeing this. As an aside, it's really opaque to me how a non-profit project like ubuntu decides how to spend money on things (e.g. bazaar). It seems like their sugar daddy funding puts them outside the normal decision making process of most open source projects. Commercial endeavors like MySQL have the market to answer to and a profit motive to explain many of their decisions, while the majority of non-commercial projects' evolution can be understood by simple 'scratch-an-itch' motives. I haven't quite figured out where (or whether) ubuntu is located on that spectrum. 10:38:53 PM      comment []  trackback []

High Performance Perl w/perlbal? I found perlbal, a perl-based load balancer/(rewriter?) written and used by LiveJournal, by following some links on Matt Sergeant's blog. Danga has some other tools that look interesting for those in the market for portal-sized scalability. 8:45:13 PM      comment []  trackback []