Mole End

The Mole recently attended an SDForum Software Architecture and Modeling SIG talk on Cassandra, a "distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size across many commodity servers". Cassandra was developed at Facebook to speed up certain searches; to the Mole's understanding, it was built to support indexing of user-to-user messages by the words in those messages. (That is, if a message contains the phrase "Jeering Mole", the words "Jeering" and "Mole" will be put into the index as keys with the message id as the corresponding value.) The developers seemed to have hopes or expectations that Cassandra will be rolled out more widely into the Facebook infrastructure.

The Mole hesitates to contrast this talk with the previous one ("The Magic Behind Multi-tenancy", which The Mole described as a righteous hack) with the phrase "from the sublime to the ridiculous". There is some possibility that The Mole's understanding was more limited than he realized, a deficiency not compensated for by excellent presentation skills. More likely, however, is the possibility that Casandra is just hacking -- fancy, upscale hacking by talented programmers -- without the clean architectural lines of Salesforce.com's delightful perversion of relational database design principles. [The Mole promises to blog at greater length about that talk.]

But what really distressed The Mole was slide 19 of the Cassandra talk, "Information Flow in the Implementation". The content does not bother The Mole: it actually seems quite interesting, in its original context. The problem is that the diagram and the text below it are taken without attribution from the paper "The \phi Accrual Failure Detector" by Naohiro Hayashibara, Xavier Defago, Rami Yared and Takuya Katayama [pdf]. Poor form, gentlemen.

Overall, The Mole's conclusion is that these speakers are clever but sloppy. They have mashed up several good ideas -- deliberately accepting errors in order to achieve high availability, using hashing to load balance, accrual failure detection -- into a system that apparently works. While the result may scale to larger server farms, the process by which is was delevered will not scale to more substantial projects.

[The title of this entry is indeed meant to echo the title of the famous story by Jacques Futrelle.]

Last night The Mole went to the Computer History Museum to hear David Alan Grier's talk "Too Soon to Tell: Essays for the End of the Computer Revolution" (drawn largely from his new book of the same title). The Mole usually emerges from such talks energized and enthusiastic, with a reinvigorated commitment to moving back to doing substantial software work at a high-performing outfit. (The reader is welcome to draw his or her own conclusions about what may or may not be implied about The Mole's current employer.) On this occasion, however, The Mole found himself dispirited. Not only do the glory days of software appear to be past, but also glory goes only to the young.

With some food (starting with a light meal at Totoro with Tim Kay (founder of Boopsie) after the talk) and twenty four hours between him and the talk, The Mole has regained his equilibrium and says "Onion sauce!" to such defeatist musings. It has to be possible to do interesting technical work even when family responsibilities make living on packaged ramen in a dump with six co-founders and working 18 hours a day an unreasonable approach to success.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A key difference in the Mole's opinion is that magic is impenetrable, impervious to reason; technology is not. In the case at hand, the Mole is certain he could learn the intricacies of b2evolution (and, if necessary, php). As he has not, however, the white screen of nothingness that presented itself after an attempt at a point-and-click site upgrade some months ago was quite daunting. The Mole thought he might have to immerse himself in the internals of blog engines.

Like the Sorceror's Apprentice, however, the Mole muttered incantations beyond his understanding (i.e., clicked the upgrade button again) and found his blog restored.

So the Mole is back in business, gamely scribbling inanities that the world can continue to ignore vigorously.

The Mole has started a list of Recommended Reading. The first few entries are books so wise, so famous, so well respected, and so widely accepted that the Mole cannot add anything useful by way of a new review. If you need more words on why to read any of them, use your favorite search engine and you will have no trouble finding dozens of hearty, wordy, recommendations.

The Mole will, however, send a jeering "Onion sauce!" in your direction if you knowingly choose not to read them.

After many years of having no visible presense on the web, I have decided it is time to get with the program.

Frankly, though, the image that comes to mind is that of the poet Avrillia in The Garden of the Plynck:

...[Sara] leaned over the balustrade and looked down into Nothing. It was very gray.

"Do you throw your poems down there?" she asked of Avrillia, in inexpressible wonder.

"Of course," said Avrillia. "I write them on rose-leaves, you know--"

"Oh, yes!" breathed Sara. She still thought she had never heard of anything that sounded lovelier than poems written on rose-leaves.

"Petals, I mean, of course," continued Avrillia, "all colors, but especially blue. And then I drop them over, and some day one of them may stick on the bottom--"

"But there isn't any bottom," said Sara, lifting eyes like black pansies for wonder.

"No, there's no real bottom," conceded Avrillia, patiently, "but there's an imaginary bottom. One might stick on that, you know. And then, with that to build to, if I drop them in very fast, I may be able to fill it up--"

"But there aren't any sides to it, either!" objected Sara, even more wonderingly.

Avrillia betrayed a faint exasperation (it showed a little around the edges, like a green petticoat under a black dress). "Oh, these literal people!" she said, half to herself. Then she continued, still more patiently, "Isn't it just as easy to imagine sides as a bottom? Well, as I was saying, if I write them fast enough to fill it up--I mean if one should stick, of course--somebody a hundred years from now may
come along and notice one of my poems; and then I shall be Immortal." And at that a lovely smile crossed Avrillia's face.