April 2009

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… Continue reading The problem of slide 19

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… Continue reading melancholy anecdotes