Windows 8 “contracts” what’s the fuss is all about

Sep 26, 2011 by

So I just heard about the upcoming “contracts” concept for future versions of Microsoft products (the contracts will probably get propagated at least partially into virtually all Microsoft products like Windows Phone, XBox, Tablet OS versions etc). The general idea seems to be that various applications will be able to share data and communicate otherwise not really disclosing too much about their functionality.

It is exciting news yeah, but why does it so painfully reminds me of Android “intents” system? To me it is exactly the same. Although some sources say it has some ideas similar to what former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s proposed as the “universal clipboard” concept — dating back to 2006. I still find it hard to see how this is different from Android’s intents system. It would be interesting to watch who sues who over that if at all. The huge piles of patents Google and Microsoft have do not make much sense to go to war over this.

It is interesting though to see how one of the most important features/ideas of Android OS gets propagated into other operating systems.

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TextMate go to last edit plugin

May 3, 2011 by

I have recently started using TextMate. It’s been some time I wanted to give it a try and understand why so many people rave about it but every time I needed to use it, I usually wanted to do something very simple and sometimes I just got overwhelmed by all the options and sometimes I just didn’t want to invest а lot of time into figuring out how to “use” TextMate beyond the most basic stuff.

One of the options I missed and couldn’t find an easy way to do was to go to the last edit. After some searching however I did find a plugin that does that. You can download the go to last edit plugin for TextMate plugin and once you install it, you will have the “go to last edit” awesomeness in your TextMate. Use the⌥⌘J combination to activate the plugin. It uses the “undo/redo” mechanism but this particular plugin solves some problems that some other apple scripts or other solutions that use undo/redo technique had.

Enjoy this plugin and enjoy TextMate, although I actually like my MacVim better for most of the stuff I wanted to use TextMate for :) . And actually I find Netbeans to be very good for JS, I started using TextMate for JS, but now I almost exclusively use Netbeans. Share your thoughts, opinions and experience  with TextMate plugins and with Mac editors in general in the comments.

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Foursquare’s use of MongoDB

Dec 15, 2010 by

I have been to a presentation by Harry Heyman – the first non founder employee of Foursquare. He presented on the Foursquare’s usage of MongoDB, a rapidly gaining popularity NoSQL database. Quickly – the idea behind NoSQL database that it is not based on a relational model as most traditional databases but rather on a document model.

Harry had many interesting things but the one thing that was especially interesting to me was that they basically run all the DB operations of FourSquare in RAM! Yes that’s right. They employ the extra large memory instances on EC2, running with 64GB or RAM and they shard whenever they start approaching certain limits of RAM.

The outages they had in early October were because they hit the memory limit and the databases started to page in and out the data from the hard drives to the memory and back and this quickly brought them down.

He mentioned that this is however not Mongo’s fault and this would have happened with any database they would have used. Which is interesting by itself because it means that the way the application is engineered – the requirements is that all the data that they operate has to be in RAM for the application to be fast enough. I bet there is a lot of smart engineers working at Foursquare and there has to be a good reason for that and in fact Harry mentioned that they basically have to have almost all the checkins available in memory due to the nature of the queries they have to perform on the data.  He also mentioned that when (this seemed more of a “when” rather than “if”) they move to dedicated servers with solid state drives, they should not have that limit anymore because then the hard drives (SSDs) in that case will be fast enough.

For me all this was very surprising and I am still a little puzzled about it and wonder whether there is/was no way of engineering the application so that they don’t have to keep pretty much all their data (about 5 million users and 160 million checkins at the moment), all in RAM.

Slides of the presentation

UPDATE (Dec 15 2010) a few related links:

Official blog from Foursquare

Interesting discussion at YCombinator hacker news

Some notes of Alex Popescu from NoSQL blog

UPDATE (Dec 17 2010) – 10gen posted the video of the meetup

MongoDB and Foursquare video


The foursquare and MongoDB logos are properties of their respected owners.

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Facebook is down – funny tweets collection

Sep 23, 2010 by

Apparently today Facebook was down for 2 hours and for some even more… I did not pick up long time on this since I do not use Facebook, but just accidentally I wanted something and I tried to load it and boom I got:

Not sure whether this is a localized event I went to twitter to see if others had this problem and man I was in for some good laughs. Here’s the collection of funniest tweets during the time that the Facebook was down:

Ant check out the Twitter trends. How “DNS Failure” sounds to you as a trend – huh?

UPDATE: Apparently it wasn’t just my “original” idea to collect funny tweets, many other websites did so as well, what is interesting that there are about 20-30 different tweets overall which just keep repeating from site to site. Are we short of funny twitter-ers? People obviously do care. Maybe they are just afraid Facebook coming after them in revenge? (just kidding of course, or am I?). Let me know what you think in comments.

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The difference between Android and the iPhone illustrated

Sep 19, 2010 by

I’ve come across this somewhere. There was no credit, so I can not give the credit here, if you know the origin, please let me know and I will make sure to give proper credit.

And the BlackBerry would go – yeah you can do anything if you have strong enough head that it won’t crack from all the banging out of frustration…

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Load cod file to BlackBerry using JavaLoader

Sep 5, 2010 by

It is simple to load a BlackBerry application packaged as cod file to your device using JavaLoader.exe. With JavaLoader, you do not have to install the desktop manager if you just want to have an ability to quickly load applications to your blackberry

  1. Connect your BlackBerry to your computer through USB
  2. Open command prompt and navigate to the location of JavaLoader.exe
  3. Run “JavaLoader.exe -u=USB load path_to_your_cod_file” command and you should be all set

It is easier if you have the JavaLoader and the COD files in the same dir because then the command is simply

JavaLoader.exe -u=USB load path_to_your_cod_file

UPDATE: The JavaLoader command will not work if you don’t have the BlackBerry desktop manager installed. You will get an error that the port can not be open.

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