Comments in OpenSolaris code

This is funny :-))

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39197326,00.htm

"Ten million lines of code and not a single profanity? Is that really possible? Apparently, yes, says OpenSolaris community manager Jim Grisanzio. He said even before Sun filtered the code, it was relatively free of profanity. 'They went through the code for a great many things,' he said, 'and I'm sure they cleaned a word or two. Or three.' But a careful look through the code will reveal some programmers' frustration." From the article: "The most embarassing comment came from a developer of the GRUB project who went only by the name of 'Gord'. 'This function is truly horrid,' he wrote. 'We try opening the device, then severely abuse the GEOMETRY->flags field to pass a file descriptor to biosdisk. Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.'"

[Slashdot.org]

Google Summer of Code

This sounds like a good deal, although its only for students. I just wish I had the time/resolve/commitment to do it.

http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html

The list of mentoring organizations are pretty impressive. Look at the projects over at Apache Foundation and Codehaus.

June 14th is the deadline so hurry up and take ur pick... happy coding.

Worst Web Application ever

hillariously awful... :)

http://www.doughughes.net/index.cfm/page-blogLink/entryId-110

Google Down

Use http://216.239.39.99/ instead...

CSS Animation gif

OB's Longhorn/WinFX craze

http://mywinfx.blogspot.com/

Why does this seem like Deja Vu to me? I remember the same sequence of events, same interest levels in the fall of 2001.

I know this must have been discussed 100s of times but just wondering whats wrong with Java, Python, PHP (or .NET for that matter)? Why invest in a technology which doesnt even have a market for at least 3 years to come (if we assume Longhorn being *eventually* released some time next year, of course with cut-down features)? Or in a platform that is beaten/thrashed/de-publicized even before its release?

It has to take a _really_ crazy person to design the client in a technology that wont even work on all M$ platforms, let alone the different browsers that are there.

Lets think about how a business behaves. Think about $$cost$$, think about R-I-S-K. Businesses hate that and a new technology invites just that. In short the question is "who wants such applications?".

Maybe I am thinking more philosophically/morally rather than comercially/success-factorly, but anything based on closed standards using proprierty technology is not my cup of tea.

This is not meant to demotivate/demoralize the tremendous effort you guys are putting in coz I know what it takes. Any I am a lazy jerk who is doing nothing but sitting on his seat and saying wateva comes in his head. But the thing is that I want ppl to invest in something that is profitable in the short as well as the long term.

Just a short-visioned rant perhaps....

Google's secret of success? Dealing with failure

Google Technology: Linux, Shards, MapReduce, and the GFS

CNet reports on Google’s Urs Hölzle, who nicely wraps up the Google server farm specs. According to the article, Google wrote its own file system GFS, the Google File System. It’s optimized for handling large 64 megabyte data block. The whole systems assumes failure can and will happen anytime, and does the necessary to automate the process involved in handling fallbacks.

The Google data is replicated in three different places, with one master machine to locate individual copies of pieces of data (such as a keyword index).

Google’s servers – according to some figures, there are 100,000 of them – are running a stripped down lean Red Hat Linux variant. This, according to CNet, is really just a Google-modified OS kernel of the original system.

And then, there’s “shards” and “MapReduce”:

“[Google Inc] has also devised a system for handling massive amounts of data and returning rapid responses to queries. Google splits the Web into millions of pieces, or “shards” in Google tech speak, which are replicated in case of failure.

Not surprisingly, the company creates an index of words that appear on the Web, which it stores as an array of large files. But it also has document servers, which hold copies of Web pages that Google crawls and downloads.

Another important engineering feat done by Google is to make writing programs that run across thousands of servers very straightforward, according to Hoelzle. (...)

Google’s programming tool, called MapReduce, which automates the task of recovering a program in case of a failure, is critical to keeping the company’s costs down.”

[Source]