Huzzah for backcountry.com, on taking a big step toward full open source citizenship. My former employer announced last week that they would release some postgresql code back to the community. “Finally stop mooching” is how their usual informal press release put it, and props for that. The code allows for master< ->master replication across postgresql databases. It’s called ‘bucardo’ after an extinct goat that lived in the Pyrennes mountains that might be cloned back into existance (replicated, get it?)
Backcountry.com has a webfarm at a hosting center, and then a rootdb back at the warehouse– pretty standard setup. For the sake of speed, however, the company wanted to hold as much information (i.e. dynamic content) as close to the web servers as possible, and therefore wanted to replicate a good chunk of rootdb out at the ISP. If they were using Oracle, this would be a relatively straightforward configuration. However, because the system was built around Postgresql, we needed to configure something out. Enter the geniuses as End Point Communications — an entire system of flags sit around data tables, and these flags are synced back and forth, to determine which data then needs to be pushed to the other side. The trick here is to have the 2-way asynchronous flows of information while maintaining basic ground rules of data integrity.
The system has had several months of getting the shit beat out of it, literally. Early on, syncs would hang on a missing flag, or an unsuually large amount of data, and things would back up, only to then try and flow through like a traffic jammed freeway once the flags fell back into place. Well, redundancies have since been built into the messaging system, and the logic has been wrung to optimised levels where flags that don’t need to be in place are simply bypassed afte x minutes. It’s all rather elegant.
Props to all those that were involved with this, and special props to those at End Point who suggested the path to enlightenment lie in giving back to the community.
The devil is sending his minions to collect. A patent troll company is suing our good friends at Red Hat and Novell for technology to power multiple desktops (i.e. multiple screens of data through one monitor, with some hotkey switch between them).The funnytragic part here is that the suit is pretty traceable back to Redmond. A couple of MS lawyer-types joined this troll company not more than 4 months ago. When Novell signed a deal with the devil, I doubt they figured he would come collecting this soon. Novell will bear the brunt of this much more than Red Hat, in my opinion, for a number of reasons:
- Novell is already perceived as ‘tainted’ by their previous licencing agreements, whereas Red Hat follows a much quieter path
- Red Hat has better pipeline into the technical arguments that may be needed to defend this (think old-skool UNIX interfaces)
- Red Hat has better cashflow
In the end, I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft ends up ‘coming to the rescue’ to side with Novell (and grudgingly Red Hat). Afterall, one of the major (the only one I’ve seen?) eye-candy bits to Vista is their multiple desktop window 3-d thingamajig (which is crude and stupid ompared to the beauty of Beryl).
My shiny new laptop that runs WindowsXP (company policy: no Ubuntu for now) brought me a funny little icon this morning. The Java icon was bright orange. Curious, I clicked, and was invited to install OpenOffice.org, right there, right now. Well! It looks like Sun has finally grown a pair, and is going to attempt to “infect” as many machines as possible with their app-killer open source freeware. How might Microsoft react? Shut off Java? Not possible. Limit items in the icon tray? Again, too draconian for all of their own bloatware. I would like to see how this campaign plays out in the next few weeks.
Overall, I’ve been happy with OpenOffice.org, but I can certainly see how the power users of MS Excel are very very wedded to their pivot tables and other mojo packed into the newer versions. Mircosoft’s best bet may be to flaunt this extended feature set– Excel is much more powerful than OpenOffice.org’s spreadsheet (there, I said it) for those who know what they’re doing. Granted, 95% of the people will never be at this level, but that other 5% are usually the thought-leaders on this kind of stuff in an office environment.
Okay, I’ve started to sell out, starting with my Technorati Profile, my linkedin profile, wikipedia, and facebook. There’s a myspace page somewhere, and I am getting a lot of invites from sexy college girls who suddenly want to sell me ringtones (to pay for tuition, i guess). I have yet to sign up for kaboodle, twitter, amvona, or style, but don’t worry, I’ll slut out this website there soon enough.
The obvious drive here is for attention, for the narcissistic joy of ego-googling your own name into that top position (over my rivals Dave Jenkins the photographer, the construction company owner, and the guitarist for Pablo Cruise, not to mention the mayor of Salt Lake City back in the 40s and my cousin Dave Jenkins in London). But is there a place for the meta-meta-blog? Would a site that gathers all of these together for someone and allow common updates work? here’s what I see as the base requirements:
- The code must be neutral and open, allowing all these other meta-blog sites to adjust into the API
- The site would need to provide a one-click-heres-all-your-links functionality
- People would want an interface where they could ‘go dark’ with a simple click– erase all their profiles
This last one is the most powerful. Already way too many of us have shared way too much information out there. How nice would it be to be able to comprehensively kill all those profiles out there? The problem is that– with Google Cache, the wayback machine, and others– data never really disappears. So, this meta-meta-blog-eraser would need to go in and jam all these profiles with random information, in the hopes that as the spiders come through again, the newly randomized junk would show up instead. But we all know that won’t work either.
I promise I'm relevant 
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