sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged andrew
Mapufacture - helping build the geospatial web
mapstraction: del.icio.us/tag/mapstraction
introduction
to
andrew
geopress
neogeography
Turner
mapstraction
Firepow - Why You Shouldn't Buy Firepow Software
Firepow software review – don’t buy firepow software by Andrew Hansen till you read my explosive Firepow review
Firepow Review - It's Worse Than You Think
Firepow – the latest product launched by Andrew Hansen. Is Firepow all it’s really cracked up to be? I’ll tell you the truth why Firepow won’t get you the thousands a month as quickly as you’d like it to…but I know what will.
Data Centers That Will Follow the Sun and Chase the Wind
A plan to combine cloud computing, fast broadband and renewable energy could reduce the demand data centers place on the electrical grid and save companies money on power costs. Data centers’ ability to suck up inordinate amounts of electricity is turning them into the Hummers of the computing world. And much like Hummers, their power-guzzling ways means they are becoming increasingly costly to run. To read about the plan being worked on by Andrew Hopper, head of the Cambridge University Computing Lab, head over to Earth2Tech.
computing
infrastructure
university
cloud
startups
cambridge
andrew
Sphinx 0.9.8 is released!
The Sphinx project just released version 0.9.8, with many enhancements since the previous release. There’s never been a better time to try it out. It’s really cool technology.
What is Sphinx? Glad you asked. It’s fast, efficient, scalable, relevant full-text searching and a heck of a lot more. In fact, Sphinx complements MySQL for a lot of non-search queries that MySQL frankly isn’t very good at, including WHERE clauses on low-selectivity columns, ORDER BY with a LIMIT and OFFSET, and GROUP BY. A lot of you are probably running fairly simple queries with these constructs and getting really bad performance in MySQL. I see it a lot when I’m working with clients, and there’s often not much room for optimization. Sphinx can execute a subset of such queries very efficiently, due to its smart I/O algorithms and the way it uses memory. By “subset” I mean you don’t get the full complexity of SQL, but you get enough functionality for lots of the poorly-performing queries I see in the wild. It’s a 95% solution.
Is Sphinx for you? Good question. You can find answers in Appendix C in High Performance MySQL. And yes, that is why I wrote this blog post — to put in a plug for the book. *grin* But before I go, let me put in another plug for Sphinx: go vote for it on Sourceforge! If it’s voted as one of the Community Choice projects of the year, that will be fantastic.
Ooma Not Dead Yet
Ooma, a Palo Alto, Calif-based company that launched with much fanfare last year had run into a wall in recent months. It lost some key executives and failed to live upto its promise. Ooma promised free voice calls for life married to slick hardware was a classic case of too much sizzle, very little steak. Lately there were signs that the company was staring down a dark abyss.
Ooma is not dead, yet. In a bid to try and regain some of its lost momentum, Ooma is cutting the price of its Hub and Scout package by $150 dollars to $250. The company is going to sell a premier service package that is going to cost $12.95 a month or $99 a year. The company is refocusing on the consumer electronics retail channel, said Rich Buchanan, a former Sling Media executive who just joined Ooma as chief marketing officer.
I had a very candid chat with Buchanan, pointing out that it is hard to develop enthusiasm for a company that had overpromised and underdelivered. Instead of developing cheaper products and getting into the retail channel, the company focused on developing strange concept promotions for a device whose value proposition in a nut shell is: cheap calls.
Cheap calling is a tough, low margin and volume business - as Skype’s recent performance shows. Ooma device despite their slick packaging had some performance issues. Buchanan wants to refurbish the company’s reputation and brand. “Clearly I have my work cut out for me,” Buchanan acknowledged, admitting that “Ooma has a black eye.” He said the company had realigned and is focusing on building a retail channel.
I think even at $250 for the package, the device is still too expensive. You can buy PhoneGnome . Despite some distinct differences, the two companies serve the same end goal of making voice calls cheaper/free. (The comparisons between the two riles up our readers.) Buchanan who has been a retail guy for a long time, acknowledged that the right price for Ooma is between $99-to-$199. But in order to get there, the company will have to overcome some serious odds.
In US, the introduction of unlimited plans and other cheaper options from say Skype, has put Ooma on the backfoot. Given that I was impressed by Ooma at the time of launch, I hope
Microsoft co-operation working well.
Data Structures in the Andrew Text Editor
Threading Benchmarks, NetBSD versus FreeBSD
Andrew Doran posted some threading benchmark results to NetBSD's tech-kern mailing list, following up to some benchmarks he'd posted earlier. The results compared NetBSD -current with FreeBSD -current, and the Linux 2.6.21 kernel. Kris Kennaway was surprised by the results, and ran his own benchmarks with minimal configuration changes, summarizing, "this measurement shows that FreeBSD is performing 70-80% better than NetBSD in this 4 CPU configuration. This is in contrast to Andrew's findings which seem to show NetBSD performing 10% better than FreeBSD on a 4 CPU system (a very old one though)." He added, "the drop-off above 8 threads on FreeBSD is due to non-scalability of mysql itself. i.e. it comes from pthread mutex contention in userland."
Kris ran additional benchmarks with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, showing much improved scalability above 8 threads, "postgresql is much more scalable than mysql on this workload and doesn't have silly scaling bottlenecks inside the application (cf the tail of the FreeBSD curve for mysql which is where pthread mutex contention kicked in)." He continued his testing, and found that on older 4CPU P3 hardware NetBSD did outperform FreeBSD, "but only by 3-4% (in particular I am not seeing the ~10% difference that Andrew observes on his 4*p3 700MHz). Given the age of the hardware and the fact that I am not seeing it on other workloads or on modern hardware it might just be due to a small scheduling difference on this configuration."
