Nov. 2nd, 2012

jducoeur: (Default)
This week's notable link from LinkedIn is this delightful roundup of Five Trendy Open Source (Big-Data) Technologies. It goes through some of the newer hot products -- not stuff that's gotten mature like Hadoop, but newer concepts like Storm, Dremel, and Hana. Worth a read if you're doing any sort of big data at work, especially if you are in any way influencing architecture -- the enterprise world is driving advances in data processing at *remarkable* speed.

That said, it makes amusing reading for me right now. Everybody is talking about Big Data as the way to make money from enterprises. So I guess Querki might best be labeled the first truly serious Small Data project I've seen in a surprisingly long time. I'm explicitly not going after enterprise at all, at least not yet. (In a few years, if Querki is successful with consumers, we'll probably spin off a business-focused subsidiary. But first things first.) Indeed, for the time being I'm going to strictly limit the number of Things you can have in a Space, to somewhere in the tens-of-thousands range -- not even pocket change by Big Data standards.

Querki's underlying theory is that, while the Big Data problems are sexy to computer scientists and businesspeople, they have relatively little to do with the ordinary person on the information superhighway. Normal people are always trying to deal with *little* problems, involving only thousands, hundreds or even tens of things to keep track of. They don't care about lightning-speed processing of billions of records -- they care about being able to *easily* manage the small, everyday problems of the real world. And right now, they are looking sadly neglected.

I'm really quite enjoying this: there's nothing more exciting than finding a problem that nobody's dealing with well. Let's see if we can start a Small Data revolution, while the giants are all focused on the mountains in the distance...
jducoeur: (Default)
A garage startup is an interesting game, and in some ways I'm finding myself conforming to the stereotype -- in particular, I *am* often working in my bathrobe in the mornings. (The downside of this, of course, is that I'm working 8am - 7pm most days: you don't succeed in this game unless you're willing to completely commit. After I finish posting this, it's back to studying Akka.)

But I'm not here to talk about business today. Instead, let's talk about footwear.

As we head into the colder months, I'm finding myself with a dilemma about what to do with my feet. It's getting too cold to leave them bare. But our house is three floors of immaculately-kept wood flooring, and going around sock-foot always feels dangerously slippery as I run up and down stairs -- bedroom slippers even moreso. (And we're a no-shoes house.)

Today, I've resorted to yoga socks:
ExpandSilly polka-dotted feet below cut )
Yes, they have little toes. More importantly, though, they are polka-dotted with tiny rubber studs. They're remarkably effective -- I think they actually provide more secure footing than my shoes do on these floors.

But they are *crazy* expensive (most of $10/pair), and fairly thin -- as we reach real winter, I'm going to want something warmer. So I'm asking myself whether it would be possible to get a pair of real bedroom slippers and do something similar to their soles, or something like that.

So what the heck, let's toss it out for ideas. How would you solve this? Do you already have a favorite solution that gets you warm feet and good indoor traction?
jducoeur: (Default)
A little tidbit for the programmers: just came across the Typesafe Config Library, a very nice little open-source project that provides a general-purpose JVM configuration stack. (Entirely Java-based, so that you don't need Scala in order to use it.) Given that every startup I have ever worked at has wound up wasting time building a better config system (since most of the traditional options suck), this is a fine benefit -- the Typesafe stack appears to provide all of the major features that I always have to reimplement (like layering).

Particularly interesting is the HOCON ("Human-Optimized Config Object Notation") config language. It's a very useful looking dialect of JSON -- it basically starts with JSON, but relaxes many of the syntactic rules so that it winds up much easier to write and maintain by hand. It's still a reasonably rich data-representation language (indeed, more powerful than JSON itself), but by simplifying the annoying requirements like comma placement, it gets rid of most of the usual gotchas.

Pretty, simple and useful -- I'd bet that this language will quickly escape its parent project...

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