wikipedia madness

I hate it when i read something on the web and it has hyperlinks to wikipedia for every word longer than 4 letters. Annoying for anyone over the age of 4. Oh, wait, maybe the web has been taken over by 4 year-olds. Never thought of that!

Jeez it's been 5 years since I posted an entry!

Time goes by when you're having fun. Last time I posted I was employed by Avaya here in New Jersey. Avaya decided to close it's Lincroft facility and all of us in Lincroft were let go. For me personally this was a very good life event. I was picked up by AT&T. They are close to where I live. After about 9 months they made me an offer to be a Principle Member of Technical Staff, which I promptly accepted.

I am now working within their managed services group (CDNs mainly) with a very good group and loving every minute of it. Here is hoping the next post here isn't too far off.

New year = more blogging

I guess I have to blog more here this year. I never did bring over my prevoous blog entries. Stay tuned.

postgres vs mysql

MySql is to Postgres as cvs is to Clearcase.

MySql is easy to use and works (as does cvs)

A developer can get their hands around all of MySql. It works as advertised. It is fast. It is easy to install, maintain and use. It has no surprises, other than some non-standard SQL constructs. No surprises is a good thing because we aren't all DBAs, and we really don't want to be. Users and programmers love MySql, it matches what they think a DB should be.

Postgres is byzantine (as is Clearcase)

Too many surprises. Too big. Too slow. Too many cooks^h^h^h^h programmers had a hand in it and it shows. Yes, it does support the SQL standard a little better than MySql. But to get that, you pay the pain of maintaining it. DBAs love postgres, it matches their model of what a DB should be.

Save yourself a lot of hassle; use MySql (and cvs, svn, arch etc. but not Clearcase)

Why Java performance is not even close to C/C++

There has always been a vocal crowd saying that Java and C/C++ performance is equivalent or at least close. Early on I sided with the C/C++ crowd saying that Java couldn't come close in performance. Lately I have been on the Java side of the fence. Java has come a long way in improving performance.

But I just had an ephiphany. The performance almost everyone measures is single process performance. It doesn't take into account the memory footprints of teh JVMs (or if it does then there is a lot of handwaving of why memory doesn't matter.)

If you architect systems with Java servers (in the sense of client and server) you get the overhead of a JVM per server. In an architecture that demands more than a few servers this is a staggering blow to the memory capacity of a medium-sized machine. Yes, I know about the efforts to have the JVM's use shared memory, put the common classlibs in shared memory, and even have multiple java programs use the same JVM. These efforts aren't standardized and still have a long way to go.

One solution is to have a single (changeable) JVM hooked into the kernel that can then execute your Java code. This would make the JVM a first class kernel object. There would only be one instance of the JVM for all java servers. Other JVMs would run as today, but a mechanism could be used to have a program use the in-kernel JVM if it wanted.

For production multi-server systems it seems that you can count Java out if you want reasonable performance. At least until we get Java down to a single JVM for multiple servers.

gothic tales

If goths use VisiCalc are they known as Visigoths?

There are only six computer programming languages of note

There are only six computer programming languages of note:

1. Fortran
2. Cobol
3. Basic
4. C
5. C++
6. Java

These account for about 99% of the code in the world. Yes, I know there are other languages that are noteworthy but for now this is the list, all the other languages are toys, except maybe C#, which has a long way to go to get in this list.

This is not to say that other languages aren't useful, they are. Some languages are even more important, Lisp and Smalltalk come to mind. But in real terms of number of lines of code written they don't even come close.