techno.blog("Dion")

There has been a usual public “I am better than you” debate over the fact that Friendster goes PHP.

Ian Kallen uses some common sense in his thoughts: The Scalability Holy Grail.

Obviously there is never a winner in “language X is better/faster/more scalable than language Y”. It just doesn’t make sense.

However, I do have direct knowledge on whether a Java site can run fast (some of the pro-PHP’ers claim it can’t on that thread).

TheServerSide doesn’t run fast, or slow, due to the fact that Java and a JVM are in the loop. What has allowed us to scale is the architecture. We don’t use all of the most amazing design patterns, or the latest technology. We are using EJB and our own MVC layer (for now), yet it still runs well (although it is a pain to maintain like this).

Smart caching is king in our application (as Ian mentions in his blog). This is where Tangosol Coherence comes into play. Weilding that tool well has allowed our cluster to scale. It also allows us to get away with sloppy lower-level code, as in the grand scheme of things those nano-seconds don’t matter!

We try hard not to be bottlenecked at the DB, and that is what gives us our performance AND scalability.

A PHP site designed to scale will be able to do this just as well. A site not designed in this manner will not be able to handle a large load.

Moving to PHP has worked for Friendster, but this probably means that they didn’t grok how to write a Java web application that can scale (even with Java book authors ;) Fortunately they could write one in PHP, and good luck to them. There is room for all!

Intel has an Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) project.

Imagine a world where computers become so ubiquitous that the idea of carrying a laptop will almost be laughable, a world where any computer could be your computer! According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this is the goal of Intel Research Pittsburgh’s Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) project, a project that may one day let your work jump from computer to computer without interruption by using Internet, distributed file systems, and virtual machines. When the non-proprietary technology becomes available, a user will suspend a task on the computer he’s working on, and resume this work using another computer in another part of a city or several thousand miles away. The second system will look identical to the first one, with the same files and applications opened. This technology would also ease OS upgrades or eliminate the pain coming from a hard disk failure. The project has even a feature named Rollback which would permit to go back in time, eliminating these pesky viruses. A pilot test will start this fall, so don’t expect to be able to use ISR before a while.

I can’t wait for this type of system. I remember the days when I was at Uni and could logon to any machine there, and I would get MY desktop. X was so cool :)

Now, one of the bains is that I have multiple computers and don’t have a really nice way to sync up between them. I would love to have one “virtual computer” running, and each machine would be able to give me a view of it. It would also be cool if the virtual computer could run Mac, or Windows, or Linux, or all of them at the same time :)

Norm blogged about how his high school buddy was borked out of his GI Bill.

G.I. Bill doesn’t pay for one MN Marine

A Minnesota marine served his country for more than four years. But when Erik Barstow came home and tried to go to college with money from the G.I. bill he couldn’t. At first he thought it was just a paperwork snafu but 5 Eyewitness News shows why he now blames his recruiter.

I have run into this myself, with a friend in Colorado. He was promised $ for grad school, and at the last minute they screwed him over, and it was the recruiters fault there too.

How can we do this to people that are risking their lives? (NOTE: You can be against the war but NOT against the troops…. like the bumper sticker says: “A patriot against the war”)

I don’t know about you, but I have gotten into the mode of “open in new tab” or “open in new window” for some links that I come across.

One of the annoyances is that you don’t often know if a link is target="elsewhere" or javascript:doSomethingWickedAndOpenANewWindow().

So, I wish there was a way to mark the difference. We could have a new pseudo part to CSS. We can now do a:hover, what about a:newwindow.

For now we can manually do stuff with class=”", but it would be nice to push out a standard so people start following it.

We could do the same with internal vs. external links (people often have a little icon for external links)

This is quality. Listen in to Pat Helland singing, with Don Box on guitar, and Dave Chappell on keys.

Pat wrote Bye Bye to Mr CIO Guy which takes the mickey out of the Harvard Business Reviews’ paper IT Doesn