Virtually Free

Artifacts that define a culture

While working on a project associated with an Entrepreneurship class I am taking at HAAS, I was reminded of a realization that a culture can be defined by just a handful of artifacts. While I can't imagine this to be a throughly new piece of knowledge, I have to confess that I have never seen anyone really address the complex plethora of needs that this simple fact is linked to.

For some cultures, the ability to enjoy these artifacts means that one has to learn the language. In some cases, that's exactly what happens.

On the other hand, people frequently have a strong desire to share these "things" that they value so highly with their friends of different cultural backgrounds. Some artifacts can survive this cross-cultural sharing and get generally accepted and appreciated. Some, however, are "too different" and end up becoming another stereotype that defines the particular culture that is part of.

The two things that you can find on my
PictureM blog, a song and a short cartoon (if you can't see the cartoon, install the DivX codec, which is also attached), are very likely to be familiar to anyone who grew up in Russia. The song, "Fastidious Horses" is probably the most incredible thing that I happen to know of, and is partially the reason why I want my kids to learn Russian. The cartoon called "Mitten" can be described as something of the quality that you don't come across too often. I contend that it is an appreciation for these as well as a surprisingly small number of other things that keeps us Russians together.

It is my belief that such artifacts should be exempt from IP laws because of their sheer importance and that people should build and promote on-line libraries for sharing them. Learning the language first is not the best way to get to know a culture, because the language not the end goal. It is merely a key to unlocking wonders that you need to get a glimpse at first, so as to fill your heart with the contageous desire.

Friendster shitcanning

I was stunned to see the Troutgirl's shitcanned
post. This is just as weird as their decision to move away from Java in the first place. Unbelievable.

Olympic indifference

Another thing that stands out is the degree of our interest in the Olympics. The Chinese TV, as well as the Russian TV, seems to be doing a much better job at covering the events. We care a lot less. Whereas in China and Russia other sports events are temporarily eclipsed, we still have baseball, football, and other stuff on TV.

This is actually pretty remarkable. I guess, it means that we don't care much for things that take place outside of our country.

The land of the fat

This post was prompted by my today's visit to Costco in San Ramon :-)

China may not be as wealthy nation as we are, but the Chinese certainly do not have the obesity problem. I recall that about 25% of Americans are obese, and an additional 50% are overweight. So, only one in four is "normal", and the situation has been steadily getting worse over the past thirty years. In China, however, it is rare to see even an overweight person. This difference is very obvious and disturbing.

The answer, at least partially, must be the food. Healthier food in China is a lot more diverse and, in general, a lot more available than here. As a result, people aren't walking around eating chips and sipping on their Cokes. Not yet, anyway. So, I think the junk foods lawsuits have some merit. You can't let a handful of corporations do this to us.

Getting into the routine

I've noticed some time ago that getting into the old routine is remarkably easy. During an enjoyable vacation you tend to regret going back to work. But very quickly after that, the routine takes over completely. Weeks begin to zig by, and the vacation becomes but a distant intangible memory.

We'll see if I am able this time to leverage the lessons of this vacation to improve my schedule somewhat. At the very least, I have a tangible artifact with me this time: on my keychain, there's now a key to our beautiful apartment in Guangzhou.

We are back!

And we are back from this amazing trip. There was too much to see and not enough time to be blogging, so I will attempt to follow up with travel notes in the next couple of weeks.

Trips like these help you look at things from a different angle. Some things that we are used to in our every day life we end up revering as ultimate truths of sorts. We don't necessarily understand why, say, hamburgers are so popular, but we assume that they are because the humanity hasn't come up with anything better. Different countries and cultures don't have a whole lot in common, though, which helps question the mundane.

Off to China

The past few weeks have been spent in hectic preparations for our vacation in China. We are leaving for Hong Kong, Guangzhou as well as some other places, hopefully, this Sunday night. Hoping to be photo blogging during the trip :-)

Item descriptions

For a while now, I've been trying to understand what role item descriptions found in the XML feed of your blog should play. Should they contain the full body of your post? A part of it? If so, how long should this part be?

An obvious (yet possibly, an over-simplistic) idea is: the description should be sufficient to let an average reader decide whether to read the full post or not. So, if I'm using an RSS aggregator but value my time enormously, this is what i might want.

A tougher question is, should the description be sufficient so as to let an average classifier successfully classify the entry? I have this feeling that the answer should be "yes" to this question also. It is all about automatic processing. And today, you can pretty much forget about having a bot clicking through to the "actual" page where the entry resides: parsing some of these pages is near impossible. Try Wired, for instance...

Anyone care to comment?

Building a high-performance social networking site

By the way, John Ko has the slides from our JavaOne presentation posted on his blog. The demo code should be there shortly as well.

Evil Java Threads

Another interesting sentiment that I recently heard is that programming Web sites in Java is hard because it involves threading, and threads are hard. I would like to know more as to what the roots of this argument are; but here's a few obvious things to consider:

(a) If you program in JSPs or Servlets as you are expected to, you have no reason to even worry about threading (so the fact that JSPs and Servlets are multithreaded adds no complexity to the application). Recall that your stuff inside JSPs gets mapped to a method call when they are compiled into Java code. By default, this means no static class variables. You can, of course, have static blocks in JSPs, but you need to be an experienced JSP developer to know how to do that (which hopefully ensures that you know what you're doing). With Servlets, it's a bit easier to create static class variables, so you need to pay more attention. But it's not like you have to manage the entire life cycle of the threads; the web container takes care of it for you. So, I don't really see how servlet or JSP applications get more complex because of threading.

(b) Struts is a bit more complex, true, but you don't really have to use Struts, especially if your focus is on performance. I am not saying here that Struts is a bad idea, of course, I am just saying that the framework carries an additional complexity along with it, and it therefore expects a higher level of skills from its exploiter.

(c) There's this related argument that Java supposedly scales through threading, that it pushes you to use one gigantic JVM and so on. Again, I don't fully understand the argument here. The size of the thread pool that you use in your web container (Tomcat, Resin, whatever) is a configurable parameter. So from the thread perspective, your appserver JVM has just as many threads as you want it to have. If, for whatever reason, having just one JVM serving requests out of the physical box is not optimal (which is usually caused by poor quality coding, by the way), it is very easy to vertically clone appservers. This gives you multiple logical appservers (or JVMs) on the same physical box, is supported by practically all appservers, and does not cause problems in most cases. Someone mentioned inter-JVM communication. Vertical cloning typically does not require inter-JVM communication because of session affinity, which again is widely supported today. You may wish to have this communication when you are maintaining a large object cache (which you probably should be doing if you are Friendster), but you'd also want it anyway with horizontal cloning.

Anyways, I would appreciate it if someone could elaborate on what they meant in regards to these threading issues. Clearly, Java threads are lots easier to code to than, say, pthreads. And of course, having a thread pool is faster than forking a new process each time. If you want to beat Java threads, you need to code with pools of pthreads, and I suspect, this is what you will have to do sooner or later in order to support a PHP tier for a site like Friendster. Isn't this what Yahoo! had to do for their middle-tier?

PHP vs Java

So, according to this article, Friendster is now powered by PHP technology. There
appears to be a lively discussion on the subject, which has taken on somewhat religious overtones...

Jeff Moore has a better overview in his article, which includes some links to the use of PHP at Yahoo! Interesting stuff.

Fairly recently, I was the lead architect for IBM's Intranet portal, which has about 200,000 registered users, and about 100,000 dynamic hits per day. We did that site with JSPs; it can easily run on a single quad 1.5 GHz box. It actually can handle up to about 20 hits/s/server and could be further tuned to well over 100.

While it is possible that we are dealing here with some kind of nosebleed territory traffic that JSPs can't handle, I don't think it is likely. Of course, one
could resort to C ultimately, but we've been down that route and we know where it leads and what its advangates and disadvantages are.

I think the question is that of architecting for performance. You can do that with JSPs and Java, and you can do this with PHPs and/or C++ or C. When you have a complex dynamic site that is likely to be adding features, you have to factor these additional considerations of extensibility, maintainability, flexibility into your architecture. Further, a three-tiered system with smart object caches can almost always outperform a two-tiered one, where business logic is pushed into the database. I think eventually the discussion boils down to whether Java is the most convenient and powerful language to design and write your system in. And if it's not, then many of us are in big trouble.

Apples and diamonds

Probably the single most surprising thing about the recent SuperNova conference for me was the number of Mac laptops there. Not everyone had them; but it seemed that almost all the "cool" people did: Ross Mayfield, Judith Meskill, Valdis Krebbs... So I thought, well, my T40 is all black and it doesn't have an apple that glows in the dark on its cover, but it has 2 gigs of memory.... From the purely virtual reality standpoint, my Thinkpad is adequate. See, if all I care about is what my screen looks like and what this laptop allows me to do, like how fast it is, etc., then the Thinkpad works just fine.

I suppose the Apple laptops tell us, well, you can't actually discard the "real" reality, you geeks, so it does matter what your laptop looks like even when it's not turned on. It's about augmented reality, not the virtual one.

Yet, there's still a gap between, say, personal jewelry and an iBook. Diamonds are forever. In contrast, you'll own the same iBook for maybe a couple of years. Maybe a company like Movado would be able to figure this out.. Maybe we should start embedding our laptops in some kind of jewelry casings, so you could just take any laptop and fit it inside?

GMail, at first glance

I finally managed to experience GMail firsthand today, nearly a month after it launched. GMail has received a lot of press, and there's no point in repeating the obvious. My impression is that Google is not after Yahoo's share of revenues from advertising on an email service. By crawling your mail, they can find out what you are good at. Through owning your address book, they will find out who your contacts are and the nature of your interaction with them. Essentially, Google is trying to capture and leverage the human capital, relationship capital, and ultimately, social capital of their users. Want to find a Java expert? No problem. Need an honest car mechanic? Easy. You get the idea.

No doubt, it is an ambitious task. I think that the launch of GMail means that Google is getting ready to release other technologies that are needed to make the above work. This probably includes instant messaging, calendaring, Orkut, a wireless service, as well as a few surprises.

Women and children in Falluja

It is difficult to know which information sources are reliable, but there seems to be a growing number of stories reporting that women and children die from sniper fire in Falluja. Even if only a fraction of this is true, it is still terrible.

Succumbing to pressure

So, I am finally succumbing to pressure. I make my living thinking about and implementing Internet technologies. Yet, I have never had a decent homepage. It must be that the technology is finally catching up to my highly refined needs :-)