Category Archives: Architecture

Congratulations Xen

Posted on June 2, 2011 by M@

Xen is now in the mainline kernel, where KVM has been since Feburary 2007. Xen is still a completely separate kernel, with completely separate interfaces. Xen may now be in Linux, but still is not Linux.

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SmartMenu

Posted on May 10, 2011 by M@

Case: Large menu system where different users use different items more often than others. Some spend 80% of their time in <5% of the options, some spend 60% of their time in the least used 10% of the options. Problem: … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Coding, Work | 1 Comment

A Perl Thread-Pool

Posted on February 24, 2011 by M@

UPDATED: 9/5/2013 to use better Thread::Queue::dequeue_timed in lieu of sleep. I’ve been doing a lot of large-system coding with Perl ithreads lately.  This thread model has been scaling very well on very high-throughput operations in conjunction with well-placed yield() calls … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Coding, Linuxy | Tagged | 3 Comments

Programming Philosophy

Posted on April 14, 2010 by M@

Ask three Computer Science geeks their “programming philosophy” and you’ll get four different answers. I don’t have a direct answer, as I borrow from different schools of thought, and simply have a handful of Canon. Canon of Simplicity Following the … Continue reading →

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The Risk of Aircraft Navigation Modernization

Posted on March 23, 2010 by M@

We love technology. If you’re reading this, you at least can use a computer, possibly have an RSS reader, probably have an interest in geeky things, so I don’t need to go into proving that statement, methinks. One problem with … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Life, Opinions | 2 Comments

The Next Five Years of Storage

Posted on October 5, 2009 by M@

[NOTE: This essay was commissioned by a client in December 2006. It’s the third in a series of old-yet-relevant position-papers whose exclusivity has expired, that I’m editing and posting. Things for the next five look “similar”. There is no formal … Continue reading →

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The Next Five Years of Bandwidth

Posted on September 25, 2009 by M@

[NOTE: This essay was commissioned by a client in December 2006. It’s the second in a series of old-yet-relevant position-papers whose exclusivity has expired, that I’m editing and posting. Things for the next five look “similar”, yet scaled up in … Continue reading →

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Disposable Appliance Computing

Posted on September 24, 2009 by M@

[NOTE: This essay was commissioned by a client in February 2007. It’s the first in a series of old-yet-relevant position-papers whose exclusivity has expired, that I’m editing and posting] The hosted systems industry has turned another critical point. Several years … Continue reading →

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A Rebuttal of a Rebuttal…

Posted on September 8, 2009 by M@

Somehow, while clicking away at the Internet, I managed to get to this blog post, which is a rebuttal of this article by Cory Doctrow about cloud computing. Please keep in mind I dislike most of the things that come … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Opinions, Work | Tagged | 2 Comments

Distributed By Design

Posted on September 2, 2009 by M@

The Internet, by taking its name literally, means “the network between networks”. 40 years ago today, the Men and Women that first started implementing the technologies that grew up to be the Internet didn’t want to create one network- they … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Life, Opinions, Work | 1 Comment