I donated and so should you

US CTO: Bill Joy

I saw this entry on the NYTimes technology blog. Apparently Barack Obama wants to appoint a US CTO, and Bill Joy has been brought to his attention.

Bill Joy has always been a personal technology-hero of mine. He co-founded Sun Microsystems, played a major part in the creation of the SPARC microprocessor, and played a major part in the creation of Java. If you run a mac, it's kernel is built from his branchild, BSD, and if you use unix and edit files, it's likely you use vi, also created by Bill Joy.

Bill Joy is awesome. He retired from Sun in 2003, and now works for a venture capital firm focusing on green energy.

Here is a cool interview on Nerd TV.

However

Bill Joy has been leading this so called neo-luddite movement, which opposes genetic and nanotechnology research for fear that we'll run into a Terminator-like scenario. I agree there are risks with those types of research, but if we don't do the research, someone else will -- and there are HUGE upsides to this type of research.

I believe that free market capitalism works (for the most part), and I don't want to see regulations put on genetic and nanotech research. I support Barack Obama, and I believe government intervention and minor regulations are necessary to fix our current economic crisis, but that intervention and regulation should be focused on our financial sector and should not extend to our technology sector, or other sectors for that matter.

I greatly respect and admire Bill Joy, but his appointment will somewhat worry me.

ETags

I'm sure your all familiar with ETags, which can be used to determine if you've downloaded a file from a site or not. This works great for images: if you've already downloaded an image, why bother downloading it again? But have you ever thought of using ETags to determine if a user has downloaded your dynamic html?

Let's say you've got a page that takes 15 database queries to generate. I'd bet money on the fact that with just one or two of those queries you could determine, using ETags, whether or not the user has seen the page already. If you can do that, you can return a response code of 304 (Unmodified), so the browser pulls everything from cache -- you'll cut database activity and bandwidth usage to a fraction of what they would be otherwise, which could cut the need for extra servers in your cluster.

Here is a cool blog entry using RoR as an example, but the same technique applies with Grails (and Java):

and here is another more long winded article with Spring/Hibernate


-Dustin

Quicksort in Scala

def sort(list: List[Int]): List[Int] = {
        list match {
                case List() => list
                case List(_) => list
                case List(_, _*) => {
                        val pivot = list(list.length/2)
                        sort(list.filter(x => x < pivot)) ::: list.filter(x => x == pivot) ::: sort(list.filter(x => x > pivot)) 
                }
        }
}

Erlang is Rad

I don't know how many times I've brought it up, but Erlang is still rad. Everyone in technology should watch at least the first 13 minutes of this presentation:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/erlang-software-for-a-concurrent-world

SearchMonkey

I'm pretty excited about SearchMonkey

Marchitecture

This is one of the most insightful interviews I've seen in a long time. I don't know if the term "marchitecture" (guess so) existed before, but whomever coined it was a genius! I have worked for places that were sold TONS of middleware that simply put a halt on productivity, and made life hell. Too bad I'm the only geek I know that watches stuff like this :)