Holy Cow! Transport Tycoon in Javascript?!
December 31, 2007 § Leave a comment
Well… not quite the whole game, but the demo itself is impressive!
Furthermore, the tool that allows the developer to achieve Transport Tycoon in browser is intriguing.
It’s called JSC. This open source project compiles c# code to javascript.
I’m not qualified to comment on MSFT technology, but JSC compiler seemed to work at low level. Interesting…
References:
Interesting criticism against SQLAlchemy
December 30, 2007 § Leave a comment
The Hand of FuManchu pits SQLAlchemy against Storm and Geniusql under his benchmarks.
In the INSERT benchmark FuManchu(I believe he is involved with CherryPy) claims that SQLAlchemy is making over 400 function calls.
FuManchu show these 2 findings on his benchmarks:
- SQLAlchemy spends a lot of time building the bound parameters.
- He also claims that SQLAlchemy takes 73 Python function calls fetching auto-increment id.
In response, Mike Bayer wrote, in his blog, saying that SQLAlchemy aims to be a complete ORM with rich features. He even corrected the benchmarks here.
What does this benchmarks mean to me? Nothing much really. I like using SQLAlchemy, it has a lot of features I need and some more. IF this benchmark is right, I can always use raw SQL just for the sake of speed, although such code is ugly.
For readers, read the blogs comments as well. They are very interesting.
Waiting for Joost? get Miro instead!
December 30, 2007 § Leave a comment
Miro is open source client side Internet TV.
It conveniently(sometimes too conveniently) downloads internet videos to your computer via RSS(& bitTorrent?).
It claims to have a lot more channels than Joost.
It is written using XUL.
It has a lot of science and tech channels by default, which is awesome for me personally.
Beware: to prevent running out of hard-drive space, You have to set lower expiration days on preferences.
Reference:
Hadoop: Open Source Map Reduce
December 29, 2007 § 2 Comments
What is Map:
In Python, map() applies a certain function to each element in a list. Map returns a list.
What is Reduce:
Superficially, not much difference, reduce() takes a certain function and runs that function against every element in a list. Reduce returns 1 item.
What is MapReduce:
It is an architecture that allows functions to be executed across distributed cluster. MapReduce is special because the map and reduce functions are complemented with key-value mapping so that functions can be executed across distributed commodity servers.
What is Hadoop:
It is MapReduce open source implementation. It is written in Java.
Python obviously already have map and reduce functions, so what’s left is to figure out the distributed aspect of MapReduce. Below are two people who have already thought of MapReduce implementation in Python:
Resources:
History of iPod
December 23, 2007 § Leave a comment
Part 1/5
Part 2/5
Part 3/5
Part 4/5
Part 5/5
Source:
Fake Steve Job is finally revealed
December 22, 2007 § Leave a comment
Darn… I never really wanted to know the real person behind fake Steve Jobs.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is an anonymous blog, authored by “Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ)”, that follows hi-tech industry in a candid way. Words on the street’s that real Steve Jobs and Bill Gates read FSJ blog (In 1 of WSJ podcast, Bill Gates claimed that he is NOT FSJ).
It is always more fun to imagine that Steve Jobs really said the things on Fake Steve Jobs blog.
But anyway, FSJ turned out to be Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who lives near Boston.
As FSJ, Daniel Lyons enjoys calling Bill Gates as Beastmaster and Eric E. Schmidt as Squirrel Boy. Fun stuff…
Although sadly, sure enough, Apple lawyers are starting to contact him.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/technology/06steve.html
