Werner Vogels: In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability. Let me repeat this before it gets misunderstood: Dynamo is an internal-only tool.

Werner Vogels points out Michael Stonebraker may still be working under an N = 1 mindset: I like this challenge, given that 50X is likely to be able to make impact, where 2-4X in general can be easily compensated for by the next generation hardware. But something bugs me about the challenge and also about some of the demonstrations in the papers; 50X is still focused on scaling-up, just as many of the current database systems do, instead of scaling out, which is what the world really needs.

Judge Ann Aiken of the Oregon Federal District Court ruled that two provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), "50 U.S.C. §§ 1804 and 1823, as amended by the Patriot Act, are unconstitutional because they violate the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution." Her decision is a refreshing reminder of the power and uniqueness of our constitution, and a hard slap down to the administration that proposed the legislation and the weak-kneed congress that rubber-stamped it.

For the first time in my life I downloaded music off the internet legally. Let me qualify that statement: I've never downloaded music illegally. I've never used iTunes, or any other DRM-laden "service" to buy music. For the first time in my life I can download music off the internet legally using Amazon's new MP3 service. I've been waiting for this day for a long time.

Derek Sivers: I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom. As I've said before, Rails deserves a lot of credit for moving the bar for web frameworks, but there's nothing magical there that ties the ideas in Rails to the Ruby language.

Rob Pike: The decade that moved menus and windows from the research lab to more than ten million PC’s, that changed computer graphics from an esoteric specialty to a commonplace, has barely advanced the state of the art in user interfaces. A case can be made that the state of the art is even backsliding: the hardware and software resources required to support an X terminal are embarrassing, yet the text editor of choice in universities on such terminals continues to be a character based editor such as vi or emacs, both holdovers from the 1970’s.

Sam Ruby: ... I see a future in lightweight threads without locks or semaphores. I think Newsqueak might be an instantiation of that future. (And no, this isn't a smalltalk deriviative; Newsqueak has nothing to do with Squeak.)

Unlike some people, I just couldn't resist getting a Honda Civic Hybrid. On top of the $5,000 incentive that Google offers for the purchase of a fuel efficient vehicle there was also the "green loan" program at the credit union which reduced our loan a whole point. Not only does this car get 49 mpg in the city and 51 mpg on the highway, we also bought the satellite navigation package with voice recognition.

Our copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys arrived and the kids have enjoyed it. Our first project we did out of the book was the battery: Ten alternating layers of quarters, aluminum foil, and construction paper soaked in vinegar and salt got us five volts and enough power to light the LED. Note that if you leave the battery assembled overnight you get to give a little lesson in electroplating the next morning.

Russell Beattie has written the post on the demise of Java that I'd wish I'd written myself: I like Jonathan Schwartz a lot, but I think that unless some drastic changes are made to Java, the move to JAVA as Sun's ticker symbol is going to be as relevant as changing it to COBOL. I'm using Java less and less as time goes by, not more - the heyday of the language and platform has come and gone, and IMHO, unless some drastic steps are taken, it's going to continue to fade from relevance with increasing speed.

Jonathan Schwartz: JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet... Maybe you meant "intranet"? My internet is composed of browsers and LAMP stacks, where LAMP = (Linux, Apache/Lighty, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), and none of those pieces, not even the browsers, are written in Java. I agree he meant "intranet" :) Posted by Tomasz Gorski on 2007-08-24

Myrtle Bearch, SC

Aaron's write up of Sci Foo 2007 sounds like what I want the ETech conference to be.

Charles Pierce [via sogrady]: It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn't so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.

why: I’m not suggesting that one-liners are the heart of all programming. But they can be the hook to get someone exploring. A single line of code simply shows that a language can be focused. And it lets a beginner get comfortable with the basic atoms.

The problem with "social media" sites is that they're like bars, even if they become the next Studio 54, they will all, eventually, become the next Studio 54.

Like Tim, I just finished reading William Gibson's Spook Country. Filled with those trademark riverstone-smooth sentences and spiked with a cynicism that can only come from two terms of a Bush presidency it's less science fiction and more a mark and sweep dump of the unevenly distributed future that's already here. Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.

It's all about the construction. [ For the impatient, the executive summary is that I'm starting at Google at the end of the month. I won't be relocating. I'll provide more details as I learn them, and as I learn what I can, and can't, share. ] My first job was working at Tecan U.S. writing software for spectrophotometers and liquid handling robots. At the time Lynne and I lived in North Raleigh and my commute took me around the north west part of the Raleigh belt-line.

Michael Coté: It seems to me that people building LAMP, Ruby, django, or other applications think of themselves more as building web applications with whatever technology tools they need to use: web services, cron jobs, MySQL, ruby, PHP, python, maybe some Java: whatever. What matters is getting the web application working. People who using Java see themselves primarily as building Java applications that happen to have a “view” (as we OO head-jobs would call it) that’s the web.

A new internet-draft of URI Templates is now available. An HTML version of the specification and diffs from the previous version are also available there. As usual the discussion is taking place on the W3C URI mailing list. Kudos to Mark for getting this version up and out to the printers.