Jimmy Wales on Open Source Search

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Treo 755p

This thing looks truly prehistoric when compared to the iPhone.

Palm is doomed. They deserve it though. They haven't really innovated in 3-5 years. Good riddance.

Predictions for the Sopranos

The season finale of the Sopranos is this Sunday... and think I know what's going to happen.

Here's my prediction.

Aj is going to get ticked off at the whole episode and try to go out and kill Leotardo to prove something to Tony.

... he might kill one of Phil's goons but he'll eventually be taken out. Either they'll use Aj as bait to make Tony do something stupid or they'll just kill him.

Tony will find out and go insane. He'll then start making irrational decisions and go head on against Leotardo.

Tony won't die but will end up either severely injured, in prison, or with most of his crime family dead.

Let's see if I'm right. Sunday is right around the corner.

I'm just a caveman....

Classic SNL!

New Techcrunch Product Database?

Looks like Techcrunch is going to release a new product soon. I guess it's called the Techcrunch DB ...

I assume it's sort of a Startup Search clone.

Here's the Twitter entry...

They accidentally linked from the Scribd post.... oops. Of course maybe this was a soft launch.

I like Startup Search better anyway. Probably because they use one of Tailrank's APIs :)

Kid Shoots Huge Wild Boar

Check out this huge wild boar that this kid shot:

This reminds me of the Boar God Nago that Ashitaka killed in the beginning of Princess Mononoke.

If you haven't seen this movie you should add it to your Netflix queue. One of my favorites and certainly happier than Grave of Fireflies (another classic)

Democracy Panda

Man I love these... even better than lolcats!

Reasons I hate Java #102 - The Lowest Common Denominator

Why don't you provide information as to why the VM is shutting down?

On some platforms a native process can't distinguish a shutdown due to exit from a shutdown due to termination. Other platforms provide much richer capabilities, in some cases including notification of system suspension and restart or of imminent power failure. In short, it's impossible to generalize such information in a portable way.

Translation. Some operating systems are crippled. Instead of adding additional methods which could return certain 'unknown' values when running on legacy hardware, we decided that we'd just handicap Java running on every single OS (even Solaris).

Brilliant.

Lightning Destroys Statue of Jesus

More proof that either god doesn't exist or he's kind of a jerk.

Don't look for any religious symbolism here - it was only a freak act of Mother Nature, says Sister Ilaria.

The nuns at Mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden were thanking God on Sunday that no one was hurt when a bolt of lightning shot out of the sky and struck their 33-foot statue of Jesus.

The lightning bolt broke off one of Jesus' arms and a hand and damaged one of his feet, sending marble plummeting to the ground during a Saturday afternoon storm.

Probability of Failure and Size of VC Round

I think there might be a direct correlation between the probability that your startup will fail and the size of the VC round you raise. There are other variables in raising a round (terms, board structure, etc) so your mileage may vary.

I don't have time to track down all the data (which I'll admit is a huge cop out) but based on my experience I think the following holds true.

The more money you take the higher probability that your startup will fail. The key point is the mythical man month. You can't put more engineers on a problem and have it solved faster. Pick a small area of innovation, stake your claim, move fast, and execute.

If you factor in both graphs below (including size of exit / investment) then there's a sweet spot on the lower end of the funding scale. Raising a smaller round (say $500k - $2M) will allow you to lower your probability of failure and increase your exit since you can innovate a bit faster.

Of course if you can get there on revenue so much the better since you don't have to spend 90% of your time pitching VCs.

The main reason I decided to post this was because I keep seeing entrepreneurs raising large rounds ($8M, $30M) for ideas which don't have legs. They're just increasing their probability of failure and lowering their exit potential.

Sure there's the occasional Youtube but these are very rare. These guys were REALLY lucky and were headed right for a wall. My estimates were that they had 4-6 months left on their burn rate before they needed to raise another round of VC.

Unfair Benchmarks of Ehcache vs Memcached

Greg Luck benchmarked ehcache vs memcached:

The results are that put and gets are 500 to 1000 times faster in ehcache compared with memcached. The grey bar, barely visible, is ehcache with the cache all in memory. The blue bar is with 9,900 of the cache items in the disk store. Even the disk performance of ehcache is way faster than memcached. Of course memcached is entirely in memory.

Interesting to say the least but I think it's a false comparison. Apparently, ehcache stores the cache locally and then sync's the cache with the cluster in the background.

Did Greg use getMulti? If he didn't use getMulti then memcached performance will CLEARLY suffer due to gigabit ethernet latency. A 1000x performance difference is certainly possible.

Greg should re-run the benchmark with getMulti.

Also, a flat out put() comparison won't be fair either since there is no putMulti in memcached right now. I talked to Brad Fitzpatrick about this problem it should be possible without a protocol update but I have yet to implement it in the Java client.

The reason this isn't an issue in practice is that most memcached installs are 99% read and 1% write. That said, putMulti would be really attractive for benchmarking or installs that are more like 50/50 read/write.

Local in-process caching will always be faster than remote caching due to the fact that objects don't need to be serialized/deserialized during puts/gets.

One could use a local in-process cache to further buffer memcached but with Java there's one critical problem - memory size estimation.

With a local in-memory LRU cache there's no way for Java to free the memory used by the VM and you could potentially run into runtime out of memory exceptions.

Using weak references is a potential solution but the cache pruning would be non-deterministic from the cache's perspective. There would be no way to tell the cache to remove lower priority items first.

Taking all this into account, using getMulti with memcached and without a local LRU cache is fine for most production applications.

Scientology and Me

Awesome. I've been wanting to see this and apparently it's already on Google Video.

Richard Dawkins vs Bill O'Reilly Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins vs Bill O'Reilly

Bring it!

Richard Dawkins vs Bill O'Reilly Richard Dawkins vs Bill O'Reilly

Bring it!

James Comey is a Civil Liberties Hero

The story coming out of Washington is that James Comey is a civil liberties hero.

Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzalez apparently waited until Ashcroft was sick and in bed and on drugs to try to convince him to sign off on an NSA spying campaign which both Ashcroft and Comey felt was illegal.

Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzalez are traitors. I seriously can't think of a stronger word here. Trying to get a sick man to sign off on the wholesale violation of the 4th amendment for millions of Americans is shameful. No wonder Bush likes these guys.

Here he is testifying before the Senate Judiciary. Breathtaking. I seriously need to shake this guys hand.