Dark Pegasus

I’ve been using appengine for a side project lately and it’s pretty sweet! However performance isn’t guaranteed, especially with a naive model. Some learned points:

• Avoid accessing the datastore. Especially writes. GAE is highly optimized for frequent reads and infrequent writes.
• Related to that, favor fewer large objects over many small objects in the datastore. It’s much better to load and deserialize an object tree than to make a query for each object type. This will reduce your round trips to the datastore. Also there is no way to bulk delete rows but if you have your objects as a pickled collection in a db.Blob, you can delete many elements from the collection in a single access. Pretty nice actually.
• Avoid writing to the same objects concurrently. This needs to be balanced with the previous point. The contention will kill your performance as you get more users. However if writes really are rare in your model this is fine.

Awesome. Google is now doing audio indexing on videos. So far it seems they’ve just started with political videos and not general youtube videos but still. Damn! Very cool stuff. I wish I was that cool…

http://labs.google.com/gaudi

There are a lot of benchmarks about how fast Chrome is at running Javascript. While true there is still a good amount of bias in them. Obviously Google optimizes for their benchark suite, mozilla for their’s, IE for who knows what. But numbers don’t do it justice. Download Chrome and try out these sites to see what a difference it makes. Okay, so some of these sites are optimized heavily to run on today’s browsers so try running them on a slower machine if you can. Trust me, you’ll notice the difference.

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/mariokart/  Rendering bug on my machine, I filed a bug report through the browser.

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/chess/ Rotate the board

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/wolf/ 

http://www.jsdesk.com/

http://www.meebo.com/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/examples/dd/portal-drag_source.html#

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pHAgbiDvfxHEUsrD0NhujRA (Copy this to a new spreadsheet, change the data)

http://maze.sitepoint.com

You have that just formatted feel. You just installed all the required drivers, Windows is running fast and smooth because there is nothing on it.

Now what?

Well, you install apps to make it useful of course! The real question is what to install? That’s where this post comes in. It’s as much of a checklist for myself as a guide for everyone else, what to install right away without spending any money.

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Recently I’ve bumped into several projects which have sparked an interest in me for learning electronics. Something appeals to me about building a physical device to interact with in addition to the software required.

I hope to work my way up to building a build indicator, a small robot or an intruder defense system in the next few months. So where does someone like me get started? Why, with the basics of course. To that end I’ve picked up Electronic Circuits for the Evil Genius and have been building the circuits in there. The book has a nice project based approach which is good for getting your hands dirty quickly (how I learn best). I haven’t designed any circuits yet but that will come after I have a better feel for why the circuits do what they do.

After I have a handful of experiments under my belt I think I’m going to pick up a book with more theory and revisit the circuits I’ve already built. Wish me luck!

It was someone’s birthday at work recently and like many birthday celebrations there was cake. His was a little special though…