Author Archives: Ted Leung

Seattle Flickr sociality

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Recently I’ve been doing some photo stuff with some folks from the Seattle Flickr Meetup group, particularly a bunch of people that are interested in Strobist style off camera lighting. Being able to interact with a community of similarly interested people has been a huge help to me. David Hobby’s post yesterday was about helping connect people to others in their locales who are also interested in lighting. As a bonus, he links to some video of our latest escapade. Here are a few of my shots from that same event.

[This is my first post using MarsEdit 2.0, which has great Flickr support built in]

The Erlang community

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Matt Croydon Didn’t agree with my commentary on the Erlang community, and he’s partially right. I shouldn’t have said “we need a community” because there is an Erlang community, and I knew that. I have never been a fan of Java, and I don’t want to be stuck using the moral equivalent of Java when the multicore/concurrency thing shakes out. So if I want to be able to use Erlang (and I’ve not totally made that decision), then it needs to have a bigger, more diverse, and easier to find community.

Greg Stein mugged

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Kevin Burton reports that Greg Stein, who is a friend and has done a lot to help open source in a variety of ways, was mugged last Friday. In addition to the things that Kevin listed, Greg has been very involved in getting Google to fund students to work on open source projects via the Google Summer of Code program. If you want to do something nice for Greg, Kevin’s post has the details.

Opening up to distributed version control

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Stefano has written a great introspective post on his inner reactions to a Linus video on Git. It’s good to see people being more open minded about this. I’ve never understood the resistance to distributed version control, especially open source software development is itself an example of the success decentralization. Even the “social” argument that distributed version control would somehow destroy communities seems odd to me. This year at the OSCON Art of Community panel, Karl Fogel said that a tenet of the Subversion team is to avoid using technology to solve social problems. Yet insisting on a centralized version control system seems to me to be doing exactly that. I think its noteworthy that the Subversion team itself has a “hybrid distributed/centralized VC model” as a long term goal.

Centralization in open source projects is a “community smell” (think code smell). It’s best avoided.

Another victory for full feeds

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During the bar conversation after the Saturday Seattle Strobist Seminar, a bunch of including James Duncan Davidson and Eric Soroos were talking to David Hobby about full feeds on the Strobist site. In particular, we pointed him to John Gruber’s experiment with full feeds on Daring Fireball (preliminary report on John’s experience). So I was very happy to read that David has decided to try a full feed for Strobist as well.

Since David wanted some more power user full feed info, here’s my take on David’s situation.

The argument for full feeds is that it allows a reader to be more efficient because they can digest more information per unit time. At least that is true for me. The other big benefit is that it allows people who want / need to read offline to do so. The question is, “Doesn’t reader efficiency come at the expense of the publisher”? My answer is, no, not if your content is good. In fact, if your content is good, reader efficiency works in your favor. If your content is good, then you as the publisher doen’t want me to have to break my workflow (by switching to a browser, browser tab, or NetNewsWire tab) to determine that the content is good. If I have to break the flow, there’s much less chance that I will do command-shift-P (in NetNewsWire) to pop the your post into Ecto where I can quote it as part of my post (which ought to generate some additional traffic for you). There’s less chance that I will hit command-1 to pop your post’s title and permalink into Twitterific, where it can get pumped into the realtime information junkie network. And there’s less chance that I will hit command-control-‘ to pop your post’s permalink into Pukka where I can quickly tag it and stick it into del.icio.us, where it can be immortalized as important, seen by my del.icio.us network, and pumped into my blog and tumblog. In other words, you make it hard for people like me to help you. Now you might not care about that, and that’s a completely rational choice. But since just about everything in the blogosphere (after your good original content) is about getting flow (which doesn’t just mean inbound clicks) from other people, it seems like a short sighted thing to make it hard for flow to happen.

There are a few other dynamics which I think are relevant to Strobist, which don’t apply to all blogs.

1. Strobist is not just a blog, it is a source of reference materials. If you metered my accesses to the Strobist site, you would see that I access the site much more as a reference site than as a daily blog. I read the daily blogs, but since I am learning something that requires practice, trial and error, and so forth, I am always pulling up old posts (and those Lighting 101 and 102 pulldown menus) are a godsend for that. Which you have to go the site for. Dropping the 1 click that you would have gotten by forcing me to follow from the partial feed is just noise compared to the other volume

2. The advertisers on Strobist aren’t getting the value from the ads. If you make me go to Strobist in Firefox, Adblock pwns you. I never even see your ads. If you want to get value from Strobist, do something that works with what David is doing. Nonetheless, I’ve ordered several times from the Midwest Photo Exchange, not because they advertise on the site, but because they are doing something that works with what David is doing – so well that David actually writes about it. You might think you need an ad, but what you really need is to do something that will get David to write about you. Strobist is becoming a community, and the advertisers / sponsors of the site will get the most value by being a part of the community (see yesterday’s post on Nikon for tips). And that means more than just doing ads.

3. I was less vehement about full feeds that night (and I do love my full feeds) because I don’t think that David’s audience is an RSS enabled audience. The small sample size at the bar bore that out. So full vs partial doesn’t make that much difference, really. I’ve been reading the blogs of some wedding photographers because I think that maybe someday I might like to take a crack at that. But one thing I’ve noticed is that the word on Strobist is out. I see the techniques being mentioned. People see off camera flash pictures and want to know how to do that. And the answer that invariably comes back is Strobist (or occasionally, the OneLight). You can be sure that this is happening in real life, maybe even more so than on line. So the flow net for Strobist has expanded beyond the RSS savvy crowd and into the real world. No amount of full vs partial RSS feed is gonna change that.

But just in case, click here to convince David of the value of a full RSS feed. 🙂

Scalability != concurrency

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Sam Ruby is writing about Russell Beattie writing about Java and Erlang.

Russell thinks Java needs an overhaul. I think that Java has reached the point where technical, community, and business forces well exert pressure on the language to evolve in a uniformly bad manner.

Russell wrote:

The reason people are looking at Erlang is not because its beautiful syntax, great documentation, or up-to-date libraries. Trust me. It’s because the Erlang VM can run for long periods of time, scaling linearly across cores or processors filling the same niche that Java does right now on the server.

Actually, I am looking at Erlang as a solution for anywhere, (including the client) where concurrency will be an issue. By the way, it is not VM’s that scale linearly, but computational problems. And there are some problems which just can’t scale linearly, no matter what VM we put them on.

Sam goes on to make the point which is the title of this post.

Next, to dispel a few myths. Slashdot is written in Perl, seems to handle the load, and also seems to stay up. While there are a number of BitTorrent implementations, the original and (to the best of my knowledge) the most pervasive version is written in Python. Yahoo is a mix, but a good portion of it is written in PHP, with critical functions written in C. Twitter is written in Ruby, had early scalability issues, but seems to be past them. These are all examples of massively scalable applications.

Scalability is not the same thing as concurrency. It is certainly possible to scale a program written in any language – that’s a given. Especially when scaling = throwing more hardware at it. But there’s got to be a better way of doing it. Question is whether the better way is worth the price of admission.

But as far as Erlang vs Java, the real kicker is here:

Unlike the CLR which was designed to be multi-language, and unlike the JVM which is in the process of being repurposed to be multi-language also, Erlang’s VM is designed from the ground up assuming that objects typically are immutable and serializable.

Which is what makes the situation with Java so bad. Not only is the language bad, the VM is fatally flawed when it comes to actor style concurrency (which is why for all its niceties, Scala will suffer the same problems as Java). There’s a real problem here — ask yourself why there is a market for these things, if all that is needed is to throw even more boxes at the problem.

In the comments, Sam wrote;

The biggest problem I have with Erlang is clearly an addressable one: the documentation of the libraries, and the lack of good samples that can be quickly found by Google/MSN-Live/Yahoo!/Ask searches. And many of the libraries appear to be abandoned at 0.n versions.

This is actually 2 problems. There’s the issue with the libraries, and there’s the issue with the community that did/didn’t produce the libraries. We don’t just need a technology, we need a community. Hmm, Erlang lab, anyone?

Yet another reason why Nikon’s star seems to be rising

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Nikon has done a great job of featuring the work of Flickr users in their Nikon Stunning campaign, and the Nikon Stunning Gallery tag on Flickr. Now they’ve taken it up another notch by introducing the Nikon Digital Learning Center group. It’s a great idea, marred only by a very unpleasant copyright license policy for pictures in the pool. That doesn’t seem to extend to the discussions, so you could still post pictures there in order to gain educational value from the group. That flaw aside, this Nikon seems to be pounding Canon into the ground as far as their use of Flickr. Oh, and their ability to produce an ISO 25,600 DSLR.