Anycast

For this reason, anycast is generally used as a way to provide high availability and load balancing for stateless services such as access to replicated data; for example, DNS service is a distributed service over multiple geographically dispersed servers.

One of many things I need to learn more about one of these days is Internet infrastructure. For some reason, I'd never heard of 'Anycast' until today, as I was reading up on how Google's new DNS service would work. Interesting stuff in there too about using Anycast as part of the transititon to IPv6.

Go vs Go!

Go! is a concurrent programming language, first publicly documented by Keith Clark and Francis McCabe in 2003 [1]. It is oriented to the needs of programming secure, production quality, agent based applications. It is multi-threaded, strongly typed and higher order (in the functional programming sense).

Google's new 'Go' programming language, the very day it is announced, is already embroiled in a naming controversy.

Personally, I think they should contact the makers of LabVIEW, and see if they can acquire the naming rights for the G programming language.

Convicted Murderer To Wikipedia: Shhh!

In 1990, Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr was brutally murdered. Two of his business associates were convicted, imprisoned for the crime, and recently paroled. Who killed Sedlmayr? Its a matter of public record, but if one of the men and his German law firm gets their way, Wikipedia (and EFF) will not be allowed to tell you. A few days ago, the online encyclopedia received a cease and desist letter from one of the convicts—represented by the aptly named German law firm Stopp and Stopp—demanding that the perpetrator's name be taken off of the Sedlmayr article page.

German convicted (and paroled) murderer attempts to censor Wikipedia, to hide his crime. I suspect this will be subject to the "Streisand effect" -- where trying to hide something only succeeds in drawing more attention to it.

"Oh, and by the way, the convicts were Wolfgang Werlé and his half-brother Manfred Lauber."

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why the mainstream media is dying

Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson.

Let's just say, the New York Times come off looking like a pack of fools. Read the whole thing, please.

Partly this is due to the fact that TechCrunch is a specialty publication -- when you have an economics story, The Economist is likely to do better coverage than, say, Newsweek. But that is a benefit of the blog format: focus. Blogs have a 'beat' just like old-school reporters do; and while a general purpose news outlet might cut back on coverage of some beat when times get lean, that's not going to happen at a blog whose brand is built around specifically that type of coverage.

I agree with FSJ; if the old-media outlets die out, we'll be just fine, maybe even better off.

Reading Code: In praise of superficial beauty

So, while Marco's problem started with the project's shoddy documentation and API, his actual code criticism focuses on issues that are apparently superficial. He hasn't discovered a substantive bug or architectural weakness in the snippet above. Instead, what matters to him are simple virtues like consistency, style, and readability. Marco is saying, in fact, that the OpenSSL code sucks because it lacks superficial beauty. I couldn't agree with this position more.

Yes, yes, a gazillion times yes. When it comes to code, I've found, appearances are not deceiving: code that looks good generally is good. Well crafted, neatly organized, tastefully named code is the sign of a disciplined mind at work.