I’m back in the UK, and now living in my flat, but updates are sparse because I don’t have internet access in the flat and work is a little busy - that’s what happens when you’re out of the office for 5 weeks!
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This morning I got up and put on my Scotland rugby shirt…. no real reason, just seemed like a good idea.
I’m now sitting in the very friendly cafe in the Hideout Theater in Austin, and noticed that Scotland won the Calcutta Cup!
A real coincidence, and a good day.
Was what I heard when I picked up the phone a moment ago. Happily I had an easy out given that I’m not able to vote tomorrow.
Having been in Texas for 2 weeks, it’s been almost impossible to sit through an ad break on TV without seeing an ad for one or the other, hence I now have a strong opinion. FWIW (and it’s worth nothing), if I had a vote in the Democratic primary tomorrow I’d be voting for Barack Obama. Why? Because I think he’d more likely to succeed in the change both he and Hillary Clinton promise.
So I am now, fundamentally in debt… good debt, I think, but debt.
How? I’ve bought a flat in Winchester. Yes, I’m in Texas, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem in this day and age.
Now I just have to wait 3 weeks before I’m back in Winchester to see if it is anything like I remember.
See, no need to bring Tea with you to America!
Last night I arrived in Austin, Texas, my home for the next month!
More later….
One of the things that I really enjoy is working in a distributed development team which spans the globe. On occasion, however it can be a little frustrating. Yesterday I returned a defect to the originator asking for some diagnostic trace. It was here for me when I arrived in the morning. Excellent I thought, I’ll get it squared away today. Then I went looking for the particular piece of trace which would provide the critical information. What did I find?
(big messy startup deleted)
The originator tried to be helpful, and unfortunately, this time, it’ll slow us down some while I wait for him to get into the office in the US and send me the original file. That’s one of the downsides of distributed development…
On Wednesday, for only the second time ever, I had Sushi. It was excellent. Thanks again to Paul and Jonathan for introducing me to it 2 years ago.
It was at the end of a good day’s work out of the office doing something completely new, and ended up with a few drinks with a good friend. Yes, it was a good day.
More regular posts to resume shortly….
Merry Christmas Everyone!
It’s been a fun family Christmas so far, and I’m looking forward to a few more days off 
P.S. No cards this year - climate crisis and all… e-mail all the way
Amazon Web Services Platform - SimpleAtomic please
Published December 16, 2007 Tech , amazon , webservices 0 CommentsIt’s probably not a good approach for a number of reasons, but every time a new development technology or platform comes along, I first evaluate how I’d develop a theatre ticketing system with it. I reimplemented newts a few times in Java because I didn’t get it remotely correct the first time out, so I know the problem inside and out and it can be extended to an online model for those kinds of technologies. So while it might not be an ideal reference concept, for me it’s a good start.
This past week Amazon announced SimpleDB to extend their web services platform to small, semi-structured, queryable data storage. It really does make you ask the question “What doesn’t their platform provide?”. The answer to that is a transactional data store for non-file data. That’s right, SimpleDB isn’t a database in the currently common understanding of the term. The lack of transactionality and the ‘eventual consistency’ model help hugely in the scaling out methodology used by companies like Amazon, and having seen a couple of presentations about that strategy, I’m a proponent myself.
And for many, many applications which currently use a RDBMS, no transactionality/consistency is fine. In fact, to use my ticketing system example, there’s only one place where I actually need to read and update data atomically, and even that is a single integer associated with each performance. But I really do need it in that one place. I’ve thought about it for a while, and it’s just not optional.
Where does that leave me on the Amazon platform? I think it means I have to install a RDBMS on a couple of EC2 instances and jump through all the annoying hoops to get that to work and be robust and scale. All that for a single atomic integer update.
What could they do to help with this? Well after a little head scratching, what I’d like is to be able to write some distributed transactional/atomic logic on the Amazon platform for these small cases where it’s actually required, and where I’ve considered the scaling implications.
So I’d like a transaction/atomic primitives service. A SimpleAtomic service which lets me create and access simple Locks, AtomicBooleans and AtomicIntegers (similar to the java.util.concurrent classes).
I’m looking forward to discussing this at work and outside as I’m sure the ideas of (1) moving transactions/atomicity logic explicitly into the application and (2) doing transactional work in a scaling environment will be controversial in each environment respectively.
