Category: Thoughts
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SaaS Euthanasia
I’ve just shut Amanuens down. Forever. Writing the announcement back in June was sad enough, but the actual taking it offline is even worse. And then I even received this: 2012/07/31 17:22:27 UTC: that is the official time of death of Amanuens. Trust me, announcements do not even come close to doing the actual thing…
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Beyond The Google Now/Siri Vision
When I first learned about Siri, quite some time ago, I ditched it as an elaborate way to voice-control your phone. In truth it’s more than that because it sports some kind of intelligence that helps you retrieve and manage multiple kinds of information. Now I have Google Now on my Galaxy Nexus, and I…
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We Still Haven’t Figured JavaScript Out
That fact that manipulating the DOM via JavaScript has become very easy, thanks to libraries like jQuery, doesn’t mean we should feel authorized to write crappy unmaintainable JavaScript code. The problem is, I can’t seem to avoid writing piles of bad JavaScript. It’s just too hard. Or, rather, it’s too easy to write bad code.…
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Misbehaving DNS
Large cloud infrastructures like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Windows Azure share, at least for certain features, a common trait: DNS is used aggressively to quickly provision and deprovision instances/services/load balancers/endpoints. The trick is to keep DNS records’ TTL values very low. Azure, for instance, keeps TTL at 10 seconds, meaning that the client connecting to…
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There Is An Upside In Every Bad Thing (For Real)
So we’re shutting down. I would be lying if I said that it was an easy decision, or that it had no emotional byproducts. I ought to write a post-mortem one day. I surely will. But in all this melancholy, there still is an upside: we are receiving dozens emails from our users. All of…