links for 2008-09-05

i concur

"I can't get past the fact that there's no SQL. I know why there's no SQL, (Brewer's Conjecture etc) and I have some experience with it. I've been doing years of mostly-simple mashup stuff with quickbase, which is a similar PaaS-backing non-relational data store. It has it's place, but it's hard to imagine really cranking out something complicated with it. When I do code reviews for clients, the biggest improvements come from transforming procedural cursor logic back into set-oriented db-logic, and AppEngine wants you to go the opposite direction. Sigh."

this is excellent stuff. there's a lot XMPP can do for sites, and these Ajax enabling libraries will help presumably help it get there.

pushback on traditional enterprise marketing and its vernacular

i can quite honestly say i've never seen anything like this. anything remotely like this, in fact.

"In 2006, UK police arrested the liquid bombers not through diligent airport security, but through intelligence and investigation. It didn't matter what the bombers' target was. It didn't matter what their tactic was. They would have been arrested regardless. That's smart security. Now we confiscate liquids at airports, just in case another group happens to attack the exact same target in exactly the same way. That's just illogical." precisely. so much of security is theatre, and each inconvenience – or worse, sacrificed liberty – is a win for those that would cause terror.

"The point is that you don’t need to change technologies (or even interaction styles) to solve a problem of information transfer efficiency. Sometimes you just need to rethink the problem. There are many systems for which a different architecture is far more efficient, just as XMPP is far more efficient than HTTP for something like group chat. Large-scale collaborative monitoring is not one of them. An XMPP solution is far more applicable to peer-to-peer monitoring, where there is no central service that is interested in the entire state of a big site like Flickr, but even then we have to keep in mind that the economics of the crowd will dictate scalability, not the protocol used for information transfer."

who knew that the author of James and the Giant Peach was not only a rake, but a spy?

this is older, but very cool

Solaris packaging complaints