Eventually Consistent

In this great article Bruce Schneier clearly explains the lock-in rationale for software companies and the way they try to sell this as security benefits for the consumers.

«By confusing control and security, companies are able to force control measures that work against our interests by convincing us they are doing it for our own safety»

«With enough lock-in, a company can protect its market share even as it reduces customer service, raises prices, refuses to innovate and otherwise abuses its customer base. It should be no surprise that this sounds like pretty much every experience you’ve had with IT companies: Once the industry discovered lock-in, everyone started figuring out how to get as much of it as they can.»

The article starts by talking about the locked nature of the iPhone - not about SIM locking but about the fact that you cannot develop/install 3rd party applications. This has been really annoying me and as much as I like Apple and the iPhone I think this is a serious blow to an important part of their users base: the tech geeks. Hey! WE-WANT-OPEN-PLATFORMS! In fact all my friends with iPhones are spending a lot of energy trying to unlock their iPhones… What a waste - they should be spending this energy contributing to the platform not trying to break free out of it!

N95 and N810

Originally uploaded by Tom Raftery

I finally had the chance to play with the Nokia N810 for a while and here’s my appreciation of the device:

The good: ultra portable, ultra connected (wifi, bluetooth, usb2, gps) with a real keyboad and a great 800×480 screen. Geek approved: it runs Linux and is open, so, many apps like Skype, Pidgin or OpenSSH are available. The Ruby and Python language can also be installed. The browser is Mozilla based so web2.0 browsing works.

The bad: the thumb space for the directional pad is a bit limited on top, maybe they should have made the keyboard slide down a few more millimeters. I haven’t had good luck with the gps, it took forever to acquire satellites indoor. I don’t have much experience with gps devices so I don’t know if it is just not very sensitive or if it is normal not to work well indoor.

The ugly: I was anxiously waiting to try the N810 mostly for one application: Google Reader! Even more since I saw a post about Google Gears being ported to the N810. Well I’m sad to say that the experience is not good… Google Reader is very demanding on the browser and on the N810 it is simply unusable. Big big deception. Of course the mobile version works but it is a line-printer type interface

In conclusion it is definitly a device I would get… Hoping the browser performance would get better… Or maybe alternate faster browsers will be available eventually.

Finally, I decided to give the final push to complete my transition from Blogger to WordPress on my own server on slicehost. I decided to keep my old blog online as an archive and redirect my readers here.

The idea for Eventually Consistent comes from the Amazon SimpleDB technology and Amazon CTO’s blogpost about the concept of eventual consistency in the context of data replication. As with CouchDb, the concept of distributed, document-centric, non-relational and schema-free database engines is gaining traction - especially in the community of web-application architects/developers that need to scale sites/applications that deal with huge amount of data.

There is a lot of confusion on the subject and many are trying to compare the performance and usability of such engines in the context of their existing RDBMS architecture. You simply cannot do a first-degree comparison of MySQL/PostgreSQL/etc versus SimpleDB or CouchDb - they are very different tools to solve very different problems.

Welcome aboard!

Colin.