Turkey trot

It seems like we are at that time of the year when everybody is incredibly busy.

And there's so much to read!

• If you only watch one technical video this year, make it James Hamilton: AWS Innovation at Scale

  This session, led by James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer, gives an insider view of some the innovations that help make the AWS cloud unique. He will show examples of AWS networking innovations from the interregional network backbone, through custom routers and networking protocol stack, all the way down to individual servers. He will show examples from AWS server hardware, storage, and power distribution and then, up the stack, in high scale streaming data processing. James will also dive into fundamental database work AWS is delivering to open up scaling and performance limits, reduce costs, and eliminate much of the administrative burden of managing databases.

• Google to Quadruple Computer Science Prize Winnings to $1 Million

  The Turing Award had carried prize money of $250,000 and was jointly underwritten by Google and Intel since 2007. But Intel decided to step away as a funder, and Google stepped up and upped the ante.

• Microsoft Releases Emergency Security Update

  “The attacker could forge a Kerberos Ticket and send that to the Kerberos KDC which claims the user is a domain administrator,” writes Chris Goettl, product manager with Shavlik. “From there the attacker can impersonate any domain accounts, add themselves to any group, install programs, view\change\delete date, or create any new accounts they wish.

• Compiler Design in C

  Compiler Design in C is now, unfortunately, out of print. However, you can download a copy

• Keeping Secrets

  the conference featured the work of a group from Stanford that had drawn the ire of the National Security Agency and the attention of the national press. The researchers in question were Martin Hellman, then an associate professor of electrical engineering, and his students Steve Pohlig, MS ’75, PhD ’78, and Ralph Merkle, PhD ’79.

  A year earlier, Hellman had published “New Directions in Cryptography” with his student Whitfield Diffie, Gr. ’78. The paper introduced the principles that now form the basis for all modern cryptography

• Building a complete Tweet index

  In this post, we describe how we built a search service that efficiently indexes roughly half a trillion documents and serves queries with an average latency of under 100ms.

• Why I'm not signing up for Google Contributor (or giving up on web advertising)

  People say all kinds of stuff. You have to watch what they do. What they do, offline, is enjoy high-value ad-supported content, with the ads. Why is the web so different? Why do people treat web ads more like email spam and less like offline ads? The faster we can figure out the ad blocking paradox, the faster we can move from annoying, low-value web ads to ads that pull their weight economically.

• Your developers aren’t slow

  Feel like your team isn’t shipping fast enough? Chances are, your developers aren’t to blame.

  What’s really slowing down development?

  If it’s not your developers, what’s slowing down development? Here’s a hint: it’s your process.

• Cache is the new RAM

  You know things are really desperate when “less painful than writing it yourself” is the main selling point.

• Delayed Durability in SQL Server 2014

  With delayed durability, the transaction commit proceeds without the log block flush occurring – hence the act of making the transaction durable is delayed. Under delayed durability, log blocks are only flushed to disk when they reach their maximum size of 60KB. This means that transactions commit a lot faster, hold their locks for less time, and so Transactions/sec increases greatly (for this workload). You can also see that the Log Flushes/sec decreased greatly as well, as previously it was flushing lots of tiny log blocks and then changed to only flush maximum-sized log blocks.

• Delayed Durability in SQL Server 2014

  Like many other additions in recent versions of SQL Server (*cough* Hekaton), this feature is NOT designed to improve every single workload – and as noted above, it can actually make some workloads worse. See this blog post by Simon Harvey for some other questions you should ask yourself about your workload to determine if it is feasible to sacrifice some durability to achieve better performance.

• The Programmer's Price: Want to hire a coding superstar? Call the agent.

  Hiring computer engineers used to be the province of tech companies, but, these days, every business—from fashion to finance—is a tech company. City governments have apps, and the actress Jessica Alba is the co-founder of a startup worth almost a billion dollars. All of these enterprises need programmers. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen told New York recently, “Our companies are dying for talent. They’re like lying on the beach gasping because they can’t get enough talented people in for these jobs.”

• git-p4 - Import from and submit to Perforce repositories

  Create a new Git repository from an existing p4 repository using git p4 clone, giving it one or more p4 depot paths. Incorporate new commits from p4 changes with git p4 sync. The sync command is also used to include new branches from other p4 depot paths. Submit Git changes back to p4 using git p4 submit. The command git p4 rebase does a sync plus rebases the current branch onto the updated p4 remote branch.