Ben Matasar

Wikipedia iPhone app

My friend Patrick made a Wikipedia browser for the iPhone.

tech | link | 2008/Jan | comments (0)

Two blog posts about OODBs

Via Patrick:

1. Object Oriented Database Management Systems Succeeded
2. The Technology and Business of ObjectStore

I found these two articles interesting. Some good quotes:

From Looking into the future, Dave Moon says: “The illusion of random access memory is becoming increasingly unconvincing on modern hardware. Although dereferencing a pointer takes only one instruction, when the target of the pointer is not cached in the CPU that instruction can take as long to execute as 1000 ordinary instructions executed at peak speed. It’s not clear that other approaches to database navigation are able to execute at peak speed, i.e. with no cache misses and no delays due to resource conflicts within the CPU, but if they were able to execute that fast, they would be able to expend hundreds of instructions to do what pointer dereferencing does and still come out equally fast, in the random access case where the target is not cached. Thus, the advantage of ObjectStore’s architecture is being eroded by hardware evolution. But at the same time, the advantage of C++ and other conventional programming languages is being eroded in the same way. It is not unreasonable to predict that we will see widespread abandonment of the illusion of random access memory in the next two decades. The IBM Cell processor used in video games is the first crack in the dam.”

And:

The code became too hard to maintain, and the demand for Smalltalk turned out to be a fad in those particular years, so we discarded this.

tech | link | 2008/Jan | comments (0)

A book from me! (sort of)

I was the technical reviewer for my friend Topher's book, Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer. I'm biased, but I think it's an interesting book, and early reviews seem to agree.

tech | link | 2007/Dec | comments (0)