Handy tool for establishing ping times btw servers in different countries.

> Here's my perspective... I view URLs and HTTP as a serialization layer for communication between software processes (RPC).

Right. REST views it differently. That's what you're missing. REST is a means for computers to communicate, but not through procedure calls. They communicate through transferring stateful representations. Hence the name.

"In the end SOAP and REST are very different approaches to solving slightly different sets of problems. REST based web services may be easier create and integrate; but some problems, such as system wide distributed transactions, can be more straightforward to implement using behavior centric models like SOAP."

"The data preparation phase is often known as ETL (Extract Transform Load) or the data factory. "Factory" is a good analogy because it captures the essence of what is being done in this stage: Just as a physical factory brings in raw materials and outputs products ready for consumers, so a data factory brings in raw data and produces data sets ready for data users to consume. Raw data is loaded in, cleaned up, conformed to the selected data model, joined with other data sources, and so on. Users in this phase are generally engineers, data specialists, or researchers.

The data presentation phase is usually referred to as the data warehouse. A warehouse stores products ready for consumers; they need only come and select the proper products off of the shelves. In this phase, users may be engineers using the data for their systems, analysts, or decisionmakers.

Given the different workloads and different users for each phase, we have found that different tools work best in each phase. Pig (combined with a workflow system such as Oozie) is best suited for the data factory, and Hive for the data warehouse."

"SQL's ubiquity is convenient. However, I believe that Pig Latin is a more natural choice for constructing data pipelines, for several reasons:

Pig Latin is procedural, where SQL is declarative.
Pig Latin allows pipeline developers to decide where to checkpoint data in the pipeline.
Pig Latin allows the developer to select specific operator implementations directly rather than relying on the optimizer.
Pig Latin supports splits in the pipeline.
Pig Latin allows developers to insert their own code almost anywhere in the data pipeline."

nice overview of three options today

"During the time before latest release of highlight.js 6.0 I decided — for the first time in more than 4 years — to actually look at other highlighting libraries. Sure I knew of their existence before but nonetheless never felt compelled to do any serious comparison because highlight.js is a fun project and I'm quite happy with the result. In fact this comparison has also been made for fun more than for anything else. I just wondered how actually good (or bad) highlight.js was looking among similar libraries.<br />
<br />
I decided not to take into account highly subjective things like visual appeal, installation simplicity and documentation clarity. Also I didn't evaluate number of supported languages. While it is a measurable quantity it doesn't mean much for an end user: if a tool doesn't support the language you need you don't care about dozens of others that it does support. Instead I concentrated on universally measurable things that make sense for everyone: size, speed and correctness."

"Like any sane programmer, I was initially wary of CoffeeScript. How could a little syntactic sugar sprinkled over JavaScript possibly justify the extra compilation step?<br />
<br />
But after playing with CoffeeScript for just a few days, I knew I’d never go back. The syntactic sugar was only the beginning. I was writing code more quickly and with fewer bugs, because everything was so much clearer. It became much easier to tap into the good parts of JavaScript—and there are many—while steering clear of the bad. I’ve listed a few of those nasty bits below, along with some of the ways CoffeeScript makes it easy to avoid them."

"As part of the Consumer Electronics Show, Root Wireless used their own product near the Las Vegas Convention Center for six hours a day throughout the show. With just limited data, the company was able to create a useful graph of each carrier’s data performance. In fact, it verified something we repeatedly said throughout the show as our iPhones became useless bricks."

"In many situations, the Script DOM Element is a good choice. It works in all browsers, doesn’t have any cross-site scripting restrictions, is fairly simple to implement, and is well understood. The one catch is that it doesn’t preserve execution order across all browsers. If you have multiple scripts that depend on each other, you’ll need to concatenate them or use a different technique. If you have an inline script that depends on the external script, you’ll need to synchronize them."

"Anyone who tells you with absolute certainty which operating system is “the best” without knowing your individual needs is probably going to be wrong – and I include myself in this. The right choice for you may be Linux, or it may be Mac, or it may be Windows. Choosing is a complex dance between hardware needs, price, aesthetic preferences, application requirements, technical competence, and even “what my friends use”. I think the best piece of advice that I can give, though, is this: if you are considering switching platform, don’t expect “the other side” to be the land of milk and honey forever. Every computing platform has its pros and cons, and once the honeymoon period is over, you’ll run into them."

handy tool for comparing several amazon items at one time

very helpful

"Guitarist and recording engineer Mark Nelson has tested more handheld digital audio recorders than just about anyone. By overwhelming reader request, here's an overview of his conclusions so far; we'll update this page as more recorders come in."

slicehost (+1) and linode get props

apparently suggests excellent credit cards

This is a comparison of notable web application frameworks.

It's pretty common, when reading discussion of Apple's “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, to come across the comment: > Sure, they're great ads but they don't work. John Hodgeman’s PC is far more likeable than Justin Long’s smug hipster Mac. This is missing the point. To illustrate, here are director Chuck Jones’ rules for writing Road Runner cartoons, copied from Wikipedia

highlighting the differences between vi and vim

wikis save time because they cut down on "transaction costs" within a group.

by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators pi

quickly compare your shipping options all at once

email vs wiki workflow illustrated (via: preoccupations)

love it!

A side by side comparison of a photo tour in New York City and Liberty City...crazy details!

overview of the opensource firmware options for the NSLU2

price comparison search

adds a tab for sufficiently permissioned users. The tab shows all revisions like standard Drupal but it also allows pretty viewing of all added/changed/deleted words between revisions.

See price of heating oil at a glance

a site-by-site breakdown of what you get — and give up — by consenting to the Terms of Service at some of the major video sites.

user-contributed size comparisons.

Compares various services and helps sort through their offerings

lens database for Minolta AF mount (Sony alpha) DSLR cameras.

a cross-platform application to visually compare and merge files for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix

visually analyze and understand the demography of the United States through the use of interactive maps and data reports

Looking for operator or function names?

This page is updated on a regular basis and provides a unique resource for everybody who is looking for a hard drive - whether it is for home or for business use.

The interactive CPU Charts provide a true performance comparison between AMD and Intel processors. They allow ambitious users as well as decision makers and dealers to compare their favorite products in 20+ benchmark disciplines.

comparing music-recommendation services Pandora and Last.fm

Welcome to the brand new WikiMatrix.org, your number one source to find the Wiki engine that matches your or your company's needs.

Rate comparison for digital photography prints