My comments on "Why the World Needs a New Database System"

Nice post by Anand on Datawocky
Why the World Needs a New Database System ! The post talks about the need for a new database system built on top of commodity hardware, that can handle large amount of data, and provides an easy to use query language. On solution front, Anand's post focuses mainly on Aster Data. Although there are mainly solutions mentioned in the comments sections.

Definitely there is a need for a simple query language (SQL like) to process large amount of data distributed over commodity hardware.

I feel Hypertable , an open source version of Bigtable, may be a good way to address this problem. Hypertable uses a query language (HQL - Hypertable Query Language) that is similar to SQL. Hypertable can be installed over distributed file system like HDFS, and KFS. Since these file systems are fault-tolerant and scale well with the number of nodes in the system, Hypertable is also fault-tolerant and scalable.

I wonder how Aster data solution fares with respect to Hypertable.

Freezing Austin

For the first time in the last 5 years, I have seen so much ice/snow in Austin, thanks to the ice storm. Many people including me are under "house arrest" since last couple of days. It's so new to Austin that I thought of posting some pics :). Check out more pics here.





Jack is back ...

Another season (6th) of "24" started with a bang. Four out of twenty-four hours are already passed with action packed sequences, and Jack, as usual, is all over the place with his self-healing power.

A trivia: if you get involved in a bar fight, and if you have an option to chose between Jack Bauer and Harry Potter for your help, then whom will you pick? Of course, Jack Bauer. See this blog for an interesting argument.

Check out this site for some interesting facts about Jack Bauer. Some of them are really funny. For example,
  • Jack Bauer never retreats, he just attacks in the opposite direction.
  • The city of Los Angeles once named a street after Jack Bauer in gratitude for his saving the city several times. They had to rename it after people kept dying when they tried to cross the street. No one crosses Jack Bauer and lives.
  • When Jack Bauer ran out of ammo, he caught 3 bullets in his chest and used them to reload.
  • Once, someone tried to tell Jack Bauer a "knock knock" joke. Jack Bauer found out who was there, who they worked for, and where the goddamned bomb was.
  • Jack Bauer doesn't need to eat, sleep, or use the bathroom because his organs are afraid of making him angry.
  • Superman is one of the few individuals who could possibly survive a confrontation with Jack Bauer. But that is only because he can fly away.
  • Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.
  • When Jack Bauer plays dodgeball, the ball dodges Jack Bauer.
  • ... :)

On mood swings

I was feeling a bit low in the middle of the week. After wasting a few hours, I was still not alright. In an attempt to get over it, I started asking questions like why am I feeling low? What was it that triggered the feeling? How should I cope up with this? What do others do in this situation? And I started getting some answers when I was posing the situation in the form of questions. It seems years of computer science problem solving training has deeply affected consciousness as well. Now do I need to deal with any situation by posing a relevant question? Not a bad option though :). The following blog was a good read, http://health.yahoo.com/experts/yeahdave/5837/riders-on-the-storm

I hope I can learn something from the following quotes.

"You can't expect to prevent negative feelings altogether. And you can't expect to experience positive feelings all the time...The Law of Emotional Choice directs us to acknowledge our feelings but also to refuse to get stuck in the negative ones." -- Greg Anderson

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." --Franklin D. Roosevelt

movie Borat

I recently watched this movie Borat. While watching the movie, I was wondering what a Kazakh would think about the movie. And I was not surprised when I found that there is enough controversy about the movie that I didn't know about (check this out: Borat controversy). The movie is fictional, but I wonder how can the director/producer depict a country (and people from that country) in such a bad way, and also somewhat illogical. For example, the main character could learn driving in American highway and roads, but could not learn some basic things in the daily life.