1. White iPhone delivery date keeps postpone. At first, its end of June. Then end of July and now unknown. Who know may be its the end of the year? So after 6 months, there will be iPhone 4s or iPhone 5?

2. Apple never honestly explains why they keep postponing the white iPhone. At first, its the paint problem. Then its the glass problem. And now the light lacking problem. Or Apple is secretly fixing the antenna problem? Dont care what exactly the problem is… I wont take the risk to get a product that has so many production issue. I had 2 white iPhone before and they do have some issues with the case.

3. White does look better? May be not… The white iPhone has an extra window for the sensor. It looks ugly in my opinion.

If you have a 3GS and you really want to have the white iPhone 4, I will suggest wait for the next version of iPhone instead. Unless you need the iPhone 4 new features badly (for me, I want the new high resolution display to read books and blogs).

Oracle Coherence does not only works as a key-value paired distributed cache. It does also support distributed data processing (not exactly like map-reduce but it works actually like parallel processing). Also, it can read-through and write-behind Oracle database. It sounds like a perfect solution as our primary domain object storage.

We have about 240GB memory for storage (20 server x 3 JVM x 4GB heap) storage nodes. Due to the number of servers, we decide to have zero backup count. In this scenario, when a node fails, we will lots the data that stored in the node. We assume as long as we have the Oracle database as the permanent storage (thru write behind), we can always read through the missing data.

During our performance testing in the staging environment, Coherence does not performance if we try to random access (add, query, and delete at the same time). To be worse, for each new search index will consume 10-15% more storage. It is really expensive to use RAM for storage!!!

Write behind does not working at all due to our data throughput. Since we have 60 nodes, we have 60 x N JDBC connections. Oracle database basically cannot keep handle all the insert, update, merge, and delete at the same time. The database latency causes the storage nodes evicted from the data grid due to timeout.

After 10 months of development, we decided to get rid of Coherence and use Oracle database directly. Oracle 10g performs pretty good comparing to our legacy system. However, it still cannot provide the performance that we need. We are now looking into other open sourced NOSQL solution that could provide us memory/disk based storage plus Map-Reduced. The current candidates are Cassandra+Hadoop or MongoDB. Cassandra doesn’t support multiple keys indexing but version 0.6 works very well with Hadoop integration (although I have learned from forums that Cassandra has performance issue during high traffic of data loading). MongoDB is very fast and support multiple key indexing. However, the M-R solution comes from MongoDB only supports single thread.

SQl or NOSQL? Still have no answer after 12+ months of development.

Tomorrow, it’s the last day of one of my team members at work. He is an author of 2 books and an active member of some open source projects. He is going to help my other colleague from the other team at work to write a book. There are so many chapters and they need helpers to work on this project. Wow, what a chance for me!!!

I have no idea what I have committed into. I heard a lot of stories about how long to write a book. However, we have 4 very smart people/engineers and I believe this will be a fun project. Also, I wish I can learn more during the adventure.

有消息指，酒牌局要求部分續酒牌的酒吧凌晨2時後不可以賣酒，而近日已至少有 40 間位於不同地區的酒吧在續牌時加入有關條款。酒牌局發言人表示，在審批酒牌申請時會加入賣酒時限等條件，申請人如果不滿可提出上訴。

有近 200名會員的酒吧業協會副主席錢雋永表示，客人11、12點落到酒吧，但 2時就要關門，因為 2時後不能賣酒，酒吧如何能經營呢？他又表示，大部分酒吧老闆基本上是在不知情的情況下，當去到續牌時附加了有關條件。

旅遊界立法會議員謝偉俊認為，酒牌局的做法會影響旅遊業：「應考慮有關地方是商業用地、還是民居為主，作出平衡，在措施、政策上要體恤民情，亦要看香港現時在商業上、旅遊業上的需要，作出較合適、合理比較平衡的做法。」

朋友柏秋雲也憤憤不平道:

這種條例對做酒業生意的人非常不公平。

我也在 Facebook 及 Twitter 引述報導, 可以說 100% 的人都反對香港這個無能政府的做法。說什麼民主自主, 可以的話不如來個全民投票?

Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you — enough for about 1,750 more songs or a few thousand more photos.

One  of the reasons could be related to the PowerPC code removal within the universal binaries.  Secondly, it is related to the new compiler and linker, which generates a small size of target code.  The third reason, which not much people are paying attention to, is the way how to convert from bytes to KB, MB, GB, or TB.

For the past few years, Microsoft Windows uses the base of 10 to calculate storage size.  In computing world, 1MB = 1024KB.  On the other hand, 1MB = 1000KB in metric world.  In other words, a hard drive that has 10,485,760 bytes of available space will be shown as 10.49GB in Windows but only 10GB in pre-Snow Leopard.  Now, in Snow Leopard, we will see 10.49GB instead of 10GB.

Do you see the magic there?

Here is what I found:

1. My Epson Workforce 600 All-in-One Printer doesn’t work after installed Snow Leopard.  I have to download a new version of the driver and installed Rosetta in order to have my printer/scanner works.
2. iStat Menu does not work at all.  My topbar is naked now.
3. Developer Version Google Chrome crashes occasionally.

[Update: 09/01/2009 10:00am]

[Update: 09/02/2009 08:20am]

[Update: 09/03/2009 08:57am]

• The new iPhone like Chinese handwriting input method is very cool.  Your trackpad turns into a Chinese handwriting board.  There are 3 virtual buttons on the left hand side and the other 3 virtual buttons on the right hand side of the trackpad.  You write in the middle of the trackpad and you pick the words by hitting 1 of the 3 virtual buttons on the right hand side.
• Many people mentioned their Macbook Pro runs faster after installed Snow Leopard.  Honestly, I don’t feel any difference on my non-unibody 15″ Macbook Pro (the last model before the unibody model).
• Apple mentioned Snow Leopard can free up storage space due to the removal of PowerPC code in the binaries.  However, it seems Apple changes the way how to calculate storage size.  In computing world, 1KB = 1024 Bytes , 1MB = 1024KB, and 1GB = 1024MB.  As a result, a 524,288,000 bytes hard drive will be shown 500GB .  Using the new calculation, the same size of hard drive will be shown as 524.28GB.  Do you see the “magic”?
• iStat Menus for Mac 2.0 is just released on 09/03/2009.  The latest version finally supports Snow Leopard and it has a minor user interface upgrade.

So what’s new here?

1. Sony finally officially supports Mac.  However, by saying supporting Mac, I guess it’s just about the user can transfer file from Mac to the reader using USB cable.  However, it’s a good enough feature comparing to the existing popular eBook readers (i.e. Kindle and iPhone/iPod Touch).
2. The reader comes in 3 different favorites with 3 different prices.  Personally, I think the 5-inch Pocket Edition is very attractive.  Not many people wants to buy/download books via 3G and paying the premium price that they rarely use.  Also, 5-inch screen should be good enough for casual ebook readers (just think about iPhone’s screen size).
3. Users can transfer files from Mac/PC to the ebook reader using USB cable.  This is a very attractive feature.  May be Sony is different than Amazon, who doesn’t sell books as it’s primary business.
4. The Daily edition uses AT&T 3G service and user doesn’t need to pay monthly charge.  Sony is copying Amazon Kindle’s model.  Good luck with AT&T’s coverage in US.  However, Sony can easily selling this device around the globe because the readers are using HSPA.

According to Wikipedia,

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet . Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them.

According to Berkeley RAD Lab,

The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the general public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds.

Ok, so what extractly is cloud computing?  I’m sure you can figure it out by searching from the web so I’m not going to pretend as an expert.  In general, popular cloud computing services are services from Google (such as Gmail, Google Reader, Google Documents), Dropbox, Moobee, Photoshop.com, etc. (I can easily name over 50 popular cloud computing services)

When I start Firefox, I have 3 default pages need to open: Gmail, Google Reader, Facebook.  However, I have Remember the Milk displaying the todo list on the right hand side of the Gmail page.  Other than Firefox, I have DropBox, Spanning Sync, and MobileMe running in the background to help me pushing my documents, calendars, and contacts back to the clouds.  I also backup important files to MobileMe iDisk and Amazon S3.  When I receive documents within emails, I use Google Document to open them.  I also share documents with friends and co-workers using Google Document as well.

The more I wrote and the more I figure out I don’t use thick client as much as before (i.e. Microsoft Office).  95% of the thick clients are replaced by cloud computing services.  Of course, that’s why I can only carry a 8.9″ Acer Aspire One with me most of the time (instead of the 15″ Macbook Pro).

How about you?  How tie you and your cloud computing services?