Databases, Computer Science, User Preferences, Loyalty Apps, DDG, Skype, Ransomware, Riffle

Post date: Aug 7, 2016 5:07:01 PM

• Interesting database article: Why Uber Engineering Switched From Postgres to MySQL - Lot's of information about indexing, transactions, replication, MVCC, WAL, data structures and commit internals. And even more interesting reply to that post by Oren Eini. Great comments and insights, I liked the reply more than the original post.
• Studied Translation lookaside buffer (TLB) - Haven't actually heard the exact term, but looks like a standard caching procedure for address mapping information aka Address translation. Memory Management Unit (MMU) was naturally very familiar to me. And of course the huge & large memory pages as well as Page Size Extension (PSE) + classic Physical Address Extension (PAE) + Virtual Memory.
• I forgot to mention one thing. Wire.com user search is also a miserable failure. Especially if searching with name, instead of exact email address or phone number.
• It's some times funny to notice how much different viewing options affect users. Some users watch stuff ONLY from Netflix. Some prefer ONLY traditional TV. Some do use other cloud services, like provided by TV stations. And some do prefer traditional downloadable file instead of streaming. This separates users in pretty different groups. Because if you try to 'share' media between user groups. It's probably going to fail. No, I won't watch TV. No I don't have Netflix. No I don't want to download files. Well, I guess Youtube is the most universal option of these. Afaik, Vimeo is better. But nobody uses it.
• Started to use NFC loyalty cards as mobile App. This is pretty handy after all. I've alyways deeply hated stupid loyalty and member cards. It doesn't make any sense to carry such junk with you.
• DuckDuckGo search has been failing repeatedly today. (20170727, YYYYMMDD)
• Great work Microsoft. Skype does actually lose messages, even if it's MS cloud based. That's something that can't be tolerated. There has to be better option out there. Microsoft has successfully totally ruined Skype.
• Ransomware as a Service (RaaS). Nice new cloud models and out sourcing are big business in cyber crime too.
• Quickly checked out several posts about Riffle anonymous proxy. But it seems that most of the articles are absolutely horrible fluff. No information value at all. I'll have to read the original paper and think about it hard. I think things then will make sense, or not. I'll make a separate post about it with my thoughts.