CouchDB scaling

The CouchDB is appealing for those who want to expose their datamodel to the world via web-services (REST). RWW ponders whether when coupled with Javascript-y clients, could this model of development cut out the server-side presentation layer? We expose a lot of data via Web Services, but strangely we are rarely exposing raw data models. There is often a layer of indirection, translation, validation and BP processing associated with these services, rather than a thin-veneer. That could be just a style thing on our part.

Having read about CouchDB, I could see the appeal, certainly for internal projects, but it seemed a little bit alpha-ish for my purposes. Then we ran up against it in anger, when using Chef for ops automation. Basically it can began to fall over under heavy write load - a lot. Much tweaking, auto-compacting and other general pottering about with bleeding edge code and it is functional, but not ideal. Then I came across the blogpost from Jonathan Ellis's - CouchDB: not drinking the kool-aid.

Akira remake with Zax Efron

Of High-school musical fame. Eek.
 Film | guardian.co.uk

Kinects future

Watching this video on kinect - Gizmodo by MS Engineers, the description of the multi-echo cancellation sound array struck a chord with me. This is the same-ish technology which is used in the lifesize video-conferencing system we have at work (which is awesome). It is clever enough to pick up even whispers around the room and it does this by identifying the location of each speaker and doing some clever maths to isolate each of the voices. Couple that with its motorized optical processing that does full stereoscopic depth-of-field analysis and tracking and you have some pretty interesting tech ripe for exploitation.

Games will drive a lot of innovation, but I would be surprised if this stays just in the Game arena. For example, ehat would kinect for video-conferencing give you. Well it might give you the ability to do Snow Crash avatar-based conferencing (the novel that inspired Second Life - don't be put off by that though the book is worth a read).