Twitter, Ruby and Scala

This is a good article about how and why Twitter folks rewrote some of their systems in Scala. Those components have been written in Ruby before and its really interesting to hear about their experiences in working with dynamically typed languages. Long live the JVM!

http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/twitter_on_scala.html

Lasantha Kularatne
Software Engineer
Bazaarvoice [site | blog | twitter]

A big hurrah for LCH

It is a historical day: March 30th, 2010
LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has started colliding particles today. World is celebrating it today.
This is the quest for finding Higgs boson, dark matter and studying the big bang theory.

The CNN report:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/science/03/30/large.hadron.collider/index.html?hpt=T2

OSx 10.5.7 with ATI Radeon HD 4870

For All Hackintosh enthusiasts,

I got my Diamond ATI Radeon HD 4870 512mb working successfully with QE/CI support. Used OSx 10.5.7 & Natit pkg.

• I used iAtkos 5i (10.5.5) distro with Voodoo kernel. Selected the the VGA driver and compatible network, SATA driers.

• Then I had to start in safe mode with ( -x ) kernel parameter. If you start in normal mode it will flicker and just show a blank & pixlated screen.

• Then in safe mode I have updated to 10.5.7 from the Mac menu ‘Update’ option. This will install the Vanilla 9.7 kernel and I had to enable the vanilla kernel in Boot.plist file changing the kernel mode from ‘custom’ to ‘mach_kernel’. Remember I had to do it in single user (which is root console) mode with -s kernel parameter, because I could not find the root password for iAtkos distro.

• After restart I still got the flickering, and then safe mode again and installed the Natit pkg.

• Another restart… voila! It worked with hardware acceleration and QE/CI support in 1080P resolution.

I tried nVidia GTS 250 and GTX 260 but did not have any luck, so I had to gamble with a new 4870 and it paid off.

Intel Core i7 System

I am building my next gen pc with Intel's latest processor Core i7. This will be my system. I did not receive all the components yet to build the system, but will get them soon. I will keep the progress and photos posted.

CPU : INTEL Core i7 920
Motherboard : GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R
Memory : OCZ 6GB DDR3 1600
Graphics : XFX Radeon HD 4850 1GB
PSU : CORSAIR 750w TX Series 80
Casing : ANTEC P180
Cooler : Noctua NH-U12P SE1366

Excited...