Actually Implementing Group Management Using ZooKeeper

I wrote a post at the KaChing eng blog on Actually Implementing Group Management Using ZooKeeper.

Van Gogh says

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot.

I believe the California DMV is screwing me

I guess I'm late registering, so I got this notice that my registration was due 12/31/2008. That makes me around 40 days late. My bill says my penalty fee is $147.

Looking up the penalty rules at http://dmv.ca.gov/vr/vr_info.htm it says for 30 days to 1 year late the fee is 60% of the license fee and 60% of the weight fee. My numbers:

License fee: $121
Weight fee: $24

60% of that sum is NOT $147. I'm going to have to call them, so please pray for me.

git-rebase --onto master branch topic

is awesome!

(where master is branch's parent, branch is topic's parent)

Some favorite blog quotes

I'm going to scale my foot up your ass

The Edge is Where the Innovation Happens
The Edge is Where the Smarts are in a "Stupid Network"
The Edge is What Gives The Internet its Ability to Scale
The Edge is Who Gives U2 Its Distinctive Sound

I would believe in god if I found out he made screen.

Good things learned the first month at Ning

Asynchronous code reviews work well, though make sure that the software sends nasty-grams after no feedback for a few days.

JConsole is a decent tool. I'm surprised I've never used it before.

We have a nice JMX idiom where you register a class and tag methods with a @Managed annotation. This avoids the need to create separate interfaces and implemenations for MBean classes.

Google Guice is nice for the static type checking and annotations. I've always hated XML files for configuration.

Try out jDBI from Ning's Brian McCallister when you want to directly hook into your db.

TestNG is sweet. Classifying tests to group them as fast, slow, etc., is really nice.

String.format(). Why haven't I been using this??

SugarSync 1.0 is released

http://sugarsync.com