Intel is offering $1m in prizes to designers and manufacturers who can come up with sexier alternatives to the “big, beige box”. This sounds like a Project Runway in the Information Technology side. Nowadays, the computer is not only the tool for production or toy for enterntainment, it stands for the taste and personality. Just curious whether Intel invite another Tim Gunn as the mentor or Michael Kors as the mean judge? At least they should invite Heidi Klum to host the Intel Developer Forum 2007.

I eventually put the Firefox with Google toolbar in the sidebar since Firefox really rocks in the Web development. Here are more slogan from slashdot:

Friends don’t let Friends use Internet Explorer.
— TheShadowHawk

‘Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.’
— JZnat

This post has stirred in the slashdot about whether Gentoo installation is so painful even for a savvy Linux user. Ok, let’s replay the his Gentoo journey:

Mini LiveCD vs LiveCD
The author complains that the miniLiveCD is not adequate for the installation, so he had to download/burn the liveCD again. But later, he grabbed the snapshot of portage, and compile almost everything from the scratch, — the troublemaker, zlib is in system metaclass, — so why bother to go for the LiveCD? Eventually, the liveCD is used in the 2nd run.

GUI vs CLI
I strongly suggest the CLI interface for either savvy user or newbies. You have more control of the packages, configurations.

Auto configuration
I have never used Debian or Ubuntu, just curious how Debian users update/rebuild the kernels. Does Debian is powered by smart tools to probe the devices automatically? If so, why Gentoo could not adapt it as well?

RTFM
I know quite a few Linux users hate this word. But it really works. Gentoo enjoys the reputation to have the high quality documentation, wiki and forum. You can easily find a solution in Gentoo’s community than Google.

Python 2.5 is released with advanced refactory in the interpreter, and some new language constructs. During the development of dojo.gfx, I am really fascinated by the anonymous function, which easily solve the namespace pollution and encapsulation. However, this long-waited feature is still missing.

The Python 2.5 is not in the official Gentoo portage so far, I might wait for a couple of days to experience the enhanced interpreter engine.

Today’s key note is presented by Paul Strong, the distinguished research scientist on eBay. He demonstrated the growth of eBay’s business and IT infrastructure. There are several interesting facts to share:

The original eBay system is powered by open source components: FreeBSD, Apache, Perl and GDBM. With more users registered, they switched to Windows NT/IIS/ISAPI solution, and migrated the database to Oracle or Solaris. It is reasonable if we take the overhead of Apache’s process model into account, they try to squeeze every once of computing power from the web server, the lightweight thread model in IIS is favored.

More users joined the community, and more functionalities are added into the system, the logic is extremely complicated: 3.3 million lines of C++ code, 150MB ISAPI binary after compilation.

On 2002, they decided to embrace J2EE, and build the N-tie architecture to break the bottleneck of scalability.

On 2002 – 2005, the system evloved gradually, there are ~170 Windows servers, ~170 Linux(RHES3) severs and 3 Soloaris servers.

He also addressed the biggest challenge for eBay: database update. Due to the characteristics of bidding system, there are millions of database update in one second, the updates are supposed to replicated to all the data centers and reflected in the next query. It is quite hard to optimize the search using cache scheme. This also takes great impact on search. They took the Voyage(developed in the house, or bought from the vendors?) and Voyage II to address this problem, the database is updated real-time with less than 1s latency.