LevelDB Open-Sources by Google
LevelDB is a fast key-value storage engine written at Google that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values. We are pleased to announce that we are open sourcing LevelDB under a BSD-style license.LevelDB is a C++ library that can be used in many contexts. For example, LevelDB may be used by a web browser to store a cache of recently accessed web pages, or by an operating system to store the list of installed packages and package dependencies, or by an application to store user preference settings. We designed LevelDB to also be useful as a building block for higher-level storage systems. Upcoming versions of the Chrome browser include an implementation of the IndexedDB HTML5 API that is built on top of LevelDB. Google's Bigtable manages millions of tablets where the contents of a particular tablet are represented by a precursor to LevelDB. The Riak distributed database has added support for using LevelDB for its per-node storage.We structured LevelDB to have very few dependencies and it can be easily ported to new systems; it has already been ported to a variety of Unix based systems, Mac OS X, Windows, and Android.LevelDB has good performance across a wide variety of workloads; we have put together a benchmark comparing its performance to SQLite and Kyoto Cabinet. The Riak team has compared LevelDB’s performance to InnoDB. A significant difference from similar systems like SQLite and Kyoto Cabinet is that LevelDB is optimized for batch updates that modify many keys scattered across a large key space. This is an important requirement for efficiently updating an inverted index that does not fit in memory.LevelDB is available on Google Code, we hope you’ll find it useful for your projects.
Benchmarks available here at http://leveldb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/benchmark.html
Posterous' Analytics is Broken
I was going through the Posterous management dashboard to review some of available functionality (which is, in fact, was not there, but that's a different story) and I got shocked by a number of pageviews of one of my posts.
Not so fast. The first time I got upset was when I saw that somehow and suddenly I became 10 times less popular. See 4,044 vs 42,010. Oh, this hurts and you are starting to nervously think whom did you call a douche bag or an asshole...
The second time was when I saw my Google Analytics stats.
Now back to the real world. Of course I would never believe that I could have 40K eyeballs on that post. So seeing so many pageviews has pretty much the only one explanation - these are internal or automatic pings or whatever you call them, could be probably done by a caching server or any internal process that I don't even have an idea about. There are only two things about that: bad and bad. The bad thing is that a post, that generates 2 real pageviews, probably should be never accessed 40 thousand times by any number of internal processes. And the bad thing is that such statistics can piss me off, if I'd at any second believe it is real.
Hopefully the guys at Posterous will fix that as soon as possible.
Bing vs Google
Bing 3 – Google 4
So based on the current results it’s really a very near run thing. I’m quite surprised to see this actually, evidently Bing’s UI is easier to navigate than I might have expected.
I think a lot of us have learnt behaviors for Google based on years of experience, so Bing is really doing well to stay up there with Google, especially considering the two UIs are quite far apart.
Both services could obviously make a few small tweaks to their UIs, but as you’d expect with two such popular websites, they are already very streamlined.
As more people take the test, we can expect to see results to evolve somewhat. Be sure to check back at http://video.intuitionhq.com/pub/405 to see how they change.
I feel like I am going to give Bing a try and see if it makes me feel better. :)
Google Apps accounts are being transitioned into "full accounts"
I'm so pissed of to see how badly Google executed the transition of Google Apps accounts into the "full status".
The thing is that historically I've been using prokh...@gmail.com account exclusively for products & services from Google, that I couldn't authenticate with my Google Apps account(s). That was fine, why not. Such services include Reader, YouTube, Wave and probably something else. However, I discovered that now whenever I'm trying to access services like Reader I'm logging in as my Google Apps account. Which is, frankly speaking, annoying. I have no reading lists there, as well as I don't want to use Google Reader' Share button to share some interesting link through my *new* Reader account (and I never know where it goes to, as I don't remember whom I'm logged in right now). What the heck? And I don't want to start toying with import-export things, because I do have some stuff looking at my Reader account, like Twitterfeeds, people who read my Shared items, etc. This is just bad.
What I am forced to do now is to swear every single moment I'm opening something I wanted, but finding myself into one of those (pretty numerous) accounts. This definitely doesn't make me a happier person. What it makes me, though, is to start looking for at least new online RSS reader for myself.Google Wave is heading to the dead pool
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
Damn, that was so freaking easy to understand that Google Wave wasn't a product with a clear purpose. It wasn't solving any single problem. I was really surprised to see Google coming up with this product, where Product Management is taken into such high levels. Anyways, no regrets, hopefully it'll free up some space for something worth trying.
Mixpanel v. KISSmetrics v. Google Analytics
I didn’t see a clear winner after poking around with the three tools so I decided to try all of them together. I’m really glad I did because this is the comparison table (based on my experiences from above):
Mixpanel KISSmetrics Google Analytics Tracking Events Great Poor Poor Measuring Funnels Poor Great Average Analyzing Traffic Poor Poor Great Real-time Yes No No Setup Difficult Moderate Easy They’re all great at different things! And since what you need to learn will change over time, you really need more than one tool in the long term.
Arthur Klepchukov has posted a nice comparison between Mixpanel, KISSmetrics and GA. While I believe that GA can be quite good in everything, with a little bit of Mixpanel sauce, it's still a decent pros/cons table to consider.
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