Sunday, 1st June 2008
I’ve (probably) been using Google App Engine for a week longer than you have. My snappily titled App Engine introduction, presented at BarCamp London 4.
Video speech matching on TheyWorkForYou.com. Launched this morning at BarCamp London by Matthew Somerville—TheyWorkForYou now has video from BBC Parliament but they need your help matching it exactly to their transcripts from Hansard. Neat example of a game that helps process large amounts of data.
MagLev recap. Avi Bryant reports on the RailsConf demo of MagLev, a new closed-source Ruby implementation built with Gemstone (Smalltalk) technology that packs some impressive features (transaction based concurrency across multiple VMs) and exciting benchmarks (6-100x faster than the standard Ruby interpreter).
Maglev has begun to publish glowing performance numbers well in advance of actually running anything at all. They haven't started running the RubySpecs and have no compatibility story today. You can't actually get Maglev yet and run anything on it. It's worse than Vaporware, it's Presentationware.