Evan Weaver, a former Twitter systems engineer, writes about Cassandra, Ruby performance tuning, distributed systems, and repetitive strain injury.
HN links his posts on Cassandra, Ruby GC tuning, and his distributed systems paper list, which one commenter calls categorized with every paper awesome.
#2: Sorry i consider this moot:
- the docs for tsearch are dense, not terribly friendly, and acts_as_tsearch appears to be under documented and possibly not maintained/updated. So if tsearch has any deal winners over sphinx and solr (for me, key ones would be custom tokenizers/stemmers, UTF-8, column weights, indexing short words and acronyms, faceted search, indexing instance methods and has_many child records along with what's in parent record) they're not readily apparent. Granted i only tried to understand tsearch for ~20 minutes)
and a_a_tsearch did well in benchmarks, see comments: (teh tsearch count for "god" in index by book does indicate a possibly serious problem)
http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2008/03/17/rails-search-benchmarks/
- The four leading search plugins: acts_as_[ferret, solr],ultrasphinx , thinkng sphinx work equally well with MySQL, and postgres, as far as i know. They're all pretty painless installs, if not terribly fast to build indexes, in the case of ferret and solr
I had RSI, chronic ankle pain after an injury, and back pain. I bought all sorts of ergonomic solutions. Some helped, but none completely. I was getting desperate since, as mentioned, typing is how I pay the bills. I can't just STOP.
I was scouring the net and ran across a developer who swore that The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain by Sarno fixed his issues. I looked him up, proved to myself he was a dev and then basically said, fuck it, let's try it despite it seeming woo-woo to the extreme.
Little to no pain to this day. This was after MONTHS of PT and ergonomic changes that didn't solve the problem.
Anyway. Just my two cents.
*EDIT - one of these was the article (perhaps both), https://blog.evanweaver.com/2012/09/05/a-programmers-guide-to-healing-rsi/ and http://aaroniba.net/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain
This happens to be an oldie but a goody. On the same topic, I might as well spread the wealth of links I've amassed for learning and understanding Cassandra:
Up and Running With Cassandra
http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-running-with-cassandra/
Building A Small Cassandra Cluster
http://posulliv.com/?p=149
Cassandra PHP CRUD Class (Pandra)
http://github.com/mjpearson/Pandra
Getting Started - CassandraWiki
http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/GettingStarted
Cassandra In Action
http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/03/cassandra-in-action.html
This was actually previously discussed by Twitter's Evan Weaver. I can't find the article I'm thinking of, but this is close: http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-running-with-cassandra/
My understanding is that it came down to Cassandra being the only one that was well tested in multi-datacenter configurations. I think there were other reasons, but that was the big one.
Evan Weaver (systems engineer at Twitter) put together a great list of distributed system papers as well. His list is categorized and every paper in it is awesome.
distributed systems primer:
http://blog.evanweaver.com/2009/05/04/distributed-systems-primer/
distributed systems primer (update):
http://blog.evanweaver.com/2010/08/12/distributed-systems-primer-update/
I read in several blog posts that Cassandra has its share of data-corrupting bugs. http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-running-with-cassandra/ mentioned that even Facebook does not use it as a system of record. Wonder how Digg deals with that.