Nintendo to expand R&D department in Japan

If you are asked for the most innovative games hardware manufacturer right now then Nintendo is likely most people’s first answer. The Wii hardware certainly has been a success, but you can also count the Nintendo DS as just as successful if not more so. It may come as no surprise then to find Nintendo are [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-11

More news from 2009-02-11

Playing With CouchDB: First Impressions

About a week ago, Nat posted Open Source NG Databases on O'Reilly Radar. That caught my interest because I'm playing with some "alternative" databases for some of our data at Craigslist. Don't get me wrong, MySQL is great. But MySQL isn't well suited to every use case out there either. (I'll talk more about this at the MySQL Conference.) Meanwhile, I left a comment on that posting about CouchDB and have been playing with it a bit more since then--mostly loading in test data, figuring out the data footprint, performance, etc. Overall, I'm impressed and encouraged. I agree with what Ben Bangert said. The simple API is great but the lack of a schema to worry about really makes my life simple in this application. I don't have any initial plans for views, but writing them in Javascript is an interesting idea. I can definitely appreciate the flexibility there. And having good replication built-in solves one of my big needs. I'm sure my thinking will have evolve after I've loaded a few hundred million documents in, but so far I'm really liking it. The CPAN modules in Net::CouchDb do a pretty good job and get you up and running quickly. I had a knee-jerk response to tweak a few things there but quickly realize that they're far from being the bottleneck anyway. It seems that without any tuning or fancy work, I can get about 75-100 inerts/sec on my desktop class Ubuntu box (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66GHz, 1GB RAM, single 80GB SATA disk). That's not bad for out-of-the-box performance. And doing the math on space used for a document set (after compaction), I'm seeing roughly ~3KB/doc. That's a bit more than I expected but really not bad at all. I wonder if there's a future for gzip compression in CouchDB. Or maybe we should just use ZFS... (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-11 more

Write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script

Suppose you want to write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script. Here’s an example spreadsheet that you might want to update from a script: I did some searching and found this page, which quickly led me to the Python Developer’s Guide for the Google Spreadsheet API. There’s a simple “Getting started with Gdata and Python” [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-11 more

Nintendo to expand R&D department in Japan

If you are asked for the most innovative games hardware manufacturer right now then Nintendo is likely most people’s first answer. The Wii hardware certainly has been a success, but you can also count the Nintendo DS as just as successful if not more so. It may come as no surprise then to find Nintendo are [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-11 more