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If you love Emacs Org Mode, and you are looking for a JavaScript parser for it, you are in the right place!

I have just published an org-mode parser for Node.js, the Javascript based server a lot of guys talk about.

This first revision spot more then 20 non-regression tests, and it is ready for a prime time use. Anyway, production use is still discouraged because additional testing is needed. Feel free to email me or to leave a comment.

And so you like JavaScript Html5 Web app, which can run on Safari iPhone, Nokia Windows Phone, Android web browser, Black Berry and so on? Are you on the mantra of multi platform mobile programming, aren’t you? Well,  Google mega corporation will soon awake you in a new nightmare: a new programming language!

Be strong young Jedi. This war will begin shortly. You can try to keep you jdk under your pillow, but the html5 will hit you in the middle of the night. And a knife in the dark will rise from shadow: JavaScript

I am happy when I am not the only one with bad experience with virtual machines.

I like a lot stuff like Xen virtual machines but…sometimes they did not soleve problems, they generate them!

[...] While I was looking for hosting, I heard a couple of recurring questions from users and potential hosting companies:

Why not go with Linode/AWS/[other virtualized hosting]?

My own experience with virtualized hosting is that I/O performance can be very poor, and that it can be impossible to diagnose underlying I/O problems from within the virtual machine. For example, in early days of Pinboard we found ourselves hosted on a machine that needed to recover a RAID volume. This so crippled I/O that it forced the site onto a backup server for three days, and yet from the perspective of the virtual machine everything looked the same. The ‘physical’ device was still mostly idle, just a hundred times slower than it used to be. That and similar adventures cured me of any desire to host on a non-dedicated server.

This is the second article on functional programming. In the first one we talked about scala and the type inference system it brings in the Java Way of Life.

I played a bit with python functional howto, building a small game. Before starting I surfing for a bit of libraries and documentation.

We talked about ”Web applIcation Service Provider” (WISP) in the past days. So what are the specification for a Service Provder wanting to be a WISP?

Let’try to sketch them together:

WISP Hypothesis

• A WISP must offer a set of XML-RPC API (WISP API) to configure the services. They must be simpler than SOAP, and must support at least two languages picked from  Python,Ruby,Java,PHP, Perl.
• WISP API should be provided always in SSL way.
• WISP API specification will be provided on subsequent articles
• WISP must provide a minimal set of LAMP applications, like WebMail, CMS (i.e. Wordpress). Also WISP must provide at least one "dashboard" web interface to set up a dashboard for the WISP API
• For simplicity, the web application are deployed as  two tiered: database tier and web tier. Anyway you can build complex system connecting a lot of 2-tier application
• On the database tier, WISP must give at least one Relational Database (like MySQL or PostgresSQL) and one NoSQL solution, altrought NoSQL forest is a bit tricky.
• About email, at least an IMAP server and SMTP server must be provided
• It should be possible to define "logical user" to segregate email mailboxes and web application
• The amount of RAM allowed to be consumed by application should be considered only on the application tier. Database and webmail will be offered on a "best effort" base, with clear defined limits. For special needs, a "private" database instance could be installed
• The Service Level Agreement (SLA) should be at least 99.99%
• WISP has the freedom to choose the underling Operating System. By the way, the web application should try to be agnostic (even if Linux is always the first choice for a LAMP stack)
• WISP must provide bandwidth and disk space in a very cheap way. For this reason, the "usage meter" should be easy to compute and very liberal on disk space, while very strong on single application memory usage

Archimedes (287 BC) said “give me a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Apple, after decades of lack of decent garbage collection to Objective-C, seems to say “I will give an ARC to exit to the dark hand-made memory allocation”.

Let’see how.

As you know, we at Gioorgi are not so Cloud-Computing enthusiastic.

Anyway, we watch every buzz-word, every good idea also if it born in an evil empire :) Cloud computing is SOA and huge. As software architect, Cloud computing is doomed to fail for some simple reasons: