CodeWord: Apokalyptik

Let me make a few of my own “The internet during 2007″ predictions.

• 2007 will be the year of the format wars. Differing schemas of XML will battle it out for the spot as the predominant method of sharing data in 2007. Because one size will never fit all we’ll probably end up with 2 or 3 schema layouts, varying in complexity and power. Almost nobody will end up using 2 of the 3
• 2007 will usher in the client side scripting wars. Will we still be using a J for AJAX after 2007? Probably, But I bet there will be some headway in finding a more modern, less quirky-by-vendor web scripting language. Something will do for client side scripting what PHP and Ruby have done for server side scripting.
• We’ll see real action in the database-as-a-service mindshare. I’d expect Amazon and Google to weigh in on this action. Microsoft will likely sit out, though it would be a very stupid idea. If Microsoft provided a RESTable and SOAPable database service at a decent cost, they’d soon find themselves up to their ears in just the kind of data that an internet presence should covet! Specifically, though, we’ll see work in 2 areas easy databasing (think simple one to one and one to many relationships, like tags, terms, definitions, etc) and relational databases (think many-many, foreign key, transactions)
• 2007 will see more wasted bits and bytes than gas — with all the uncompressed data interchange formats, and spam, flying around we’ll be wasting vast amounts of resources on the parts of consumable data that isnt really consumable. We probably wont see an answer to this in 2007, or if we do it wont be realized for some time to come.
• Someone will attempt to retrofit e-mail. They wont succeed even though everybody is pulling for them to succeed.
• New phones will be developed and released which have better web 2.0 support. Because after 2006 ends it’s not web2.0 anymore… it’s the web! (at least I’m hoping this is true)
• We’ll see a large number of “old dog” programmers moving from the “hot and hip” web space to the mobile space. There’s such a generation gap between modern browsers mobile browsers that the progression will be pretty natural for those who dont feel like learning “new tricks”
• People will continue to play with new ideas of making the internet social, That wont likely fall off, but what I suspect we’ll see are ways of making the internet more manifested. ether in facilitating physical meetings or actions, or in making a web presence manifest as a physical presence.
• More real world data will be mapped into databases available for processing next year than ever before, from surveys to spatial analysis to trendy places to hang out. We’ll be moving closer and closer to making virtual space analogous to physical space. You wont have to walk to the corner store’s web site (where would the romance in THAT be?) but you can bet we’ll be coming closer and closer to your next door neighbors kids lemonade stand having a web presence.
• Last but not least privacy will slip farther and farther towards unattainable. With so many vectors, so many reasons, so many locations in which one telling piece of information is being stored online, being invisible will be nearly impossible, and staying that way doubly so. But as we slip into a mode where identify is completely fabricatable… what, then does the theft of that identity mean?

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I have X number of data objects with up to about min 45,000, max 50,000 possible values associated with each object. I know… Don’t ask (couldn’t tell you anyways). Now to be able to do this in MySQL is… well… possible… but absurd. I’m thinking of trying out the approach I’ve mused about here. It could possibly be a really great way to manage finding commonalities across tens of thousands of objects with a total of hundreds of millions of values. Or it could be a massive time sink.

It would also put some of the things that Amazon has said about their S3 service to the test I doubt anyone’s really stored a hundred million objects in an S3 bucket and been concerned enough with seek time to be critical about it

Or am I missing some magic bullet here. Is there a (free) DBMS I’m not thinking of which handles 50,000 columns in a table with a fast comparitive lookup? (select pk from table where v42000 = (select v42000 from table where pk = referencePk))… I’d love for someone to pop in and say “HEY, STUPID, DB XXX CAN DO THAT!” assuming DB XXX isnt expensive

Hmm… Off to ponder…

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Because its not readily apparent when you’re concentrating on learning rails… I’m posting this here. While trying to get rails running on Fedora Core 6 (FC6) I was running into not being able to compile the ruby fcgi gem.

What gives, right? mod_fcgid (what FC6 comes with) is supposed to be binary compatible with mod_fastcgi. And there *IS* no mod_fastcgi or fastcgi in yum! Well it turns out that

mod_fcgid and mod_fastcgi both connect to fastcgi. That bears repeating. mod_fcgid is roughly equivalent to mod_fastcgi but niether are equivalent to fastcgi. (which in retrospect seems obvious as so many things do when you’re searching for answers)

so… on FC6, install mod_fcgid. then download and install fastcgi (not mod_fastcgi) from http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/ and then

gem install fcgi --source \
  http://rubyforge.planetargon.com/gems.rubyforge.org/ \
  -- \
  --with-fcgi-include=/usr/local/include \
  --with-fcgi-lib=/usr/local/lib

will work and everything will be peachy-keen

since a lot of people will be searching about this in a specific scope for Fedora Core 6, and since nobody seems to directly state this issue in plain terms, here it is. Google, eat me up!

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