Memory matters - even in Erlang

I played with pretty interesting bug, or maybe a feature, in Erlang VM. Read more on LShift blog.

Search in the versioned world

Whatever you are using: a blog, a portal, a forum or microblogging service, search works on current set of documents.

If I remove my last blog post, I expect a search to omit it in the search results. Search ought to include only the most recent state of documents.

But what if you can navigate through the history of document? What should appear in the search? We are used to see only the most recent version of document. For example in wikipedia search doesn't show documents that included searched phrase in the past.

This problem can appear also in other contexts. Consider using a VCS. I created some content, or code. I removed it as it looked unneeded. Some time later I realized that I need this content back. What can I do to recover it? Currently I have to manually review diffs in GIT/Mercurial/or whatever VCS. Shouldn't be a button somewhere: "search in history"?

So, how do we expect a search to work on versioned content? Is that feature useful at all?

Undusting the blog

It's time to undust this blog a bit. Here is the list of my recent posts on LShift blog, with a word of comment:

• Introducing RabbitMQ-Status plugin. Well, this plugin is intended to help sysadmins understand what's happening inside Rabbit. Stupid, simple, robust: the way sysadmin stuff should be.
• Python Quirks. My rant about Python language. I like Python in general, but it has some dark corners and stuff that nobody uses or understands. I tried to sum up things that I would change in the language. This things should at least be better documented.
• YDB: yet another key-value database. I was disappointed with BDB/TC write performance, so decided to hack together something. I wanted to prove if I could beat them.
• Python Queue Interface for AMQP. Python Queue interface is nice. It's a shame that it's not scalable across many machines. I tried (and partially failed) to implement similar API over AMQP.