Reasons to leave Spotify

It's interesting, thanks god Spotify allows anyone to unsubscribe and leave their service. Tricky though how they asked confirmation highlighting the answer nobody is likely to pick.

Not only this plague dared putting ads when playing my own songs, which don't use any of their bandwidth/licensing, they also trick their paying members to stay in. 

Web Framework benchmark

Some interesting figures. Certainly not the best real world scenario with the repeated "hello world" but that give some insight as to what each can give us in term of performance.

I particular like the comparison between the Java frameworks, netty only adds a slight overhead on top of servlet, which get pretty hammered by the overhead vertx adds onto it. While Spring, on its side, ruins the very efficient pure servlet implementation.

Also happy to see that node.js is not that fast compared to good old JVM based languages.

RPS is request per seconds. It also delusions the so trendy Amazon cloud. Yes it might save some money/time to stand up a service, but what a performance penalty compared to some old school privately own hardware.

And a few others, adding a comparison with some high end server cpu

What's even more interesting regarding the frameworks comparison, is how they scale up if more cpu threads are made available, with the high performance Xeon processor, with 40 HT cores, vs 8 with the i7 cpu, candidate such as Spring, Grails or ruby on rails don't even offer double performance, while netty, using pure servlet or cpoll process requests 4x or 5x faster.


See full article here.

Node.js vs vert.x ?

I'm falling behind with those hyped event based web servers. node.js has been around for a while now, even though in beta. It's interesting to see that the polyglot, and apparently better performing product is not so well known.

Interesting outlook on TDD

TDD's been around for a while, and while some people hate the idea and others can't live without it, that post shows two interesting view points.

Sublime text !

Well that's a great name - but also the best lightweight editor out there. If you like CSS/HTML and JavaScript, get yourself a copy of that gem Sublime Text

This is damn awsome

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Kindle vs iPad

iPad 1, iPad 2, iPad 3 iPad 12, it doesn't matter how far they go, the Kindle will remain the best device to read eBooks.

Why ? Because it's an eBook reader. Period.

One could go on and on about comparing features offered by the iPad and other Android tablets, but the Kindle simply embeds the right technology to offer the best reading experience. It took me a long time to get myself one of those, but there are the reasons it surpasses by far all the other tablets:

Simplicity

It doesn't do anything but offer one feature: eReader. No apps, no mp3, no notification, it's plain and simple, it reads eBooks. Resulting in all the advantages below...

Size/weight

It's exactly the right size, and lighter than a pocket book

e-Ink

Let's not talk about brightness, contrast and pixel density.. Kindle use real ink to draw text and images, it's black and white, but so are 99.99% of real books, and that's fine that way. No pixel mean no red eyes and headache, it's like reading real sheets of papers.

Also, it means one can take it to the beach or other sunny environments.. let's not try that with an iPad.

Battery

1 or 2 months, it doesn't matter, we are talking about weeks of battery life here.

Price

Oh and it's almost 10 times cheaper, the most basic model offers all one coud need, this means it's affordable, and less likely to be stolen. And if it breaks... oh well let's buy another one.