I had a great weekend at a campout with The Deep End and Space Cowboys crews in Paso Robles. Horses, camping, beats, sun, and Scrabble on a beautiful ranch with a couple hundred of my closest friends.. ;-)

Zach Moore did a diligent job in capturing all the DJ sets. Here are 2 hours of music from my sets over the weekend.

The first set was the opener for the inside-barn area. The set tries to stay on a tech-haus tip, but dips into breaks and gay-haus on a few occasions. Download Here

Set number two was a real thrill for me. I played on the Unimog as the afternoon sun was fading, which gave me a great chance to break out all my 'sunshine' related haus music (and a special treat .. Mr. Bill Withers). Enjoy on a sunny day @ a BBQ. Download Here

I played a lot with making some mashups with Ableton Live about a year ago and realized I had never released this particular one.

It combines 'Twelve Inch Therapy' (the cut by Bass Kleph) and D4L's "Shake that Laffy Taffy"

The two go great together. Enjoy!

12 Inch Taffy

The nosql meetup last week provided great insight into the current state and future direction of various Open Source distributed hash table projects.

A distributed hash table is a technology which has been recently popularized by Amazon (Dynamo) and Google (BigTable). It allows websites with massive scalability requirements to handle the workload without stressing out their operations teams and developers. The downside is that interaction with the hash tables is fairly limited (simple get/put, no relational operations, etc.)

The Dynamo paper is published online. Read it at Werner Vogel's blog

My takeaway from the meeting is that the developers who are working on these projects are really enjoying the tasks at hand. There is room for consolidation between the projects, but people are eager to explore the requirements of Dynamo and write them from scratch. As some of these projects get closer to being 'Dynamo Complete', I assume we will see some drop out of the race.

I gave a lightning-talk on work that I had done at Hyperic in validating performance of distributed hash tables across clusters of different sizes in Amazon's EC2 cloud. Specifically, I spoke about the Cassandra and Voldemort projects.

Here are the slides

NOSQL - VPork from martind on Vimeo.

I wrote a load generator / performance testing tool for Project Voldemort as part of my work at Hyperic.

You can get it here: http://wiki.github.com/trav/vpork/vpork

Project Voldemort is a distributed hash table, written by Linkedin. Its purpose is to provide highly available, distributed storage at lightning speeds.

I've written VPork to test how Voldemort performs in different scenarios. Here's my email to the project-voldemort group:

Hello Voldemortarians,

I've put together a basic performance testing framework to prove out
Voldemort for use in our company (Hyperic).  I am currently in the
process of running a battery of tests and will have some conclusions
in a few days, but in the spirit of Open Source wanted to put what I'd
done out there.

You can read / get it here:  http://wiki.github.com/trav/vpork/vpork

The framework assumes you already have a Voldemort cluster up and are
using the configuration style layout that project-voldemort ships
with.  (namely, using a config/my-cluster/config/nodes file)

It runs from a single source JVM to the cluster, so cluster based
clients are not supported -- still it does give some useful numbers.

It has 2 components, writers and readers.

A writer simply creates new records, starting at id=1, and ending at
id much > 1.
A reader attempts to read a record which has already been written.  By
default, the reader will attempt to read recently written records, but
has the possibility (with decreasing probability) of reading much
older records.  This conforms with our usage patterns.

Here are the results of a couple short test runs.  In one case, we use
100 threads in the client, in the other we use 30.  In both cases we
execute against a BDB 5 node cluster with n=3, r=2, w=2.  These were
run in XLarge EC2 instances.  Nothing about these 2 tests was tuned --
2GB JVM, default svn checkout of voldemort.  I look forward to
tweaking it.

So far I am very interested in what I'm seeing with this community --
seems like people are excited, motivated, and interesting in making
this a very successful project.  Shame about the name, though ..
searching for this project on the web has never been easier...

-- Jon

--- 30 Thread Pork ---
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM - Writes:
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Num Writes:           48072
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Write Failures:       0
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Write Latency:        35.79 ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Write Latency (%99):  230.00 ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Bytes Written:        1100.28 MB
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Thread w/Throughput:  0.65 KB / ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Total w/Throughput:   17.50 KB / ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM - Reads:
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Num Read:             5889
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:13 PM -   Read Failures:        0
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:14 PM -   Read Latency:         28.05 ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:14 PM -   Read Latency (%99):   218.00 ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:14 PM -   Read Not Found:       21 (%0.36)
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:14 PM -   Bytes Read:           134.15 MB
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:14 PM -   Thread r/Throughput:  0.84 KB / ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:23:14 PM -   Total r/Throughput:   2.13 KB / ms

---- 100 Thread Pork ----
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:17 PM - Writes:
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:17 PM -   Num Writes:           159855
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:17 PM -   Write Failures:       0
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:17 PM -   Write Latency:        85.94 ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Write Latency (%99):  319.00 ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Bytes Written:        3658.79 MB
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Thread w/Throughput:  0.27 KB / ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Total w/Throughput:   24.29 KB / ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM - Reads:
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Num Read:             19872
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Read Failures:        0
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Read Latency:         70.36 ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Read Latency (%99):   298.00 ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Read Not Found:       12 (%0.06)
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Bytes Read:           453.94 MB
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Thread r/Throughput:  0.33 KB / ms
Mar 31, 2009 6:21:19 PM -   Total r/Throughput:   3.01 KB / ms 

During a super-bowl party 3 years ago, we prepared, scripted, and filmed our own re-creation of the SNL sketch, 'Taco Town.'

The footage sat around for a long time -- missing the sexy taco-town voiceover that would complete it. We were able to acquire the talents of Lorenzo Cruz, thus propelling the release.

Thanks to Ed, Jay, ChrisK, and Lorenzo for your acting, filming, and voiceovering skills.

And if you're in San Francisco this weekend, come out to the 10 year anniversary of FingerLickin -- the greatest breakbeat label of all time. I'm playing the upstairs room at 11, and it'll be a fun vibe.
Get more info at SEISMIC