#Uncategorized

I had the pleasure of reading Scott Berkun‘s newest book – Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds. I was also forunate to get it for free in the short period of time where Scott gave it for free on his site, but this is not a guilty book review of getting the book for free.

Mindfire is a collection of 30 essays which Scott wrote in various places, mostly on his blog. The essays got cleaned up and preped for the book which made the reading very clean and flowing. Scott’s writing style is very flowing and funny and while it may seem at times as a self emporment / self help book it really isn’t.

Twitter’s Kestrel is a cool scala based queue server (based on Blaine Cook‘s (@blaine) Ruby based Sterling).

The two main features I like about Kestrel are:

• Sort-of-transactional – If I take an item I can make sure others can’t get it. If the connect drops it will go back on the queue.
• Read behind mode – If a certain queue reached a maximum pre-configured amount of RAM or items it will stop storing messages in RAM and will write it directly to the queue log file.

If you happen to be running it on Ubuntu 10.04 and want to use the provided init script (kestrel.sh) you’ll notice that it just won’t run.