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@KishoreBytes notes: “Helix [is] not well known but widely used at LinkedIn, Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, Yahoo to build distributed systems. Helix is probably managing hundreds of thousands of servers today!” It is “a generic cluster management framework used for automatic management of partitioned, replicated and distributed resources hosted on a cluster of nodes, [providing] the following features: Automatic assignment of resource/partition to nodes; Node failure detection and recovery; Dynamic addition of Resources; Dynamic addition of nodes to the cluster; Pluggable distributed state machine to manage the state of a resource via state transitions; Automatic load balancing and throttling of transitions” Sounds handy for automatic shard-based scaling. Built on Zookeeper.
(tags: zookeeper helix sharding scalability scaling via:kishorebytes partitioning architecture)
Half cooked & half raw: the Irish tradition of spuds with a moon
[…] a method of cookery practiced by the rural poor in the early to mid 19th century Ireland […] Parboiling or half-roasting rendered a potato that was at once half-cooked and half-raw, with the inner core hard to the bite. Potatoes cooked in this way were called potatoes with the moon (an ghealach) or potatoes with the bone. William Wilde, father of Oscar, describes the practice in some detail in his essay, ‘The Food of the Irish’, which was published in 1854 in the Dublin University Magazine. Here is his explanation of the practice: “the heart of the potato was allowed, by checking the boiling at a particular point, to remain parboiled, hard and waxy; when the rest of the potato has been masticated in the usual manner, this hard lump, about the size of a walnut, was bolted; and in this manner nearly a stone of the root was taken into the stomach of the Irish labourer per diem… it was grounded on a certain knowledge of physiology. “The stomach digested the well boiled farinaceous portion of the potato within the space of a few hours, and that having all been disposed of, the half-boiled lumps remained behind, and a second digestion was commenced to assimilate this portion of food, and convert it into nutritious, life-sustaining material; which latter process lasted some hours longer, and thus the craving of hunger were warded off for five or six hours after the original meal.”
(tags: parboiling potatoes history hunger ireland rural spuds moon physiology)