A friend of mine, who is the CEO of a company that develops an embedded database, asked me to do a presentation on spatial indexing. This was an opportunity for me to brush up on R-trees and similar datastructures. Download…
A distribution algorithm is used to map keys to servers in a distributed key-value store. There are several different ones, implemented in different systems, and with different properties. In this blog post I’ll briefly cover the best-known key hashing schemes,…
Background When I’m at the library, I’d like to be able to go to the toilet, without collecting all my stuff from the table. Part of the solution is to have a camera installed that films all the tables, but…
Situation: You have a large pile of computer science papers in front of you. You want to read them all. What to do? My suggestion is that you read the two guides below. They are really short and helpful. I’m…
Here’s a game I like to play. Select two wikipedia pages at random, and find a route from one to the other. I stated a theorem once that: you can get from any page on wikipedia to the page on…
I’m half way through the Part-time parliament on Paxos article by Leslie Lamport. It is an article that describes a three-phase consensus protocol by telling a story of a (fictional) parliement on the greek island of Paxos, complete with fat…
While browsing the web for for good videos to help me land a cool job at high profile tech firm, I came across this series from an Indian university. Lecture – 16 Disk Based Data Structures You should be…
Here I have captured a thought process I had while reading about algorithms for hard graph problems. The thoughts are inspired by MapReduce, distributed merge sort and the more colorful newspapers of the world. Summary of thoughts Given an instance…