@tkramar raised the question on Twitter, why every desktop client for that service seems to be built on top of Adobe Air (here). That’s something, I also was wondering about. And in fact you often hear people complain: “Why AIR? Why not a native application?” Let me try to give the answer while having breakfast. 
Jun 21
Jun 10
Somehow, all the features and increasingly popular services become more and more confusing.
Ok, everyone has Facebook (at least in English speaking countries people would rather ask if you are on Facebook than what your phone number is). And then there’s Twitter, another way of keeping friends or customers or whoever informed about what’s going on. Plus, you need to share you favourite URLs with digg, del.icio.us, or any other social bookmarking service of your choice. And of course, you need your own blog! And a Flickr account for your photos. Did I cover all of the services a modern Web 2.0 person has to have? Probably not. But now the core question: How do you manage to keep everything up 2 date? I mean as someone who’s already got a full-time job… 
Comments, suggestions, URL appreciated!
Jun 06
I have to admit that I really like C#. The last 4 or 5 months, I’ve hardly touched any other programming language. And so it happened to be my first choice when I was asked to develop a “reasonably fast” logging server.
So what is this Octopus thing about? In a nutshell it’s a server, which takes HTTP requests with a defined set of URL parameters, confirms receipt the client, and then asynchronously stores the request into a database. The interesting bit is the part between accepting the request and storing it to the DB.
Basically, we’ve got three levels of storage: a in-memory queue, a flat file buffer, and the database. The tricky thing was to optimise processing, while still being fault-tolerant. I kind of managed that, I think. Octopus can (depending on the hardware it runs on) easily accept up to 2,000 requests per second, and will store them into either a MySQL or SQLite database at the moment. Please read more about it on the Octopus Website.
