Damien Katz tag:damienkatz.net,2008-05-05://1 2010-02-09T00:40:32Z Everybody keeps on talking about it Nobody's getting it done Movable Type Personal 4.1 First week in the new office tag:damienkatz.net,2010://1.548 2010-02-08T23:56:40Z 2010-02-09T00:40:32Z Last week was our first week in our new office in Old Downtown Oakland. It's a really neat area with lots of restaurants and bars, and hardly any murders. Oh yeah, we've changed our name to Couchio. Our new blog... Damien Katz Last week was our first week in our new office in Old Downtown Oakland. It's a really neat area with lots of restaurants and bars, and hardly any murders.

Oh yeah, we've changed our name to Couchio. Our new blog will be here http://blog.couch.io/ soon.

Our office:
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Our office manager Claire:
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Chris and Mikeal:
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Claire and Jan:
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Nitin:
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Super Awesome Art by Julie Armbruster:
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Me:
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My Office:
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So far we are really disorganized and discombobulated. But I'm are working on it! I even bought Management for Dummies. Things will be running smoothly in no time ;)

Also we are looking hard for someone to help us offer CouchDB support and hopefully build a whole support organization. Email me damien@couch.io if you are interested or know someone who is.

]]> Preschools in/near Piedmont? tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.547 2009-12-16T21:31:56Z 2009-12-16T21:33:19Z Anyone know of a good preschool in/near Piedmont CA accepting applications for January? This is for our 2 year old girl, born Aug 2007.... Damien Katz Anyone know of a good preschool in/near Piedmont CA accepting applications for January? This is for our 2 year old girl, born Aug 2007.

]]> Relaxed Inc. tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.546 2009-12-13T04:20:21Z 2009-12-15T17:51:19Z So something interesting happened recently. I, Jan, and Chris are building a startup around Apache CouchDB and Redpoint Ventures has invested $2 million. Pretty cool huh? What are we going to do with that? Well, we are still figuring that... Damien Katz So something interesting happened recently.

I, Jan, and Chris are building a startup around Apache CouchDB and Redpoint Ventures has invested $2 million. Pretty cool huh?

What are we going to do with that? Well, we are still figuring that out. For the most part we are going to try to grow a large and healthy CouchDB ecosystem and then build our own business(es) within that. We are working with Satish Dharmaraj on some basic strategy stuff right now, and we aren't trying to be secretive or "stealthy" as TechCrunch said. It's just very early and I'm also very busy planning a move. Which bring me to my 2nd and 3rd announcements.

2nd Announcement: Yes, I've left IBM.

To the projects at IBM using CouchDB, please continue to feel free contact me at anytime. IBM has been very good to me and the CouchDB project and I want IBM and its customers to be successful. That hasn't changed.

To Anant Jhingran, David Fallside and especially Sam Ruby, thank you for your early support and getting IBM behind CouchDB. We'd never have made it this far without you.

3rd Announcement: California here we come! I, Laura, and our 5 yo, 2 yo, and 9 mo (for those counting at home, that's 5 people) are moving to Piedmont CA the first week of January. We have everything all settled, other than a million small details that Laura has to deal with.

We still need some recommendations for a good local family doctor, ophthalmologist and dentist. And does any know where you can get them to convert your car to a lowrider that goes bouncy bouncy down the street?

Anyway, exciting times ahead. Follow me, Chris and Jan on twitter as we figure all this stuff out.

]]> Koala on the loose! tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.545 2009-10-29T19:40:16Z 2009-10-29T20:08:54Z Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has just been released. This is big news as this version includes Apache CouchDB, used as a replicable database by desktop apps. This means CouchDB will be on over 10 million desktops. Nice :)... Damien Katz Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has just been released. This is big news as this version includes Apache CouchDB, used as a replicable database by desktop apps. This means CouchDB will be on over 10 million desktops. Nice :)

ubuntu_couchdb.png

]]> "CouchDB Implements a Fundamental Algorithm" tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.544 2009-10-29T19:12:42Z 2009-10-29T19:17:02Z Chris Anderson, an Apache CouchDB contributor, writes a great article about the core design of CouchDB: CouchDB Implements a Fundamental Algorithm... Damien Katz Chris Anderson, an Apache CouchDB contributor, writes a great article about the core design of CouchDB:

CouchDB Implements a Fundamental Algorithm

]]> Mozilla Raindrop tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.543 2009-10-23T05:09:33Z 2009-10-23T18:58:41Z Mozilla has announced the Raindrop project today, a new messaging platform built on top of Apache CouchDB: A central principle behind Raindrop is that messaging should be personal -- we want Raindrop to be people-centric both in how we... Damien Katz raindrop-header.png

Mozilla has announced the Raindrop project today, a new messaging platform built on top of Apache CouchDB:

A central principle behind Raindrop is that messaging should be personal -- we want Raindrop to be people-centric both in how we process messages, and in how we can help give people control over their personal data and experiences.

This is a huge deal for me and for CouchDB. I can't describe how proud I am of this.

]]> "Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease" tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.542 2009-10-13T15:52:12Z 2009-10-13T15:59:42Z Where is this decade's Access? It may seem like a snarky and trolling question, but think about it for a moment: for a decade or so, I was brought into project after project that was designed to essentially rebuild/rearchitect the... Damien Katz
Where is this decade's Access?

It may seem like a snarky and trolling question, but think about it for a moment: for a decade or so, I was brought into project after project that was designed to essentially rebuild/rearchitect the Access database created by one of the department's more tech-savvy employees into something that could scale beyond just the department.

(Actually, in about half of them, the goal wasn't even to scale it up, it was just to put it on the web. It was only in the subsequent meetings and discussions that the issues of scale came up, and if my memory is accurate, I was the one who raised those issues, not the customer. I wonder now, looking back at it, if that was pure gold-plating on my part.)

Others, including many people I care about (Rod Paddock, Markus Eggers, Ken Levy, Cathi Gero, for starters) made a healthy living off of building "line of business" applications in FoxPro, which Microsoft has now officially shut down. For those who did Office applications, Visual Basic for Applications has now been officially deprecated in favor of VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office), a set of libraries that are available for use by any .NET application language, and of course classic Visual Basic itself has been "brought into the fold" by making it a fully-fledged object-oriented language complete with XML literals and LINQ query capabilities.

Which means, if somebody working for a small school district in western Pennsylvania wants to build a simple application for tracking students' attendance (rather than tracking it on paper anymore), what do they do?

http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/3530

That last question is the one that interests me more than just about anything else you can ask.

]]> Apache CouchDB 0.10.0 Escapes! tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.541 2009-10-13T14:07:49Z 2009-10-13T14:10:33Z Our first beta! Get it here: http://couchdb.apache.org/downloads.html There should be another interesting CouchDB related announcement later today.... Damien Katz Our first beta!

Get it here: http://couchdb.apache.org/downloads.html

There should be another interesting CouchDB related announcement later today.

]]> Awesome InfoWorld CouchDB Article tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.540 2009-10-07T01:52:46Z 2009-10-07T01:56:00Z CouchDB emerging as a top choice for offline Web apps... Damien Katz CouchDB emerging as a top choice for offline Web apps

]]> Oh yeah, I'm on the Twitter now tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.539 2009-09-29T19:57:12Z 2009-09-29T19:58:42Z Follow me here: http://twitter.com/damienkatz... Damien Katz Follow me here: http://twitter.com/damienkatz

]]> In the Bay Area Next Week tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.538 2009-09-29T19:54:16Z 2009-09-29T19:56:55Z I'll be there Oct. 5-9. Email me if you'd like to meet up.... Damien Katz I'll be there Oct. 5-9. Email me if you'd like to meet up.

]]> CouchDB Fan tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.537 2009-09-20T17:13:40Z 2009-09-20T17:23:50Z My 6 month old son Zack :)... Damien Katz DSC05192.jpg

My 6 month old son Zack :)

]]> ICU collation in Erlang tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.536 2009-09-06T18:49:13Z 2009-09-06T19:07:41Z Right now we have a big performance problem in CouchDB view indexing when Erlang calls the ICU collation routines. The problem is that the facilities in Erlang to make C callouts are all dog slow, and collation of strings is... Damien Katz Right now we have a big performance problem in CouchDB view indexing when Erlang calls the ICU collation routines. The problem is that the facilities in Erlang to make C callouts are all dog slow, and collation of strings is something that happens a lot. So right now we have a big CPU bottleneck from collation in the indexing code, and it's mostly overhead just marshaling the Erlang data to a C "port".

To optimize, I had the idea that we could do just the basic ASCII string collation in Erlang, and when we hit non-ASCII we fail over to the ICU callouts. That makes our general collation faster in the general case, but still slower for anyone not American.

That got me to thinking, how hard would it be to implement all of ICU collation in Erlang? It's my understanding that the ICU code is generated from parsable data and the source for the C and java versions are generated from that. How hard would it be to generate the Erlang code to do that, and would it be efficient? And what about case and accent insensitive sorting, something we don't have now but probably will in the future? Any ICU experts out there have ideas?

Right now, the only thing we use the ICU for is collation, so that makes the problem easier.

]]> Wanted: CouchDB Eclipse Plug-in tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.535 2009-08-04T16:52:46Z 2009-08-04T17:18:03Z An Eclipse Plug-in for Apache CouchDB would be a big help for Java adoption, particularly within IBM. It's fairly simple as a plug-in I think, we only need something that installs and runs a local CouchDB instance. However, since it's... Damien Katz An Eclipse Plug-in for Apache CouchDB would be a big help for Java adoption, particularly within IBM.

It's fairly simple as a plug-in I think, we only need something that installs and runs a local CouchDB instance. However, since it's not native Java, each each OS supported will required special build/install work.

It will launch with it's port set to 0, then the OS will assign it an available port and the VM will return the port # back to plug-in. Application code will get the port # from the plug-in then access the API using one of the available Java CouchDB client libraries.

Know Eclipse and interested in helping CouchDB?

]]> Apache CouchDB and Lotus tag:damienkatz.net,2009://1.534 2009-07-14T17:02:21Z 2009-07-14T18:07:42Z For my Lotus readers out there, I'd like some help. Part of my job is to help IBM understand and build with Apache CouchDB. Right now I'm exploring some ideas of integrating CouchDB with some Lotus technologies, and perhaps creating... Damien Katz For my Lotus readers out there, I'd like some help. Part of my job is to help IBM understand and build with Apache CouchDB. Right now I'm exploring some ideas of integrating CouchDB with some Lotus technologies, and perhaps creating some new browser-based applications called CouchApps.

CouchApps are web applications that are served directly from CouchDB, no intermediate server is needed, it's all HTML, Javascript, JSON and of course CouchDB. The killer feature of CouchApps is the ability to replicate the Apps -- both the data and the design -- for distributed and offline usage. With a local instance of CouchDB (soon to be included as part of Ubuntu), you can replicate the apps locally and access them in your web browser just as if you were online.

What sorts of applications? The obvious ones are email, calendaring, a Sharepoint type App (I'll call it Chairpoint) and I'd really like to see web based IDE for users to build their own simple Apps. Most anything that can be built on Domino can also be built with CouchDB, as they share very similar data models. And because of this similarity, interop and replication between the 2 platforms is much easier than a RDBMS.

So I want to know what the Lotus community thinks about CouchDB, do you see a future for Lotus and Apache CouchDB? What do you see it looking like? What sorts of tools, support, applications ,etc would you need to make it something viable?

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