Happy to announce that BlitzDB has been merged with Drizzle’s Trunk.
As much as I’m excited, it’s time to come back to reality. This merge is merely a beginning. There is much more work that needs to be done to BlitzDB such as ensuring stability by adding more tests, find bugs, and eliminate them. I’m hoping that the likelihood of bugs being found will increase due to this merge. Admittedly, I want to hack on fancy (yet important) things like auto recovery but I’m going to resist doing this until I’m truly satisfied with the quality of BlitzDB. My plan is to have BlitzDB rock solid by Drizzle’s Beta release.
The review process to get BlitzDB into Drizzle was straight forward and smooth. This is mostly due to the fact that the community was very supportive about testing. Folks like Stewart Smith and Patrick Crews from Rackspace pointed out several bugs that I would not have found myself. I’m certainly lucky to have a supportive professional QA engineer (looking at you Patrick) to test out and give punishment to BlitzDB.
All I’ll be doing on BlitzDB for the next couple of weeks is debugging and refactoring to improve readability. What I need more of at the moment is test cases on JOINs that are likely to be used in practice. If you have a good test case, I would greatly appreciate it!
Toru Maesaka drizzle, oss blitzdb, drizzle
Having mobile internet connectivity was always something hot among tech geeks. What’s interesting though is that this luxury is gradually becoming a normal day to day lifestyle in urban Japan. Nowadays pretty much every major mobile carrier provides unlimited 3G Data SIM package for a competitive price. Pricing currently ranges between 2000 to 3000 JPY (Google Currency Conversion).
This movement in the mobile market is understandable since most modern lightweight laptops and netbooks sold in Japan has an internal 3G modem, which allows you to gain instant internet connectivity as long as there’s antenna coverage. Sony Vaio is a great example of this use-case. Needless to say, the iPad and Android is a contributing factor to the market shift as well.
The catch with these products is that you’re usually obliged to sign a contract for two years. This wouldn’t be a problem if you’re traveling to Japan and planning to stick around for that long but otherwise this can turn out to cost you unnecessary fees for cancellation.
Traveling to Japan? Read This
I’ve always been a fan of the prepaid model (as long as it’s not overpriced). So, last weekend I bought a 6 month package from b-mobile, which is a service that provides 3G internet connectivity (unlimited packets) for a finite period that you choose. The awesome thing about this service is that you don’t have to sign any contracts or register your personal information to the service provider (Japan Communications). All you need to do is prepay for a certain period and they’ll give you a SIM for it. No questions asked. Another good thing about b-mobile is that it runs on docomo’s FOMA network which is arguably the strongest mobile network in Japan.
For your interest I bought mine at Bic Camera in Shibuya and paid around 14,000 JPY for 6 months (works out to be around 2333 JPY per month). Their sales model is great for us consumers but the first impression I got was that this could be pretty dodgy if this product gets in the hands of folks with malicious intents.
Perfect with Android, Especially Nexus One
I decided to throw my new SIM into my HTC Magic (Dev Phone courtesy of Google) and setup tethering on it (both WiFi and USB Cable). Unfortunately the certain Android 2.1 kernel I was using wasn’t compatible with b-mobile so I had to go through several workarounds and ask my Android guru colleagues for help to get it working. The funny thing is that b-mobile will work out of the box with Nexus One running Froyo.
Despite the obstacles I’m happy with the outcome and I hope this blog entry would turn out to be helpful to those that are planning on traveling and staying in Japan for a while.
Toru Maesaka technology 3g, connectivity, internet, mobile
